‘Park Downhill’ and Other Essential Advice for Science Writers
Ed Yong on the Craft of Science Writing and Communication
When it comes to science writing and communication, there are few writers as skilled at their craft as Ed Yong. He’s something of a science writing prodigy. His writing spans topics ranging from the microbes that inhabit our bodies and orca conservation to language genes and most recently, the current global pandemic.
In fact, Yong’s coronavirus reporting has been widely praised as some of the most well-researched, compelling, and informative coverage on the pandemic. He currently covers science as a staff writer for the Atlantic, and his work has appeared in National Geographic, Nautilus, Scientific American, Wired, Aeon, Nature, the New York Times, and more. To boot, he was also recently awarded the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting for his pandemic coverage with the Atlantic.
In college, Ed studied everything from molecular biology to animal behavior and even started a Ph.D. program with the plan to become an academic researcher. But after toiling away for two years in his Ph.D. program, he realized that talking about science – and how other people do it — was much more intriguing to him than actually doing science himself.
So he dropped out.
Or rather, ‘dropped in’ to a self-apprenticed blogging marathon. Over the course of a decade, he slowly built up a reputation as a talented science writer with his blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science (now defunct since 2016). When he ended his blog in 2016, he had written over 1,800 articles.
After blogging for a few years, Yong began submitting pieces as a freelance writer to National Geographic, Scientific American, and other well-known publications. For hopeful science writers looking to get started, tracing how Ed Yong managed to make it in a fiercely competitive trade is worth examining.
In my own work as an academic researcher, and increasingly as I write more public-facing pieces on research in environmental communication (like here on Medium!) I often look to Ed Yong’s pieces to deconstruct how he pulls it off. And I often find some useful tricks I can take on board in my own writing.
In the past, Ed Yong’s main advice to intrepid science writers was to do just this: reverse engineer the pieces you enjoy most, and figure out what makes them tick.
He is also an ardent advocate for recognizing the diversity of voices that actually produce science in our world. And he calls on writers to recognize how emotion is deeply entangled with an endeavor often characterized as neutral, objective, and fiercely rationalistic.
“If you take away just one thing from this talk, let it be this,” Yong said at the Scripps Research Auditorium to a room full of science writers. “You cannot displace a feeling with a fact. It just does not work. You can only displace a feeling with a different feeling.”
11 Science Writing Tips from Ed Yong
Luckily for us science writers, Ed Yong has some more advice to give.
In 2020, the National Press Club Journalism Institute asked Ed Yong to give some advice to budding science journalists just getting started out in the field. Digging into his well of hard-earned knowledge, below are some of the best pieces of advice he could give to aspiring science writers. I compliment these fantastic pieces of advice Ed Yong shares with how I incorporate them into my own writing.
#1 ‘Above all else, work to the highest possible standard, always: Protect your work and your work will protect you.’
Putting your writing out into the world is like spreading little pieces of yourself around for everyone to see. These pieces aren’t you entirely, and they may not reflect what you think anymore, as you most certainly have changed and learned since they were written. But these pieces of your writing reflect your integrity, standards, and values, as a writer — how you source and credit others’ work and knowledge, how accurately you report on information from research and interviews, how you convey the truth.
As Ed Yong says, “work to the highest possible standard, always”: this will give you the peace of mind knowing that the work you put out into the world is work you can be proud of.
#2 ‘Be professional: File your copy on time, to word count. ‘
Not responding to email, letting deadlines pass, showing up late (or not showing up at all) etc…. Don’t be, you know, not professional.
#3 ‘Park downhill: at the end of the day, leaving a sentence or paragraph or piece unfinished so you don’t wake to an empty screen.’
In my own writing life, I call this useful tidbit of advice: “Inviting your future self to take a seat.” Before I finish writing for the day, I write an invitation to my future self to take a seat the next day and write. I don’t mean a persuasive letter or note to myself to entice me into writing. I mean tactics like writing a topic sentence containing one idea, offering me an easy lead-in for starting a new paragraph the following day.
I also find leaving a question to answer about my data or the literature works well too as a jump start. ‘Anchor sentences,’ or incomplete sentences that I need to tie off, give me an equally effective gravitational pull to my writing seat every morning.
#4 ‘Cherish good editors: Don’t be precious about your words, and find the people who make your words better.’
This goes to the heart of William Faulkner’s well-known aphorism: “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” The thing is, it’s just a lot easier to let other people do the killing for us: that is, people with the skills to recognize good writing and bad writing. When it comes down to it, writing is about communicating ideas.
“Ideas don’t exist,” writes Eric Hayot, a professor of comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University, “except when they’re communicable. The best idea in the world will do almost no one any good if it can’t be spoken or written down or drawn or sung or danced or carved or otherwise passed on.”
Worse, when we do bring an idea into existence, they can get bogged down with all sorts of inflections and tangents that leave the central idea obscured under a layer of ‘precious words’ as Yong puts it. Who can help you clear away the extra brush to reveal your ideas? Find these people. Bring them into your life. Tell them to wipe out your precious ideas. This will serve the story or idea you’re trying to communicate.
#5 ‘Actively deconstruct the work of good journalists in an attempt to decipher and reverse-engineer what makes their writing sing.’
This is probably some of the most useful advice I know of for crafting compelling research-based pieces for a non-specialist audience. On the surface, it seems obvious: if there is a piece of writing you really enjoyed, then it might be worth peeling back the layers and analyzing it to see what makes it tick.
But this means radically transforming how you read a piece of science writing, having a set of questions in your mind about what the writer is doing with their words as you walk through the piece. For me, this includes a lot of questions, but some that come to mind include:
- How is the writer making me care about this topic?
- How is the writer setting up their expert sources for the reader?
- How does the writer introduce different perspectives: historical, personal, scientific, hypothetical…?
- How is the writer pacing the story through sentence structure and style?
To be honest, though, reverse-engineering a story in the hopes of gleaning some insights about how to construct your own stories is not just time-consuming, but can be a bit bewildering for new writers to know where to start. Luckily, there are some fantastic resources out there called ‘storygrams’ that do the reverse-engineering for you.
For example, The Open Notebook is a fantastic resource to check out. Here, for example, they offer a storygram of Ed Yong’s fascinating but disturbing piece (plus an interview about it with the author): “North Atlantic Right Whales Are Dying in Horrific Ways.”
#6 ‘Pay attention to structure, and learn how to report well’
Ed Yong elaborates: “remember that most writing problems are actually structuring problems, and most structuring problems are actually reporting problems.”
This is such a crucial point. Many times, when I’m stuck, it’s not because I don’t have anything to write necessarily. More often it’s because I’m not sure which direction to take the reader next, or worse, what destination I’ve been leading them to in the first place (structure problem). This in turn is often because I haven’t gathered enough information, or looked in the right places for more nuanced and deeper insights about my research topic, settling for easy answers (reporting problem).
So first, what to do about structure?
There have been many gallons of ink spilled on explaining the ins and outs of writing structure. Most of us have had experience with writing papers in high school for a class involving a million variations on the ‘intro-body-conclusion’ format. But for the kind of science writing I like to do, writing structure really comes down to two things: 1) the structure of your argument, and 2) the rhythmic structure or flow of your piece.
To be clear, my writing is rarely structure-driven. I may have a loose structure in mind as I write, but in my experience the structure of an essay is emergent. But it’s super useful to have a map to refer to on occasions when you get a bit lost amongst the trees. For those moments, one ridiculously simple but tried-and-true tool is the Uneven U.
For dealing with reporting problems, see # 7.
#7 ‘Embrace nuance, and convey uncertainty.’
Ed Yong expands: “Ignore easy answers in search for deeper truths, but don’t fall prey to cheap contrarianism.”
In the kind of environmental writing that I do most, this often means digging deeper into the story I’m writing in two ways. First, identify the erasure patterns in the story your writing about: what is being actively hidden from view, ignored or treated as unimportant? Second: what salience patterns can you use to counter-act the deeper truths that easy answers hide from view?
These two notions, ‘erasure and salience patterns’ come from the emerging field of ecolinguistics that mobilizes linguistic tools to examine texts in order “to reveal hidden stories and question whether those stories encourage us to protect or destroy the ecosystems that life depends on.” One environmental writer that deploys these two strategies exceptionally well, allowing him to embrace nuance and deeper truths, is Michael Pollan. I recommend reverse-engineering his writing.
#8 ‘Be Humble’
As Ed Yong goes on to explain: “Recognize that you will often know relatively little about what you’re writing about, so be humble, and learn interview techniques that will delineate, probe, and stretch the limits of your own knowledge.”
In my own writing, being humble is not just about knowing there is so much more to understand about your topic. It’s that it positions you, the writer, as someone who can take the reader on an educational journey with you. While informative and quite common in science writing, having an expert pedantically bark information at you just isn’t very compelling. For some reason, it’s much more interesting when the reader feels as if they’re learning with the writer as the story progresses.
Another way to phrase “Be Humble,” as Michael Pollan so eloquently puts it, is to ‘always start out as an idiot.’
What I find so compelling about Pollan’s writing is his ability to take the reader on an educational journey as he bumbles his way through his topic, messing up, but learning stuff along the way too. Like when he embarks on starting a garden without losing his mind in his book Second Nature. Or when he freaks out over the New Age soundtrack his guide has him listen to on his first psychonaut trip in How to Change Your Mind. In these early moments of his journey, we begin with Pollan the idiot: the reader is not talked down to by a pedantic expert, but invited on an educational journey guided by an endearing idiot determined to figure stuff out with you. As Pollan writes:
“I love being at the beginning of a learning curve rather than at the end. One of the reasons I moved from writing about food to [psychadelics] was I realized I had become an expert after 3 or 4 books on food. And I don’t like writing as an expert. I think readers don’t like experts. I think they want someone to take them on a journey, and my education becomes the story that you follow, I always start out as an idiot in my writing. I’m naive, I don’t know what’s going on, I’m confused, I have questions in my head, I’m reluctant, I’m skeptical, and gradually I build my knowledge, we learn things, things happen, and by the end we are experts but we’re not at the beginning. I think that’s a really important lesson for writing in general. I think even though when you finish a research project you have your conclusions. Don’t give ’em on page one, that’s like starting the joke with the punchline. With storytelling, you start from knowing less and you move toward knowing more.”
#9 ‘Be accurate and nuanced, but know when to let a piece go and move on to the next thing.’
This is easier said than done. There’s a saying in academia: “The best dissertation is a done dissertation.” Speaking from personal experience, I can attest to the truth of this.
In one of my favorite books about the academic writing process, Write no Matter What: Advice for Academics, author Joli Jensen describes four myths that persistently haunt writer’s psyches around the world. One of these myths in particular, is the bane of many academics’ existence: The Magnum Opus Myth. As Jensen phrases it, the Magnum Opus Myth is the myth that “My writing project has to be an influential masterpiece, or else I’m a failure.” But maintaining high-standards and insisting on doing quality work are not equal to perfection.
One helpful mindset I’ve found is simply to recognize that the stories you tell are never finished off once-and-for all. Or as the anthropologist Anna Tsing puts it, we should envision our stories as always leading to new stories:
“In this kind of storytelling, stories should never end, but rather lead to further stories. In the intellectual woodlands I have been trying to encourage, adventures lead to more adventures, and treasures lead to further treasures.”
#10 ‘Note that it is better to be right than to be first, but it’s nice to be both.’
Good point Ed!
#11 ‘Don’t write to impress’
Ed Yong says, “Remember that you’re not writing to impress your sources or other journalists; you’re writing to help your readers make sense of the world. Take that responsibility seriously; view journalism as a profession and a craft whose standards you must uphold.”
Try Gooogling the words “why,” “academic writing,” and “bad.” You’ll be greeted with thousands of articles on why academics are such horrible writers. But shouldn’t people who make it their business to write, be good at writing? I suppose there are many reasons for this, but if all writing is trying to do is convey ideas, then, in my experience, the problem seems to be that when experts in a given field write about their expertise, they find it really challenging to convey their ideas in simple and straightforward terms.
Why? Counter-intuitively, for many academic writers, it’s actually harder to write more simply and clearly, in part because they’ve been socialized into writing for a very narrow expert audience. But also, writing clearly, requires the writer to constantly consider what your readers’ don’t know. And that takes work. In fact, research shows that readers may be more impressed when writers convey ideas clearly. In other words, if you don’t write to impress, but to convey ideas clearly, you might impress people more.
Next Steps
Here are some great resources to dig deeper into improving your environmental and science writing:
- Read more of Ed Yong’s work, and begin the reverse-engineering!
- Check out the Open Notebook, a fantastic collection of resources for up-and-coming science writers.
- Watch Ed Yong present his approach to science storytelling in his TED talk: Zombie Roaches and Other Parasite Tales:
