Biotext

I am a very visual person and I would rather have a picture than text to tell me a story about carbon emissions, the health risks of exposure to asbestos, or types of stem cells.
Pictures that tell stories are called ‘infographics’ and creating them is a neglected skill in technical writing and editing communities. Here are a few tips to get hesitant writers and editors going:
-Note down the key messages or action points that you want to convey.
-Work out what connects these messages (eg a cycle, a timeline, a decision tree, parts of the body, features of a landscape).
-Create a rough outline of your messages and how they are connected.
-Sit back and consider your draft. (Depending on the time of day, chocolate or glass of red can help this stage!)
-Jot down any additional visual images that would help to create a visual story (eg an explosion, a wave, a germinating seed). Don’t think too deeply – images that just ‘come from the ether’ around your messages are probably the best because these images will also resonate with your audience.
-Either create your infographic yourself or (preferably) discuss your ideas with a graphic designer and let them weave their magic!
If you are working with a graphic designer, don’t get too attached to your visual ideas or you might stifle your designer’s creativity. Just give them a bit of an idea of how you are thinking (eg ‘The key message is that once this process starts, it will go in all directions – a bit like a fountain’) and they will do the rest.
At Biotext, we are lucky because we have inhouse designers who our writers and editors can work with to bounce ideas back and forth until they are sure that they have ‘nailed’ the story that needs to be told both technically and visually. Sometimes it happens in one go; other times it takes a few iterations. This is both a lot of fun and very professionally satisfying for us lovers of infographics!

This week, Janet, Richard, Malini, Kylie and Carrie are all heading to Sydney for the Australian Science Communicators 2012 national conference. Janet, Richard and Kylie have a paper about our work on Australia State of the Environment 2011, Malini is giving a professional development workshop on science writing and editing, and Janet is co-moderating a workshop about the so-called ‘War on Science’ (more about this in a future blog) with Craig Cormick and ASC President, Jesse Shore. In a first for Biotext, we are also hosting a booth in the trade display and Richard has been working around the clock to prepare material for that.
As I reflect on my involvement with the science communication community over the years, I have a feeling that the sort of work I do in science publishing, which often focuses on technical reports and government publications, has been viewed as a bit at the margins of ‘proper’ science communication. For example, there are no Eureka prizes for the best government science report!
However, for a large part of last year, the Biotext team was consumed by the huge task of writing, editing and designing Australia State of the Environment 2011 – a comprehensive, 930-page report describing the current condition of key components of Australia’s environment. We worked with the publisher (federal government environment department) and authors (an expert committee of scientists) to write, edit and design the report, which has the stated aim to ‘capture critical information about environmental issues – issues that are nationally significant and of interest to current and future generations’ (DSEWPaC website). Published once every five years, the national state of the environment report is probably one of the most significant pieces of science communication produced about the Australian environment.
For this project, we were able to bring together two vital aspects of science communication – the content (words) and the look (visual and artistic aspects). The former was developed with the chapter experts to convey a scientifically sound, engaging story about the state of different components of the Australian environment. The latter highlighted key messages visually and used artistic elements to engage readers emotionally, as well as intellectually, with the content. We hope that the results will do their job out there over the next five years.
If you have read the SoE report, please send us your comments – we would love to hear your feedback and start a discussion here about its value as a piece of science communication.

Formatting your documents in Word, using templates, has a wide range of benefits.

Formatting can greatly streamline the process of getting information from your Word document into InDesign or other page layout software. While a Word document may look like it has been formatted, often you may find that someone has manually set the headings to look the same. Setting specific styles for each level of heading has a number of advantages: you can make global changes in style much more quickly; and you can use the Outline view in Word to get a sense of your document’s structure. The Document map function in Word is also useful for navigating long documents but will only work if heading styles have been used.

And it is not just headings that can be formatted. Other elements such as table and figure names can be also be assigned, which allows you to generate a list of tables or a list of figures. These can be a handy addition to the table of contents, especially in long documents or those with many tables or figures. Bulleted lists (including nested subpoints) are another area where using styles can save much time trying to make bullet points line up and indents align correctly.

You may be wondering why it is worth spending time formatting the Word document when it is going to be designed. Well, one reason is that people are more inclined to read something that looks appealing. And this is important if you need to get the text approved before the graphic designer spends time doing the page layout. Another reason, which we are working on at Biotext, is to make a seamless transition when converting documents from one software to another – and back.

This year, Biotext developed a new course, entitled Publication management. Over the years, we have found that many of our clients are thrown into the deep end by their managers and asked to put together a large publication with no-one around to show them the ropes. Often, this results in a stressful process for them and anyone else involved. Sadly, it is often the case that once they have been through the process once and have the knowledge to make future publications much easier to manage, they move to another job and are not required to manage another document! Our course aims to walk people through the process of publishing, starting with an idea for a publication, through to printing and online delivery.

Our top tips for people new to publishing are:

1. Allow plenty of time. Everything always takes a lot longer than you think it will.

2. Try to finalise text (including getting approvals) as early as possible. The closer you get to the end of the process, the more it costs to make amendments.

3. Keep all members of the publishing team informed with the latest decisions and developments. Effective communication will help make the process smoother.

We are hoping to run another course at the end of 2011 . If you are interested, let us know.

Malini Devadas

Learning gives you creativity
Creativity leads to thinking
Thinking provides knowledge
Knowledge makes you great

These were the words of former president of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, as he opened the PCST-2010 conference in New Delhi (see my previous post). And his words were enthusiastically repeated line by line by the audience of predominantly Indian science communicators, including many students who had come to hear this hero of the Indian science community speak.

Dr Kalam was president of India from 2002 to 2007 and was apparently a very popular ‘people’s president’. He is also highly respected in India as a scientist and engineer, which is rather unusual among world leaders (or any political leaders, come to that). While his involvement in India’s nuclear weapons program may be seen by some as controversial, he is widely respected and loved for his work to promote knowledge transfer for improvement of the common good, such as in health care and agriculture.

Building on the title of the conference (‘Science communication without frontiers’) and the premise that one of the main purposes of science (after understanding nature) is to improve the quality of life, he explained that it is not knowledge alone that makes you great, but knowledge that is directed towards the common good. And good science communication can transform society by helping citizens understand the role of science and how it can help them in their daily lives. This was an inspiring reminder that, as ‘science information consultants’, the work we do is important!

Read more about this interesting man here.

In December I attended the 11th International Conference on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST-2010) in New Delhi. I had wanted to visit India for a long, long time so this was a chance to combine a trip to that country with some professional development and networking. It was the second PCST conference that I have attended, so it was also nice to reconnect with some of the people I met in 2006 in Seoul.

After a day of sightseeing in New Delhi with my husband (who then departed for a study tour of some schools in Rajasthan) and a rather challenging taxi ride, I arrived at my accommodation in the ‘International Guest House’ at the National Agricultural Science Complex, which was the venue for the conference. At night, and after a tiring day, the place looked very gloomy. However, in the sunlight of the following morning, although my accommodation was undeniably ‘basic’, the venue looked great and the conference was soon underway amid much Indian ceremony.

So how are things in the world of science communication? It’s difficult to tell – but I have a strong sense that a crossroads has been reached. Over the past 20 years or so, the profession has developed in a fairly unstructured way, which has generated a lot of energy and excitement around all the new ideas and approaches that have come along. There has also been considerable development of curricula for teaching science communication at undergraduate and masters levels. An increasing number of people are now also completing sci comm PhDs. However, some of the earlier energy and excitement has now been replaced by reflection on what it all means; what the core principles, methods and theories might be; and whether these can be formalised into a ‘discipline’ of science communication. For me, this feels a bit like trying to pin down a sunbeam – whenever it seems that you have it firmly within your grasp, another speaker introduces a different perspective and it escapes again!

More in my next blog…

Working as a consultant science writer and editor does not provide many chances to develop personal academic interests or to write journal articles. This is because such activities are time-consuming and are not usually ‘billable’ (to use the jargon of the freelance and small business world). This is frustrating because issues and ideas that deserve further development and publication often come up in the course of our work at Biotext. I was therefore very pleased when a colleague approached Biotext to help with a funded project to research and write a paper about technology assessment in Australia.

Over the years, I have been involved in a number of national projects to assess emerging technologies and develop policy about whether or not, and with what regulations, such technologies should be used in Australia. Examples include a major public consultation by the National Health and Medical Research Council on animal-to-human transplantation, and a review of Australian legislation on human cloning and embryo research. Through this work, I have become interested in how scientists, policy makers and the public interact to discuss issues that have social and ethical consequences.

At the same time, I have been following with interest the move in science communication away from a teaching model that assumes the public will be more sympathetic to new technologies if they have more knowledge about science. This so-called deficit model has been replaced by a public engagement (or dialogue) approach, which encourages other values and perspectives to be shared as well as the science.

The technology assessment project provided a great opportunity to explore these interests. The paper I co-authored is now available online at
http://www.springerlink.com/content/102982/?Content+Status=Accepted.

Some other papers that I have managed to write ‘on the side’, while holding down my ‘day job’ are at http://www.biotext.com.au/about-other.html#engaging.

A few years ago, I worked on a government inquiry into human embryo and stem cell research. The final report (referred to in the media as the ‘Lockhart Report’ after the chair of the committee, ex-federal court judge, the Hon John Lockhart) was tabled in parliament and was the subject of intense debate.

During the public consultation, I started to think about what image the term ‘embryo’ conjured up for different people, especially in the context of human embryo research. To the scientists and policy makers working in this field, the discussion centred around a fertilised human egg from around the time of the first cell division (ie two cells), through the subsequent few divisions to form a small ball of cells, or blastula. This is the time when IVF embryos are frozen and when scientists can extract embryonic stem cells. However, I suspected that to many members of the public, ‘embryo’ meant a much more developed fetus like those depicted in pregnancy books. I wondered what results you would get if you asked 100 or so people in the street to draw what they thought a human embryo looked like.

Last year at the Institute of Professional Editors national conference I got a chance to test this idea on a group of about 30 of my fellow editors. I asked them to draw the earliest stage of human development that could be called an embryo. Most people drew a typical early fetus, one or two drew a small ball of cells and only one person correctly drew two cells. Interestingly, if I had simply asked them to draw an embryo they would all have been right because the term ‘embryo’ covers the period from the first cell division to eight weeks of development. But the issue for me is that if we are all thinking of something different when we are having a conversation about an embryo then is it hardly surprising that we sometimes appear to be talking at cross purposes. And this is a shame because biology has some good terms for the different stages of embryonic development (zygote, blastula, gastrula, fetus) but these terms have been subsumed within the catch-all term ‘embryo’ and are now difficult to reintroduce without an appearance of changing the ethical goalposts — which is certainly not the intention of this blog! As with many of our topics in this blog, there is more to say … another time.

In my last blog, I encouraged you to strike out the word ‘enhance’ from your documents. I knew I was on firm ground because Don Watson and others have already targeted this word for expulsion from the language. However, I am now going to make a suggestion that may seem altogether more contentious; that is, when writing about science we should reduce the use of the word ‘evidence’.

Why do I think this? Because most public readers of science information do not know enough about science methods to know what constitutes ‘evidence’, let alone whether it is good, bad or indifferent. Hence a statement such as ‘there is good evidence that eating leafy green vegetables reduces bowel cancer’ might mean: (a) that there have been lots of studies of variable quality that overall, show some benefit of consuming copious amounts of leafy greens; or (b) there has been one good-quality study that shows a large effect of doing as your mother told you and ‘eating your greens’. If you were reading a newspaper article on this topic, how would you know the difference? And does it matter?

I think that it does matter a great deal, and the onus is on scientists, science writers and editors to make sure that the community understands information about science evidence. Thus, in the above example, instead of talking about ‘good evidence’, we could describe the research we are talking about, for example: ‘there have been many studies of the health effects of eating leafy green vegetables and the results have shown a small but consistent reduction in the risk of developing colon cancer.’ Depending on the audience, you could add further details about the types of studies, statistical significance of the effect and so on, but the point is that replacing the word ‘evidence’ with some information about the research itself puts the reader in a much better position to understand what is going on.

There is much more to say on this topic – which I have called ‘The Language of Evidence’ – but I will save that for another day …

Janet Salisbury

Welcome to the Biotext blog!

Over the next months and years we will try to bring you some interesting titbits about the interface of science and policy that we work in. We hope that you will enjoy our posts but we are not aiming to ‘enhance’ your appreciation of these issues. Why? Because one of the words we try not to use at Biotext is ‘enhance’. We are not alone, ‘enhance’ and ‘enhancement’ were top of the list of words targeted by Don Watson in his 2005 book Death Sentence – How Cliches, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language for immediate deletion from all public policy documents.

The reason that ‘enhance’ is, in Don Watson’s words, a ‘weasel word’ is because, depending on the context, it can mean ‘increase’ or ‘improve’ or ‘enlarge’ or any one of a raft of similar terms (swell, streamline, strengthen etc). As the reader does not know which of these meanings is intended, if any, it usually falls between the cracks and ends up meaning not much at all (as in ‘the government is committed to enhancing public health outcomes …’).

Despite this public advice, at Biotext we have noticed a definite increase in the use of ‘enhance’ in the past few years. Just the other day, it popped up a few times in a report we were editing and despite our protestations we were not allowed to change it.

In science writing, the use of ‘enhance’ can be even more troublesome than in public policy. For example, a sentence like ‘the enzyme activity was enhanced by addition of calcium’ could mean that the calcium promoted production of more enzyme molecules or that calcium improved the activity if the existing enzyme molecules. Although this may not matter in some instances, it is much more informative for readers, and hardly any more words, to spell out the meaning precisely. We will keep trying …