Sunday, June 16, 2019
By:
Writing for a small college’s newspaper is a unique journalistic experience, because everyone already knows what you’re writing about. Sarah Lawrence College’s culture of relentless gossip ensures administration’s betrayals of the already-thin trust became public information quickly. The best I could do as a reporter at the student outlet Phoenix was set the record straight and fact-check the rumor mill. Science writing, I learned this week, is the exact opposite.
My assignment was to write an article on a new paper for online publication. After I got over the initial thrill of thinking I might be published in the first few weeks of my internship, I got to work. Some initial research on the topic—solar cell degradation, wrap your brain around that—revealed that “over my head” doesn’t really do justice to how baffling this paper is for a newcomer to the field. A couple more days of banging my head against a wall (I’ll leave it up to your imagination whether this is literal or not) and interviewing some of the paper’s authors, I started writing.
Science writing is the act of explaining the work of a microscopic sliver of the population to a tiny one. That entails translating opaque jargon into slightly less opaque jargon. Writing this piece, I had to get a feel for the average physicist’s understanding of semiconductors and then write to that level. To be clear, I’m not the average physicist. I’m a guy with a liberal arts degree and huge amounts of patience for obscure science. That meant another round of learning: if I had to write to the average physicist, I had to think like them (why does this sound like a metaphor for hunting big game?).
Then came the edits. One of the thrilling parts of this internship is being proximal to the lead editors of Physics Today—and have my writing marked up by them. Reading what they write is like seeing where I want my writing 10 years from now to be, so “thrilling” could easily be replaced by “terrifying.” My mentor was nice enough to remind them it was my first rodeo, and accordingly to be nice. “Though,” he stressed in the same email, “not too nice.” They followed his advice (for the most part). Their edits were like this week at micro scale: a lesson in precision. What did I mean when I wrote a vague phrase about the importance of this research? Was I using broad language about research methods to cover an ignorance of them?
Was I absolutely sure the paper’s evidence was conclusive? That one stopped me in my tracks, and it came from my mentor as he was doing a final once-over with me. There’s such a higher standard of proof, and of truth, in physics. I couldn’t be flippant in saying the paper solves a longstanding mystery—word choice has such stricter limits in science writing. That epiphany was the only thing this week that didn’t intimidate me. It reaffirmed my love for this work: I get the chance to tell other people about advances in human understanding. When those are the stakes, it’s worth being right. It’s worth being sure.
After a week of triple-checking 101 textbooks on semiconductors and questioning my career choices, I was done. My mentor made the last edit just as we were both running to a meeting. It almost seemed like an unfitting end—like the last edit should be some sacred, solemn thing. At the same time, it felt freeing. Why should the last, most inconsequential sentence redaction mean more than paradigm shifts in my writing technique? I highlighted the sentence, hit delete, and sent it off. I didn’t even have time to gloat after the meeting: my lovely partner came this weekend and I had to run and pick her up from the station. Looking back, it’s probably good that I didn’t marinate in this process for too long. I learned everything I could from last week, and my writing and how I thought about it was bent, broken, and built up again. I wrote something. I got better. I’m ready to write more.
Jeremiah O'Mahony