Thursday March 31

Today we'll talk about your library assignment and how you should use the time to do some research that can result in a background paragraph or two in your final paper.

The Open Notebook blog has a useful new piece on writing elegant background.

Here are also some nice pieces of work from the Welham story. I'm still not through all of them -- malfunctions in the learn@UW site have vexed me.

Remember: Next Tuesday April 5 at Steenbock Library. Thursday April 7 no class to work on your library assignment, which is due in Dropbox at classtime Tuesday April 12.

Voice work:

Lead:

Kylie:
When speech-language pathologist Dr. Nathan Welham and his colleagues were able to bioengineer vocal-cord tissue able to transmit sound, they had no idea how big of a splash their research would make.

Billy:

Dr. Nathan Welham is the big man on the University of Wisconsin campus. The New Zealand native has become famous for his research on growing muscle tissue. Why is that so important? Well, that tissue is for one of the most important muscles in your body: your vocal cords.

Background & transitions:

Katie:

With his patients as his motivation, Welham set out to develop a vocal cord replication. The tissue had to be tough enough to bang together, but soft enough to make human sounds. In addition, people’s immune systems could not reject the tissue after transplant, making this no small undertaking.

The researchers developed a replacement tissue that felt similar to Jell-O. Welham and his team conducted research on dog cadavers as well as mice with human-like immune systems to test the effectiveness of this firm, yet pliable, tissue. To their surprise, the engineered tissue was quite a success. Welham realized, “Gosh, maybe this is going to be a big finding.”

Melanie:

Almost immediately after his findings were released, Welham began receiving calls and emails from people all over the world. He participated in two to three weeks of non-stop interviews with reporters ranging from local newspapers to the Today Show and even BBC news. Before his discovery, Welham rarely had to deal with the media. Fortunately for him, these findings received only positive feedback.

Quotes:

Melanie:

After six years of trial and error, Welham said, “the final product was amazing but the journey to get there was many steps forward and many steps back.” 

Feb. 2 What's my lead? Where's my Quote?

The lead is the most difficult part of a story to write because you have to summarize the news, and interest the reader, usually in 30 words or less. A summary lead contains most or all of the five news elements -- who, what, where, when, why -- and can sometimes be awkward. Here's one with most of the elements. Summary leads can be limiting, especially for feature stories. 

Some leads put most of the stress on one or two elements, often the newest. The summary is in the then in the 2nd paragraph. This is a good lead because it is in active voice, with subject-verb-object construction.
Here's an example of science lead from the NYT science section. It delays "the news" to paragraph 3 in favor of setting up some fun: male flies like to fight.

Other times we'll use a more story telling approach, putting the initial emphasis on a person, then setting the scene, then widening out to the big picture. In this lead, the news is in the fifth paragraph, but the emphasis on a person helps interest readers in what may seem a dry topic.

Usually we don't emphasize the when, unless we're writing for The New Yorker. Other times, we're interested in who is doing something, because the person is famous.

Other times, we don't name the people in the lead because their names aren't known, it's their roles (for example, as victims or suspected criminals) that are important. 

Finally, notice how quotes help bring this story to life. We will talk a bit more about quotes and their punctuation. Finally, we'll try to write a science story lead. Pretend that the placebo study and the underwear study were just published today.

How to Read a Science Paper: Jan. 28

Here's a paper published this week in the journal Nature. And here's a really good write up of what it all means.


Here's another brain research paper.

Here's the write up from a science writer at MIT and another from Asian Scientist.

Here's another paper. Sounds simple and kind of boring, right? Well, here's the first article. And here's some of the fallout and more of it. Luckily medical ethics writer Art Caplan came down on the side of the parents.

Here's a video with the real story.

So, here is some advice and more advice on how to read a science paper. Here's a funny article by UW's Deborah Blum.

And, just for fun, here's a funny collection of #overlyhonestresearchmethods.

For your future writing, here is advice from the American Association of Medical Colleges AAMC on writing news releases based on science papers. And from the Journal of Neuroscience.

Science in the News Thursday Jan. 21

Today your assignments on science writing are due via box
Latecomers can have until midnight

We will also look at the process by which a scientific lab becomes science news. Here's how a paper on monkeys became a UW-Madison news release. From there, it was picked up by a variety of news outlets, ranging from a newspaper, the Guardian, a science web site, Wired Science, and a general science magazine, Science News.

Let's look at the New York Times Science section and see if we can figure out where the stories originated.

This story on bar-headed geese originated as a paper in the journal Science. And this piece on random causes of cancer was originally a paper in Science, but this is more of a "second look" article that tries to explain some of the backlash.