Beyond the Mistrusting Monolith:
Counteracting Cynicism in Science Writing Students

I love teaching science writing courses because I like to think of myself as a well-practiced audience member. I stop to read every interpretive sign when I visit a new public park; I badger my civil engineer brother about the distinction between hydrology and hydraulics; and I learn something new every week when I volunteer at a local wildlife hospital. Even in my research in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, I read research from cognitive science with an eye toward the distinctions between their ways of knowing and my own. In short, my relationship with science has been marked in equal measure by enthusiasm for topics that scientists also study, and by attention to differences in how we approach them.

When I began teaching Science Writing for the Public at UC Santa Barbara, multiple mentors framed this outsider position as an advantage, particularly when teaching classes that help STEM students write for audiences beyond their own majors. If we as writing studies faculty aren't experts on a particular area of science or its latest findings, then our questions can prompt student authors to articulate their message and tacit knowledge in multiple ways until we understand, care, and/or feel prepared to get involved. Through this line of questioning, we can help students who are immersed in a particular field of study to remember what it looks like from the outside.

While I believed that my lack of knowledge and abundance of enthusiasm made me a good audience member, I realized that my students anticipated a markedly different readership. While students in January 2020 tended to focus on audiences who are apathetic toward or intimidated by science, my next cohort in April 2020 tended to focus on audiences who mistrust science. The trend continued each year after that. This focus is hardly surprising in an era marked by the "politicization" of scientific findings. If the consequences of skepticism about climate change and vaccine safety are clear, so are the challenges of addressing skeptical audiences. Writers might ask these audiences to make personal changes to their behavior or priorities, support change to systems that might seem neutral or even beneficial, and reconcile competing investments or ideologies. In scenarios like these, the science writer's task can seem particularly daunting.

I have sought more balance by turning the lens of rhetorical awareness briefly on students and scientists, before turning it back toward a wider set of public audiences. While we are discussing skeptical audiences, I introduce Oreskes's (2019) and Gawande's (2016) perspectives of college-educated audiences and faculty. Oreskes (2019) argued that "the track record of scientists outside their specialties is not particularly impressive" (p.60). We then bring a renewed focus to rhetorical awareness, particularly to the task of defining audience and exigency narrowly and in relation to one another. Successful science writers, I remind them, do not write with all members of the public at the forefront of their mind, nor do they overtly address all potential attitudes toward the topic or field. Taking this a step further, I ask them to question the instinct to give skeptical audiences the most attention, even if they seem easy to define or urgent to address.

I set the stage to brainstorm potential audiences by listing outlooks that publics might hold about science, and their branch of science in particular, beyond mistrust. I encourage students to share both negative and positive views that publics might hold, to diversify the audiences and exigencies to which they can respond. I also ask them to respond based on public perspectives of the area of science that they are studying (theoretical physics, microbiology, etc.) rather than about science at large or its most controversial branches, in order to reach more specific and realistic rhetorical situations for themselves as writers and for the science writing landscape. I am always impressed by the wide range of outlooks that students in each field anticipate from members of the public. For example, students in health sciences have anticipated some audiences will be "overly trusting of a single source," and others will be "hopeful about the future of medicine." On the other hand, students studying physics believe that some audiences will be "uncertain of the field's significance," while others will be "curious about the unknown." This session gives students a chance to explore a wider range of outlooks that they may encounter within "the general public." It also allows me to learn from their recent experiences as ambassadors for their field.

Later in the planning process, I prompt students to list audiences that are likely to hold these views of their scientific field. This exercise is partly modeled after Ashley J. Holmes's (2022) advice to students who aim to effect change through public writing. Holmes suggested pre-planning by "mak[ing] a list of at least five possible audiences [they] could address through public writing," thinking about each audience's connection to and impact upon the topic (p.207). Defining five potential audiences forces students to break down the general public into many groups, often based on multiple criteria—not just age or education level. Returning to the example of health science audiences who are "overly trusting of a single source," students writing about protein intake methods might list gym-goers and parents of young children as public audiences who may be equally invested in the topic for quite different reasons.

Even if my students aim to write in a way that is welcoming and accessible to all potential readers, I ask them to select one audience that they want to target and believe they can engage productively. Choosing one audience from many that share the same outlook lets students be more precise about the challenges and opportunities that each audience may pose, and tailor their examples or reasoning to them. For example, parents and gym-goers may be persuaded to widen their research through different lines of reasoning, or aided in doing so with tailored examples of relevant sources. If students do end up writing to a wider composite audience in the future, targeting a more specific audience in this project will attune them to the factors that may influence their audience's perspective.

At the end of the quarter, after students have surveyed current science writing on their topic and drafted the majority of their own science writing project, we reflect on audience outlooks again. This time, students review what they have written so far, and answer this question: How do you want your audience to feel about your field of science, or about science in general, after they encounter your work?

If our opening brainstorming session produced broad predictions about how the general public views their field, this time students' responses are grounded in observations about the landscape of science writing on their topic, and in their goals when contributing to it. Returning to the examples of physics and health sciences, student authors who focused on the multiverse theory wanted audiences to become "curious about mysteries that remain [in theoretical physics]," and those who focused on medical research in clinical trials wanted audiences to become "hopeful and informed participants" in their own healthcare. In addition to showing greater nuance, these responses reflect a shift from asking how audiences perceive their field and their work to how their audiences may connect or even collaborate with the scientists who develop these findings. They see public audiences as stakeholders in the same topics that scientists study—stakeholders who bring their own lived experiences, forms of knowledge, and tools for applying what scientists learn and pushing that learning forward in productive ways.

Looking back on the development of this in-class discussion series, I can see that my thinking has mirrored that of my students. As I started teaching the course in winter 2020 and returned to the course each year thereafter, the worsening climate crisis and shifting COVID pandemic steered my own thinking and course design toward audiences who did not trust science or specific fields within it. As I write at the beginning of 2025, I also anticipate that upcoming leadership changes in the Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Human Services, and other branches of government will make my unit on mistrust seem both increasingly significant and increasingly difficult to apply (What's Next, 2024). Today, though, I am careful to examine the publics that I focus on in class, to ground our discussions in scenarios beyond the worst-case audience and exigency, and to draw on the range of outsider experiences that my students and I have had with science and its branches.