Becoming a Scientific Humanist:
On Teaching Science Writing for the Public

To me, poetry and science are alike. They both make improbable connections between the seemingly unrelated, find meter, math and rhyme for what would be prosaic, and describe patterns that make an otherwise random universe articulate. While the methodologies and values might diverge, I see the humanities and sciences as shared ventures in the making of meaning.

But this was not always the case. Beginning in high school and continuing in college, I gravitated toward the humanities because what I could write or play felt immediate, cathartic, and even unique. This subjectivity stood in contrast to disciplines where the answers to odd questions were in the back of the book and where, at least in high school, memorization seemed paramount. I did not yet appreciate how advanced science also grapples with ambiguity nor how neuroscience had become integral to fields like psychology. In as much as adolescence and early adulthood were about self- and intersubjective discovery, the humanities seemed to offer more fitting tools.

Yet in grade and middle school, I would probably have said I was more interested in science. I reveled in trips to my hometown's St. Louis Science Center, where I particularly remember gazing up in the planetarium, whispering into parabolic dishes and being transfixed by a video of the collapse of an ill-designed suspension bridge nicknamed Galloping Gertie. Just as memorable were the Center's lifesize dinosaur animatronics, replete with a triceratops and T-Rex. In my free time at home, I would draw imaginary spacecraft, bridges, floor plans and city maps, spending dozens of hours evolving their form on 8.5 x 11 in. canvases. More than once, I filled an empty fish tank with water, then poured in a glass of milk just to watch the white liquid billow and dissolve. With a scientist's curiosity, I marveled at how things worked.

However removed from the humanities these pursuits might appear, though, there was always a narrative component, be it of planetary and galactic development, how waves propagate or stand, how dinosaurs battle one another to survive, how engineered spaces connect people, or how fluids interact. But perhaps nothing brought together my childhood narrative and scientific imagination—as well as an appreciation for the sublime—like the spectacular drama of weather in the Midwest, a place where cumulonimbus clouds tower like fortresses and cold fronts sweep through like armies. I tracked the data—highs, lows, pressures, dewpoints—and forecasts with an avidness many Americans reserve for major league sports. In fact, one of my first forays into science writing for the public would have been with my high school's weekly newspaper, where, as a senior, I drew from jargon-filled National Weather Service forecast discussions to create a narrative and numerical forecast for the weekend ahead. In a similar venture into science communication, I wrote (unsolicited) a multi-page handwritten report for my statistics teacher, complete with boxplots and bell curves, decrying the casual intermixing of "average" and "normal" by mass media forecasters. For me, precision of data and language were complementary. Conveying data and concepts implied arriving at the best turns of phrase and situating them in an interesting narrative arc.

While an ardor for language and story led me to a PhD in comparative literature, I had the rather unique opportunity as a graduate student to design and co-teach a neuro-humanities course on memory, music, literature and neuroscience with Alzheimer's expert Juliana Acosta-Uribe, MD, PhD. This would prove pivotal. I saw how different disciplines siloed in academia nevertheless share questions and goals. I recognized how often a purported lacuna in one field is well-established knowledge in another. And I realized that although developing disciplinary expertise is necessary, by itself it risks becoming myopic. Now with the UCSB Writing Program, I begin my Science Writing for the Public class with an interdisciplinary invitation, echoed in the syllabus preamble, for us to consider how the desire to understand drives scientific and humanistic inquiry alike. This is an important overture since, as I once had, STEM students often internalize an either/or disciplinary identity. Framing the sciences and humanities as shared pursuits among people asking how and why helps students begin considering ways in which writing and science communication can align with their goals and identities. Better expressing the science they're passionate about proves both motive and reward.

My iteration of Science Writing for the Public at UCSB unfolds over three units. In the first, culminating in group presentations, students compare peer-reviewed articles with mass and popular media adaptations. In the second, led by student facilitation groups, the class grapples with the ethical challenges of science communication by reading and discussing Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's (2019) Merchants of Doubt. And in the third, students attend to style, character, and structure in longform journalism in preparation for the final project, which is a piece of science communication suitable for publication.

To begin unit one, students compare just the titles of peer-reviewed articles and their popular media counterparts. For instance, we contrast "Border Collie Comprehends Name Objects as Verbal Referents" from Behavioural Processes (Pilley & Reid, 2011) with "The Smartest Dog in the World" from 60 Minutes (2014/2022). Building on the interdisciplinary idea that qualitative and quantitative methods can be complementary, I ask students to tally the number of words in each title, then average the number of syllables per word. With a bit of guidance, students soon infer that jargon tends toward the polysyllabic and that, regardless of whether it should, Latinate diction signals academic ethos. Students also tend to take issue with the hyperbolic superlative "smartest" and interrogate why such an unscientific claim becomes integral to the story's proliferation. Finally, they comment on the role of pathos in this story vis-à-vis many people's emotional attachment to dogs. Just through analyzing titles, important themes emerge, including that science communication can be a realm of tradeoffs, biases and compromises and that an effective science communicator must manage them.

For their presentations in fall 2024, one student group took up some of these themes in comparing "Frontostriatal Salience Network Expansion in Individuals in Depression" (Lynch et al., 2024) in Nature with its adaptation in ScienceNews: "A Brain Network Linked to Attention Is Larger in People with Depression" (Bradford, 2024). They dovetailed from titles to the rhetorical implications of word choice in the article itself. Whereas Nature writes,

"The salience network, which is involved in reward processing and conscious integration of autonomic feedback and responses with internal goals and environmental demands, was markedly larger in these individuals with depression" (Lynch et al., 2024, p. 625),

ScienceNews offers,
"the salience network—known for identifying relevant stimuli and guiding attention—was nearly two times larger in people with depression" (Bradford, 2024).

The students pointed out that while an educated lay reader with an interest in science might be satisfied with "relevant stimuli and guiding attention," scientists might appreciate a more technical reminder that the salience network involves "reward processing" and "conscious integration of autonomic feedback." Importantly, students did not deem one version better or worse, but rather, framed their analysis in terms of audience, purpose, context and author discretion. While some groups did find misleading or even inaccurate information in adaptations, most focused on how communicators navigated the tradeoffs to make scientific discoveries appeal to disperate readers.

Although the semantic challenges of adaptation could sustain a ten-week course like ours at UCSB, students in my Science Writing for the Public class also wrestle with the obfuscation and politicization of science by reading Oreskes and Conway's (2019) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. Guided by the idea that science communication is increasingly lateral in public and online spheres, the unit plays host to a radical classroom flip that splits students into groups of three to four, vests them with the teacher's powers and charges them with generating class conversation on a given chapter. Some groups gamify quizzes on key concepts, others might have students stand in a part of the room based on their stance on an issue, while others break the class into smaller groups to discuss ethical questions. One of the most memorable activities culminated in an impromptu debate in which facilitators tapped four student volunteers to represent divergent positions. As they actively—and ardently—cited Merchants of Doubt, the rest of the class raced through their copies to follow along. Engaging and practical, the opportunity to facilitate conversation is as rare in college as it is important after, and trusting students to take the helm gives them the chance to put their personal touch on science outreach.

As much as my pedagogy attempts to meld the humanities and sciences, I remain cognizant of a fundamental tension: The former centers the human while the latter insists that the universe is not anthropocentric. Nevertheless, since science deals in scales both too colossal and minute for humans to comprehend, a degree of subjectivity in science communication is unavoidable—and can even be beneficial. This is especially true for lay readers whose pathway to scientific understanding depends on analogies with what they already understand.

Apart from metaphor, two final, humanizing narrative techniques I invite students to consider in preparing their longform-inspired final projects are character and plot. Reading New Yorker articles, which often follow scientists into the field and the lab, reminds us how engaging readers find scientists' character: the sound of their voice, the look of their face, and the objects in their office that suggest something of what they value. Part of why I encourage students to conduct in-person interviews for their projects is precisely because they offer such intriguing glimpses into character. I also remind students that in science writing, character is hardly limited to the scientists themselves. Rather, it can be anything from a pathogen to a planet—anything that has agency or animacy, or that we might imbue with these qualities to make them relatable.

As for plot, whether Aristotelian, episodic or otherwise, many readers rely on narrative shape to make sense of a story. This presents another challenge, since the typical structure of a peer-reviewed article, if somewhat chronological, often lays equal emphasis on the significant and the mundane. An adaptation that relies on shortening length and simplifying vocabulary alone thus falls flat; even when the words and concepts are accessible, the feel can be bland, repetitive, or even tautological. Therefore, it is important for students to understand that, rather than simply re-label or re-word, the public science communicator must re-shape, drawing out what is interesting and minimizing what is not so that the research can make an impression in the mind of the reader. Shaping narrative likewise implies weaving seemingly incremental or unrelated findings from across various articles into an interconnected narrative. More than the affinity for words, it is this capacity to liken what might appear unrelated that links the poet and the science writer. Both can shape stories and make constellations from the cosmos.