Are you a scientific or a science writer?
Short answer: it depends on your audience.
Scientific writers: we address scientists, researchers. We write articles for specialized peer-reviewed journals such as Science, university textbooks, research grants, reports and protocols, and communications with regulatory agencies. Our writings are highly technical and detailed, because our readers are familiar with the complex concepts discussed.
Science writers: they address a broader audience of non-experts. They write articles for newspapers, magazines such as The National Geographic, popular science books, press releases and social media posts, they conduct interviews, they take part in videos and podcasts. Their writings rely on plain language, metaphors and analogies because their readers are, generally, not familiar with the complex concepts discussed.
Despite these differences, scientific and science writers share 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘀: clarity, logic, accuracy, and conciseness.
- Clarity: confusing the readers is a cardinal sin for all of us. Why? Because our primary goal is to inform, and this is impossible if we are not understood. Ambiguous or poorly explained text frustrates and pushes our readers away.
- Logic: we write stories, and a story has a logical flow, with a clear beginning, development and end. Even the dry scientific protocols. Not convinced? Consider a seemingly trivial and unappealing example, such as instructions to cook spaghetti: this is a story starting with the filling of a pot, progressing through adding spaghetti to the boiling water, and ending with draining the cooked pasta into a sieve.
- 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆: sloppy (or even worse, wrong) writing undermines and eventually loses 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀’ 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁. As a result, the readership may drop, opportunities to interview experts may dry up, prestigious journals may reject manuscripts and regulatory agencies deny the approval of life-saving drugs.
- 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀: stories drown in verbosity and superfluous information as excessive wording can obscure the core message and intimidate the readers. Sure, science writers have more stylistic freedom and their writing may sometimes take slightly longer to get to the point, but they still “dose” their words, like a medicine, to convey a 𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗲.
These four principles are profoundly 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱. They reinforce each other: an article will lack clarity if it doesn’t flow logically or if it is too verbose. And they sometimes clash: accuracy and conciseness are in a constant tug of war.
In the end, scientific and science writers produce different types of content tailored to a diverse audience, but their 𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝗮𝗹 is the same: 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲.
WritinGenomics 
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