Michelle Nijhuis’s Brief Guide to Writing Reported Essays
When I set out to write an essay handbook for science writers, the first problem I ran into is that no one is quite sure how to define an essay. Aldous Huxley wrote that it […]
Brief Guides
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Sharon Begley’s Brief Guide to Writing Medical News
The challenging thing about medical stories is that they can go off the rails before you’ve written the first word—when you choose what to write about. Every week brings hundreds of studies unveiling results, an […]
Charles Seife’s Brief Guide to Writing Opinion
We reporters spend our days gathering facts and talking to experts to learn about a subject. If, at the end of the process, we don’t have any opinions of our own about the matter—well, let’s […]
Susan White’s Brief Guide to Investigations
Great investigative projects usually begin with journalists brave enough to be guided by their own curiosity even if their sources—or their colleagues—think they’re a bit daft. Such journalists allow themselves to articulate the embarrassingly obvious, […]
Carl Zimmer’s Brief Guide to Writing Explainers
Imagine you’re a crime reporter writing a story about a shooting at a nightclub. Now imagine that none of your readers know what a gun is. Suddenly, your story got a whole lot harder to write. You can’t just jump into the shooter’s backstory, or the victim’s suffering, or the detective work that led to an arrest. Instead, you’ve got to explain … Welcome to the science writer’s dilemma.
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