The Blue Notebook

A recent addition to my reading pile is Best Science Writing 2007, (this year’s book with last year’s writing, a little confusing for the literal-minded folks in the crowd) and it’s a real treat because I’ve been on a media fast (or at least a very austere diet) for a few years now and so missed most of these wonderful pieces.

One I was sure to have caught back in the old days is Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article “Butterfly Lessons,” first  because I was so capitvated by Field Notes from a Catastrophe,  and second because ever since La Bonita and I went out with Bob Pyle on one of his field seminars, I’ve been very tuned in to all things lepidoptera-ish.

I say this article is science writing done brilliantly because Kolbert uses story so expertly to both frame what she’s trying to convey, and to increase its impact, and its persistence in memory.

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  In an earlier post (Don’t confuse me with the truth) I talked about the Center for Disease Control’s flu pamphlet, and the research that showed it wasn’t getting its message across. Quite the opposite in fact.

Well, I’ve been thinking about that brochure since then, and finally decided to do a rewrite of it myself. I had some fun with it, but do see a few remaining issues.

First of all there are some references that wouldn’t transfer very well to other cultures. (We called this “geopolitically incorrect” at my last job.) Not only do you risk causing offence with a culture-bound reference but it makes the document hard to translate.

The other issue I see is the (attempted) use of humor or irony, and the conversational tone. Both of these are also hard to translate, both culturally and linguistically. More importantly, the CDC probably has a style sheet that expressly forbid levity or colloquialisms.

All in all though I think my rewrite is not bad for a first draft, and with some design help (get rid of the oragne and blue color scheme I say, and start from scratch) it certainly would not have the problem of the original version—where people remembered the myths instead of the facts.

A few years ago I interviewed for a job writing internal documentation in the hardware division of a high-tech company. Without giving me any other information, the program manager handed me a small piece of plastic and said “How would you document this?”

The first thing I asked him was “who’s the audience, and what do they need to accomplish?” I had a lot of other questions too of course but none of them made sense (to me at least) without first finding out what the whole point of the exercise was to begin with.

Now I’m reading Robin Hood Marketing by Katya Andresen, and on the first page of the first chapter, “The Heart of Robin Hood Marketing,” she says “the key to marketing is to focus on our audiences” and “marketers set goals according to what they want people to do.” Sounds a lot like technical writing to me!

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Last month the Washington Post reported on research indicating that information campaigns which try to counter commonly held misconceptions may actually serve to reinforce them. (Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach, by Shankar Vedantam, 9/4/2007).

I find this maddening in the extreme, but on further reflection don’t know why I should be surprised. I claim it’s possible to convince people with words that acting locally and thinking globally is in their own best interests, but it’s clear that I’m going to need more than a trip to the Blarney Stone to reach that buried part of the human brain where we manufacture our contrary-to-fact conclusions and then hold on to them for dear life.  

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