Tài liệu Mastering the craft of science writing part 1 pdf

Ideas into Words
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Mastering the Craft of Science Writing
into
words
ideas
Elise Hancock
Foreword by
Robert Kanigel
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore & London
For my father,
who would have been so proud.
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Contents
Foreword, by Robert Kanigel ix
Acknowledgments xvii
1. A Matter of Attitude 1
2. Finding Stories 29
3. Finding Out: Research and the Interview 45
4. Writing: Getting Started and the Structure 69
5. Writing: The Nitty Gritty 95
6. Refining Your Draft
111
7. When You’re Feeling Stuck 129
Afterword 145
Index 147
©2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press
Foreword © 2003 Robert Kanigel
All rights reserved. Published 2003
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

987654321
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hancock, Elise.
Ideas into words: mastering the craft of science writing / Elise Hancock.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-8018-7329-0 — ISBN 0-8018-7330-4
1. Technical writing. I. Title.
T11 .H255 2003
808′.0665—dc21 2002011065
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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As I stepped into her office, I found Elise in her desk
chair, bent over a page of manuscript rolled up into her
typewriter. She didn’t look up. She never looked up. Just a
year or two earlier, that would still have infuriated me. So-
cial graces, Elise? Remember those? But by now I was long past
the point where I paid it any mind. So I sat and waited
while she finished.
Finally, she pulled out the page, gathered it together
with one or two others and, still not looking up, passed
them to me. It was a short essay for the Johns Hopkins Maga-
zine, which she edited, but this was one of the little pieces
she wrote herself.What, she wanted to know, did I think
of it?
Oh, it was fine, I too quickly said after reading it, then
paused. I was a freelance writer, of the perpetually strug-

gling sort, had done some assignments for Elise, and
sought others. Elise was just a few years into her thirties,
but enough older than me to seem more seasoned and
mature. She was unusually tall, and a little forbidding.
Actually, a lot forbidding: Genuine smiles came easily
enough to her, but routine, social smiles—the kind that
leave everyone in a room feeling relaxed and happy—did
not. On this stern-faced woman and her opinion of my
work, my livelihood depended. And now she wanted my
opinion of something she’d written?
Umm, maybe, I ventured, there was just a little trouble
with this transition? And this word, here, perhaps it
wasn’t exactly what she meant?
Elise took back the manuscript and looked at it, hard,
the way she always did—no knitted brows, just the
blank screen of her face, the outside world absent. For
a moment, the room lay still. Until, abruptly: “Oh, yes,
Foreword