Tài liệu Mastering the craft of science writing part 1 pdf

This page intentionally left blank... Mastering the Craft of Science Writinginto Elise Hancock Foreword by Robert Kanigel THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Baltimore & London... This p

Ideas into Words

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Mastering the Craft of Science Writing

into

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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Foreword, by Robert Kanigel ix

3 Finding Out: Research and the Interview 45

4 Writing: Getting Started and the Structure 69

©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

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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