The Art of Science Communication: William Zinsser on How to Write Well About Science

How to master the inverse pyramid of transmuting information into wisdom.

I have always considered writing a way of organizing reality — of organizing one’s own mind and, in recording that process, decluttering the reader’s understanding of some subtle or staggering aspect of the world.

Few writers have articulated the philosophies and practicalities behind this artful organization with more clarity and conviction than William Zinsser (October 7, 1922–May 12, 2015) in his 1976 classic On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (public library) — a masterwork partway, in both time and tenor, between E.B. White’s vintage bible The Elements of Style and psycholinguist Steven Pinker’s contemporary counterpart The Sense of Style.

William Zissner (Photograph: Damon Winter / The New York Times)

With the hindsight of three decades, Zinsser — who had written the book in the early 1970s with nothing but “a dangling lightbulb, an Underwood standard typewriter, a ream of yellow copy paper and a wire wastebasket” — reflects in the preface to the 30th anniversary edition:

Computers have replaced the typewriter, the delete key has replaced the wastebasket, and various other keys insert, move and rearrange whole chunks of text. But nothing has replaced the writer. He or she is still stuck with the same old job of saying something that other people will want to read.

But Zinsser points out that while the job of the writer may have gotten easier as the computer became “an everyday tool for people who had never thought of themselves as writers,” the task of the writer — that ability to say something which “other people will want to read” — has gotten, in many ways, harder:

Any invention that reduces the fear of writing is up there with air-conditioning and the lightbulb. But, as always, there’s a catch. Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they’re writing fluently doesn’t mean they’re writing well.

[…]

Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping — without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect?

'Paper Typewriter' by Jennifer Collier from 'Art Made from Books.' Click image for more.

Even in the decade since the 30th anniversary edition, the technological barriers of entry for writing and publishing nonfiction online have gotten exponentially lower and the stakes of good writing and journalism exponentially higher — nowhere more so than in science, where bad writing is not only unpleasurable for the reader but also potentially dangerous.

Indeed, one of the most enduring and urgently important sections of Zinsser’s classic deals with the art of writing about science — something that often befuddles both writers and scientists. The most solid common ground between them, Zinsser playfully suggests, is built upon a shared panic at the prospect of writing — with the expectation of writing well — about science. He addresses this often irrational trepidation:

Writing is not a special language owned by the English teacher. Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all. Science, demystified, is just another nonfiction subject. Writing, demystified, is just another way for scientists to transmit what they know.

[…]

Scientific and technical material can be made accessible to the layman. It’s just a matter of putting one sentence after another. The “after,” however, is crucial. Nowhere else must you work so hard to write sentences that form a linear sequence. This is no place for fanciful leaps or implied truths. Fact and deduction are the ruling family.

To illustrate the importance of this sequential storytelling, Zinsser cites a science assignment he often gives to his writing students — the seemingly simple exercise of describing how something works: “how a sewing machine does what it does, or how a pump operates, or why an apple falls down, or how the eye tells the brain what it sees.” Reflecting on how this assignment plants the seed for good science writing, Zinsser touches on the essential function of writing as a tool for organizing reality:

Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you. I’ve found it to be a breakthrough for many students whose thinking was disorderly.

This principle of science writing, Zinsser points out, applies to all nonfiction writing, for it teaches the writer to lead the reader, step by step, from knowing nothing about a subject to understanding enough to grow enchanted with its broader significance.

Zinsser illustrates this approach by outlining an inverse Maslow-style pyramid of informational needs:

Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence broadens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third sentence broadens the second, so that you can gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation — how a new discovery alters what was known, what new avenues of research it might open, where the research might be applied. There’s no limit to how wide the pyramid can become, but your readers will understand the broad implications only if they start with one narrow fact.

But as someone who thinks a great deal about the challenge of transmuting information into wisdom, I find myself inclined to push Zinsser’s model a step further and consider the importance of cultivating a layer of wisdom above the layer of “significance and speculation.” The difference might be subtle, but it’s an important one: After all, when one reads the very finest science writing — be it Oliver Sacks writing about the mind or Diane Ackerman about the senses or Stephen Jay Gould about lepidoptery or Robin Wall Kimmerer about moss — one walks away informed about the significance of these scientific phenomena, certainly, but more than that, one walks away elevated and enriched and illuminated with a new appreciation of our “strange and shimmering world.”

On Writing Well remains absolutely indispensable, exploring such essential aspects of the craft as the key to sophisticated simplicity, the core transaction between the writer and the reader, the art of the interview, and the most fruitful attitude for the writer. Complement it with Cheryl Strayed on the importance of faith and humility in writing, Susan Sontag’s advice to aspiring writers, Virginia Woolf on writing and self-doubt, E.B. White on the two faces of discipline, and Ann Patchett on why self-forgiveness is the most important tool of writing, then revisit this ongoing archive of great writers’ advice on the craft.

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The Power of Unconditional Love: How Oliver Sacks’s Beloved Aunt Shaped His Life and Inspired His Courageous Dance with Death

“I shall hope against hope that you may weather this misery, and be restored again to the joy of full living.”

The history of creative culture is strewn with silent supporters whose unconditional love and encouragement have carried artists and thinkers to greatness. Although practical help can be enormously vitalizing — without the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky may have never become Tchaikovsky; without the man who helped him quit his soul-sucking day-job to become a full-time writer, Bukowski may have died a postal worker — it is spiritual support that best sustains the creative spirit: What would young James Joyce have been without Ibsen or Maurice Sendak without Ursula Nordstrom or Albert Camus without his childhood teacher or Beckett without his one true believer?

One of the most touching testaments to this nourishing power of unconditional support comes from Oliver Sacks and his relationship with his aunt Lennie, which Dr. Sacks recounts with great affection in On the Move: A Life (public library) — his magnificent memoir of love, lunacy, and a life well lived, one of the most moving books I have ever read.

Lennie (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks)

Lennie, born Helena Penina Landau in 1892, was one of his mother’s six sisters and the founder of London’s poetically named Jewish Fresh Air School for Delicate Children. “Delicate,” as Dr. Sacks explains, could refer to “anything from autism to asthma or simply ‘nerviness'” — but the school’s focus bespoke, most of all, Lennie’s keen sensitivity to difference and to children’s anguishing consciousness of being different, whatever the degree or direction of difference.

In that sense, young Oliver was certainly a “delicate” child, and a “delicate” young man, and it was Lennie’s unflinching support that carried him forward — toward becoming a writer and, above all, toward becoming himself. Where his mother had summarily rejected him, proclaiming that he was “an abomination” for being gay, Lennie accepted him unconditionally and enveloped him in her wholehearted love. Dr. Sacks writes:

I felt very loved by her, and I loved her intensely too, and this was a love without ambivalence, without conditionality. Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.

Although Lennie had been close with his mother throughout Oliver’s childhood, it wasn’t until he moved to Canada and they were separated by an ocean that his own closeness with Lennie — who was exactly forty years his senior — began to blossom through their frequent and sincere correspondence. She addressed his letters “Darling Bol,” and occasionally “Boliver,” which Dr. Sacks contrasts with his parents’ more formal and somber “Dear Oliver,” adding:

I did not feel she used the word “Darling” lightly.

Lennie — a woman who paid generous and loving attention to the world, noticing and noting the blooming almond trees outside her window — was also the first person in Dr. Sacks’s life to encourage his foray into writing, the very vocation he came to see as a pillar of his identity. (“I am a storyteller, for better and for worse,” he reflects in the closing pages of his autobiography, leaving no ambiguity as to his sense of purpose.) He recounts Lennie’s emboldening faith in his creative destiny:

She had felt, since my boyhood days, that I could and should be “a writer.”

So when Dr. Sacks made his first tentative steps into professional journalism in the 1960s, writing for a short-lived magazine called Seed, Lennie cheered on:

I am much enjoying Seed and like its whole format — the cover design, the luxurious paper, the lovely print, and the feeling for words that all you contributors have, whether grave or gay. . . . Will you be dismayed when I say how gloriously young (and of course vital) you all are.

In another letter, she further fertilized the spouting seed of the writing life:

You certainly seem to have found a more satisfying outlet for your restless and searching spirit. . . . I do miss you.

Eventually, 27-year-old Oliver sent her a number of pages from his travel journals, which he considered his first “pieces” — “self-conscious and precious in tone” but ones he hoped to publish one day. Lennie responded:

I received your amazing excerpts from your journals. I found the whole thing breathtaking. I was suddenly conscious that I was gasping physically.

When Dr. Sacks sank into a depression, Lennie was once again his steadfast support, writing in a letter:

You’ve got so much in your favour — brains, charm, presentability, a sense of the ridiculous, and a whole gaggle of us who believe in you.

But for Dr. Sacks, she was a gaggle of one, the nourishing power of her faith in him a potent source of spiritual vitality:

Len’s belief in me had been important since my earliest years, since my parents, I thought, did not believe in me, and I had only a fragile belief in myself.

Under the beams of Lennie’s warming love, that fragile belief was fortified into a lifelong dedication to writing. A few years later, Dr. Sacks published his first book, Migraine, followed by the now-legendary Awakenings, which was eventually adapted into the famous film of the same title starring Robin Williams as Dr. Sacks.

Dr. Sacks on the set of the cinematic adaptation of his book Awakenings, with Robin Williams, 1989 (Courtesy of Oliver Sacks)

But it was Lennie’s exit from Dr. Sacks’s life that provided at least as vital an influence as her supportive presence.

When 86-year-old Lennie was admitted to the hospital for a simple operation, something went terribly wrong and she awoke hooked to an IV. Dr. Sacks writes:

When Lennie learned of this, she felt that life with intravenous nourishment and a spreading cancer was not worthwhile. She resolved to stop eating, though she would take water. My father insisted she be seen by a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist said, “She is the sanest person I have ever seen. You must respect her decision.”

I flew to England as soon as I heard about this and spent many happy but infinitely sad days at Lennie’s bedside as she was growing weaker. She was always and totally herself despite physical weakness.

What a stark contrast this offers with Dr. Sacks’s earliest experience of losing a loved one — the death of his first great love from cancer at a young age was felt as a rupture, with a heartbreaking sense of absence, whereas his final days with Lennie were filled with a deep sense of communion and wholehearted presence.

I am reminded, too, of Albert Camus, who famously asserted that the decision whether to live or whether to die is the most important question of philosophy. But a more important question, perhaps — one at the heart of Lennie’s choice — is how to live and how to die.

Dr. Sacks captures this beautifully in his final letter to her from the end of 1978 — a letter he never knew if she read:

Dearest Len,

We have all of us been hoping so intensely that this month would see your return to health; but, alas! this was not to be.

My heart is torn when I hear of your weakness, your misery — and, now, your longing to die. You, who have always loved life, and been such a source of strength and life to so many, can face death, even choose it, with serenity and courage, mixed, of course, with the grief of all passing. We, I, can much less bear the thought of losing you. You have been as dear to me as anyone in this world.

I shall hope against hope that you may weather this misery, and be restored again to the joy of full living. But if this is not to be, I must thank you — thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living — for being you.

Love, Oliver

Dr. Sacks on his new 250cc Norton motorbike in 1956 (Photograph: Charles Cohen)

Suddenly, a luminous thread reveals itself between Lennie’s courageous exit from life and Dr. Sacks’s own. “It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me,” he wrote in his breath-stopping farewell to the world as he confronted his own terminal cancer diagnosis. “I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can… I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

As I reread and reread On the Move, hoping against hope that Dr. Sacks weathers mortality, I find myself filled with a profound sense of gratefulness for all that he has given us, for the innumerable ways in which he was elevated and illuminated our world, for everything that he is. And my soul echoes: “Thank you, once again, and for the last time, for living — for being you.”

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Arts of the Possible: Adrienne Rich on Writing, Capitalism, Freedom, and How Silence Fertilizes the Human Imagination

“The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence.”

“When power corrupts, poetry cleanses,” John F. Kennedy proclaimed in his piercing eulogy to Robert Frost, contemplating the artist’s role in society and urging us to “never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.” More than three decades later, another of humanity’s greatest poets and custodians of dignity explored this enduring relationship between art, power, and truth more closely and dimensionally than anyone before or since.

The poet was Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929–March 27, 2012) and the exploration a remarkable 1997 lecture that became the title piece in Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (public library) — the same anthology that gave us the spectacular letter with which Rich became the only person to decline the National Medal of Arts in one of creative culture’s most courageous acts of political dissent.

Rich begins by considering the perilous interplay of the market and the mind in capitalist culture:

We have become a pyramidic society of the omnivorously acquisitive few, an insecure, dwindling middle class, and a multiplying number of ill-served, throwaway citizens and workers [resulting in] a kind of public breakdown, with symptoms along a spectrum from acute self-involvement to extreme anxiety to individual and group violence.

Exactly two decades after E.F. Schumacher’s ennobling case for reimagining capitalist society to prioritize people over products and creativity over consumption, Rich laments “the self-congratulatory self-promotion of capitalism” around the world and considers “the corruptions of language employed to manage our perceptions of all this” — for, lest we forget, the space between words and their true meanings is vast and filled with the fog of confusion. She writes:

In the vocabulary kidnapped from liberatory politics, no word has been so pimped as freedom.

[…]

Capitalism presents itself as obedience to a law of nature, man’s “natural” and overwhelming predisposition toward activity that is competitive, aggressive, and acquisitive. Where capitalism invokes freedom, it means the freedom of capital. Where, in any mainstream public discourse, is this self-referential monologue put to the question?

Illustration by Anne Simon from Corinne Maier's graphic biography of Karl Marx. Click image for more.

Perhaps it is the poet in Rich most riled by this propagandic corruption of language — for what is a poet if not one who remedies “the feeling that the contemporary language is not equivalent to the contemporary fact”? But the legacy of this disconnect, Rich reminds us in a sentiment tenfold more urgent today, transcends the poetic and bleeds into the practicalities of civic life:

Our past is seeded in our present and is trying to become our future.

These concerns engage me as a citizen, feeling daily in my relationships with my fellow citizens the effects of a system based in the accumulation of wealth — the value against which all other values must justify themselves. We all feel these effects, almost namelessly, as we go about our individual lives…

But these are also my concerns as a poet, as the practitioner of an ancient and severely tested art. In a society in such extreme pain, I think these are any writer’s, any artist’s, concerns: the unnamed harm to human relationships, the blockage of inquiry, the oblique contempt with which we are depicted to ourselves and to others, in prevailing image making; a malnourishment that extends from the body to the imagination itself. Capital vulgarizes and reduces complex relations to a banal iconography.

Lamenting that terms like “consumers” and “baby boomers” feed the dual demon of contempt and self-contempt — one reduces people to their acquisition of commodities and the other “infantilizes and demeans an entire generation” — Rich examines how this collapse of language into shallowness impacts the artist’s responsibility to tussle with human relationships, which she has long considered the raw material of our private truths. She writes:

Any artist faces the necessity to explore, by whatever means, human relationships — which may or may not be perceived as political. But there are also, and always, the changing questions of the medium itself, the craft and its demands.

That craft, Rich argues, is honed in the sacred space of silence. In a sentiment that calls to mind Paul Goodman’s nine types of silence, she writes:

The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way — certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Although silence externally enforced, Rich notes, is a tool of oppression and censorship, silence willfully elected is a force of growth. She writes:

Silence … can be fertilizing, it can bathe the imagination, it can, as in great open spaces — I think of those plains stretching far below the Hopi mesas in Arizona — be the nimbus of a way of life, a condition of vision. Such living silences are more and more endangered throughout the world, by commerce and appropriation.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'Open House for Butterflies' by Ruth Krauss. Click image for more.

Echoing Wendell Berry’s conception of silence as a sanctuary where “one’s inner voices become audible [and], in consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives,” Rich places the extinction of such fertilizing silence in its cultural context:

Even in conversation, here in North America, we who so eagerly unpack our most private concerns before strangers dread the imaginative space that silence might open between two people or within a group. Television, obviously, abhors such silence.

I am reminded here of a wonderful 19th-century guide to the art of conversation, which asserted that “the power of preserving silence is the very first requisite to all who wish to shine, or even please in discourse.” The writer, Rich argues, is one who honors the silence while creating a space for connection and conversation:

Whatever her or his social identity, the writer is, by the nature of the act of writing, someone who strives for communication and connection, someone who searches, through language, to keep alive the conversation with what Octavio Paz has called “the lost community.” Even if what’s written feels like a note thrust into a bottle to be thrown into the sea.

But the successful transmission of the bottle requires a benevolent sea, which brings us back to the political dimension of art as a technology of freedom. Rich captures the true measure of democracy:

The survival of a great diversity of books … depends on diverse interests having the means to make such books available.

It also means a nonelite but educated audience, a population who are literate, who read and talk to each other, who may be factory workers or bakers or bank tellers or paramedicals or plumbers or computer consultants or farmworkers, whose first language may be Croatian or Tagalog or Spanish or Vietnamese but who are given to critical thinking, who care about art, an intelligentsia beyond intellectual specialists.

Illustration by Ralph Steadman for Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451.' Click image for more.

Nearly three decades after James Baldwin remarked that the whole capitalist system “is standing on the back of some black miner in South Africa,” Rich considers the prerequisite for such a nonelitist, democratic landscape of thought and imagination:

If we are writers writing first of all from our own desire and need, if this is irresistible work for us, if in writing we experience certain kinds of power and freedom that may be unavailable to us in other ways — surely it would follow that we would want to make that kind of forming, shaping, naming, telling, accessible for anyone who can use it. It would seem only natural for writers to care passionately about literacy, public education, public libraries, public opportunities in all the arts. But more: if we care about the freedom of the word, about language as a liberatory current, if we care about the imagination, we will care about economic justice.

For the pull and suck of Capital’s project tend toward reducing, not expanding, overall human intelligence, wit, expressiveness, creative rebellion.

[…]

Writing and teaching are kinds of work, and the relative creative freedom of the writer or teacher depends on the conditions of human labor overall and everywhere.

For what are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible, the unrealized and irrepressible design?

Arts of the Possible is a trove of lucid idealism in its entirety. Complement it with Rich on what “truth” really means, her superb 1977 commencement address on the real value of education, and her homage to Marie Curie.

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Ray Bradbury on Storytelling, Friendship, and Why He Never Learned to Drive: A Lost Vintage Interview, Found and Animated

“You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. And then your public reads you and it begins to gather around.”

In the fall of 2012, Lisa Potts discovered a cassette tape behind her dresser. On it was a long-lost interview she had conducted with Ray Bradbury (August 22, 1920–June 5, 2012) — regimented writer, creative idealist, list-maker, space-lover, sage of life and love — exactly four decades earlier, when she journalism student in 1972. Potts and her classmate Chadd Coates were driving Bradbury — a resolute, lifelong nondriver — from his home in West Los Angeles to their university, Orange County’s Chapman College, where he was about to deliver a lecture. The informal conversation that ensued emanates Bradbury’s unforgettable blend of humor, humility, and wholeheartedness to the point of heroism.

In this wonderful animation, the fine folks of Blank on Blank — who have previously given us John Lennon and Yoko Ono on love, David Foster Wallace on ambition, Jane Goodall on life, and Richard Feynman on the most important thing — bring to life Potts’s lost-and-found Bradbury treasure. Transcribed highlights below — please enjoy:

Half a century before David Whyte’s beautiful meditation on friendship as the ultimate gift of bearing witness, Bradbury tackles the subject with his singular blend of warm wisdom and wit:

That’s what friends are — people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world… Friendship is an island you retreat to, and you’re all on the floor and laugh at all the other ninnies who don’t have enough brains to have your good taste.

Shortly after Margaret Mead and James Baldwin condemned car-culture, Bradbury explains on why he never learned to drive — even though he spent his life in LA, one of the world’s most freeway-raptured cities:

I’ve had too many friends killed now. I’ve seen too many people killed in my life, when I drove across the country when I was twelve — I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude… It’s stupid — the whole activity is stupid.

Half a century after Bertrand Russell cautioned that “the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit,” Bradbury reflects on his realistic yet imaginative approach to storytelling:

It’s a combination of realism, with fantasy — but I don’t like realism, because we already know the real facts about life, most of the basic facts. I’m not interested in repeating what we already know — we know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war — all these things — by the time we’re eighteen… From there on, we need interpreters — we need poets, we need philosophers, we need theologians — who take the same basic facts and work with them, and help us make do with those facts.

Facts alone are not enough — it’s interpretation.

Bradbury, who spent a lifetime advocating for the supremacy of emotion over the intellect in catalyzing creative work, echoes Rilke’s conviction that feedback poisons art and champions the practice of unselfconscious authenticity:

Don’t pay any attention to what anyone else says — no opinions! The important thing is to explode with the story, to emotionalize it, not to think it. If you start to think it, the story’s going to die on its feet. It’s like anything else… People who take books on sex to bed become frigid — you get self-conscious.

You can’t think a story — you can’t think, “I shall do a story to improve mankind.” It’s nonsense! All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether you love a girl, or whether you love a boy, forget it — you don’t! A story is the same way — you either feel a story and need to write it, or you’d better not write it.

[…]

You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. And then your public reads you and it begins to gather around…

The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me — so that means, every day of my life, I’ve written. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writing.

Bradbury never stopped — the joy stayed with him until he exploded out of this world shortly before his ninety-second birthday.

For more of Bradbury’s warm genius, see his wisdom on the importance of love in creative endeavors, the value of public libraries, and his conversation with Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke about Mars and the future of humanity.

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