Sciwrite Outreach

---
name: sciwrite-outreach
description: >
  Communicate science to non-specialists: lay summaries, plain-language abstracts,
  press releases, science news stories, talking to journalists, presenting risk
  numbers honestly, interviewing a scientist, and using social media. Based on
  Stanford's Writing in the Sciences. Use this skill whenever someone needs to
  explain research to a general, non-expert or non-technical audience — "write a
  lay summary", "plain language summary", "my funder wants a public abstract", "a
  journalist has contacted me", "I have a press interview", "draft a press
  release", "explain this paper to my family", "write a blog post about our
  results", "how do I tweet about this paper", "make this accessible" — or when
  they are writing about someone else's research for a general readership. Also
  use it when presenting risk or probability to non-specialists. Do NOT use it for
  writing the paper itself (sciwrite-manuscript).
---

# Writing for general audiences

Your prose style does not change: concise, clear, engaging, active, the same
rules as everywhere else in this plugin. Six things change, and they are all
about what you include and in what order.

One framing to reject up front: **this is not dumbing down.** It is filtering out
the lower-level details that do not serve this reader, and doing so without
sacrificing accuracy. That takes deeper understanding, not less.

Answer in whatever language the user writes to you in.

---

## The six skills

### 1. Start with the take-home message

In a journal article you build from background to conclusion. Invert it. Tell the
reader the most important thing first, because if they do not know why they
should care, they stop reading.

> Original abstract opening: *Atmospheric water is a resource equivalent to 10 %
> of all fresh water in all lakes on Earth. However, an efficient process for
> capturing and delivering water from air…*
>
> Lay opening: *Scientists have created a device that can pull water out of air.*

That is the accomplishment. No embellishment is needed — everyone already knows
clean water is scarce, so the significance lands on its own.

### 2. Recognise and remove jargon

Harder than it sounds, because immersion makes jargon invisible. And jargon is not
only technical terms — it is the whole register in which scientists speak.

In an abstract that looks accessible, all of this is scientist-speak: *leverage*,
*wide usage*, *accelerometry*, *global scale*, *is distributed*, *prevalence in
the population*, *average activity volume*. Even *physical activity* is a
scientist's way of saying *exercise*. Lay readers might say *how much activity*;
they do not say *activity volume*.

For a general audience in the United States, **the metric system is also jargon**
— translate.

If you cannot see the jargon in your own draft, have someone mark it. Most people
need it pointed out once before they can spot it themselves.

### 3. Unpack the science

For a scientific audience you may assume a baseline: how a gene works, what a
t-test is. For a general audience, assume nothing and explain from step one.

This is where the depth of your own understanding shows. A course anecdote makes
the point: a student's draft used the phrase *neural projection*. Asked repeatedly
what that meant — an axon? a bundle of axons? something else? — she eventually
answered: *actually, I don't know. That's just the term the scientist used.* You
cannot explain what you do not understand, and the fix was to go back and ask.

Analogies are the main tool, and good ones take work. To explain digital versus
analog: adding graded lighting to a room with a dimmer switch (analog) versus ten
bulbs each with its own switch (digital) — precise control, at a cost in energy,
time, space and parts.

### 4. Prioritise details in layers

Scientific knowledge is layered, and how far down you go depends on the length of
the piece:

```
1  the big picture              the drug beat placebo
2  quality of the evidence      how many people, how long, effect size
3  meaningful to a lay reader   blinding, dosing
4  technical                    randomisation scheme, statistical tests
5  trivial                      brand of weighing scale
```

A short piece stops at layer 2, a longer one at 3. A scientific audience needs all
five in order to evaluate and replicate; a lay audience does not.

Making the cut deliberately is what separates good science writing from bad. The
writer understands and vets the lower layers, then chooses which to omit.

### 5. Get to the point faster

Scientific writing takes its time: why it was done, what was done, what was found,
what it means. A lay reader will not wait for that.

Cutting to the chase means **trusting your reader**. They may not know much
science, but they are intelligent and can infer. If you say what a study found,
the why and the what-it-means are often implied.

> Four sentences: *In order to examine if this rewiring led to changes in
> behaviour, researchers observed the mice as they tasted these different tastes.
> The mice who were altered seemed to have more of a tolerance for bitter taste.
> The altered mice licked the quinine more than the unaltered mice.*
>
> One: *The mice with the altered bitter taste buds licked quinine, a bitter
> substance, more than unaltered mice.*

The why, the what and the meaning are all inside that one sentence.

### 6. Tell a story

People do not connect to abstract ideas. The molecule you find fascinating after
five years of daily contact is not inherently interesting to anyone outside your
lab — presented as an abstraction, it will not land.

A story has description that reaches the senses, plot, drama, suspense — and
characters. Scientists are characters.

A course example: an assigned piece about a plant biology paper became a good
story because the researcher invited the writer to her outdoor laboratory, a corn
field in the middle of campus, at 6 a.m. Mid-conversation the corn became
blanketed with birds — a temperature threshold brings out aphids, which bring out
ladybugs, which bring out birds. That became the opening. The piece then widened
to include her experiences as an early woman in science, and the research became
more accessible for being set inside a life.

---

## Two worked lay summaries

**Source:** *Here we leverage the wide usage of smartphones with built-in
accelerometry to measure physical activity at the global scale. We study a data
set consisting of 68 million days of physical activity for 715,000 people, giving
us a window into activity in 111 countries across the globe. We find inequality
in how activity is distributed within countries and that this inequality is a
better predictor of obesity prevalence in the population than average activity
volume.*

**Lay:** *Researchers used data from smartphones to look at the walking habits of
717,000 people from 111 countries. Countries with the widest gaps between the
most active and least active people also had the highest obesity rates.
Surprisingly, this activity inequality was a stronger predictor of obesity than
total amount of activity.*

Three numbers became two — days of activity was the least meaningful for this
reader. The two sentences of study design became one. *Physical activity* became
*walking habits*.

**Source:** *…a device based on a porous metal organic framework that captures
water from the atmosphere at ambient conditions by using low-grade heat from
natural sunlight at a flux of less than 1 sun. This device is capable of
harvesting 2.8 litres of water per kilogram of MOF daily at relative humidity
levels as low as 20 %…*

**Lay:** *Scientists have created a device that can pull water out of air.
Water-harvesting devices have been built before, but they were impractical for
everyday use because they only worked on extremely moist air or required high
amounts of energy to run. The new device contains a porous crystal called a
metal-organic framework that soaks up water vapour like a sponge. A small solar
panel provides the energy needed to condense the water into liquid. A prototype
containing two pounds of the crystal extracted 12 cups of water from desert air
in one day using only sunlight for power.*

Take-home first. *Relative humidity of 20 %* became *desert air*. Units of *sun*
and the chemical formula went. Litres per kilogram became pounds and cups. And
the writer had to watch videos to understand the metal-organic framework well
enough to write *soaks up water vapour like a sponge*.

---

## Reference files

| File | Read it when |
|---|---|
| `references/media.md` | a journalist has been in touch, or a press release is needed |
| `references/risk-numbers.md` | presenting risks, probabilities or effect sizes to non-specialists |
| `references/news-story.md` | writing a science news story, or interviewing a scientist |
| `references/social-media.md` | posting about research, or deciding whether to |

Apply **sciwrite-prose** to the sentences. Everything there holds here too.