Ideas into Words
This page intentionally left blank
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.
This page intentionally left blank
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

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
certainly.” And saying this, she pounced on the manuscript,
pounced, using her whole body, arms and shoulders, not just
her hands, to scribble in the words that made it just the

and creative world of Johns Hopkins University, with long,
thoughtful articles and clear, graceful prose. An anthropolo-
gist at work. Cervical cancer. Rockets shot into the sky. An
issue following medical students through their four years.
Charming little Christmas presents to her readers, like pup-
pets of chimerical creatures. Each year, she and her staff
would walk off with awards for fine writing, and twice dur-
ing her tenure, Johns Hopkins Magazine was named best univer-
sity magazine in the country.
Foreword
x
Me? I’d been a freelance writer for a few years, had prema-
turely tried to write a book, and now, after some time away,
had returned to Baltimore, where I was managing the rent
on a tiny apartment but not much more. About a year earlier,
combing for freelance assignments among local newspaper
and magazine editors, I’d made an appointment to meet Ms.
Hancock.
It was the perfect time. It was 1976 and Elise was hungry.
The university was celebrating the hundred years since its
founding, and numerous centennial events—seminars, con-
ferences, and celebrations—were being held. The university
magazine, with its two-person staff, was supposed to cover
as many of them as possible and needed freelancers to help
fill centennial-fat issues. Elise assigned me to attend one of
these events, a symposium on decision making, and write
about it. I did so capably enough that in coming months she
gave me more work.
Capably enough? That didn’t mean you were the next Tom
Wolfe or John McPhee. Just that you had some slight feel for

your words and ideas, develop them, reorder them, dismem-
ber them, turn them inside out, or obliterate them alto-
gether. They signify, at some level, that your literary expres-
sion is tedious or crude, your ideas silly, boring, wrong, or
off the point. Or that you’ve left a thought undeveloped or
muddled, a scene or story vague, flat, or insipid. Together,
they imply that what you’ve done won’t do, and that what
the editor has done, through her marks, scrawls, and
penned-in changes, is much, much better.
Better, that is, in her opinion. But what if you, the author,
begged to disagree?
Well, I did disagree. A lot. Elise’s emendations, after all,
weren’t chemical formulae, right or wrong, but expressions
of judgment and taste. And I was too young, sure, and stub-
born to accept hers for the wisdom they embodied. So she’d
say, This is too much, Rob. And I’d say, No, it’s not. She’d say,
You need to rethink this, Rob. And I’d say, No, it’s fine the
way it is. Rob, do you think the reader wants to know all
this? Rob, what is it, really, that you want to say?
Most of the time, of course, Elise was right, and I’d later
come to see as much. But not without a fight. After all, these
were my words—my ideas, mine, me. Every word became a
battle, and poor Elise was left to explain why she saw things
as she did. Mostly, she did so patiently. Sometimes, though,
her normally composed features would tighten into annoy-
ance and her criticisms could be harsh. But one way or the
other, sitting beside her at her desk, the manuscript on the
sliding desk tray between us, I learned.
I can attest to the wisdom of the writerly injunctions
you’ll find in these pages because at times I’ve ignored them

against poor form and sloppy thinking.
This, then, is the happy payoff for my pigheadedness all
those years ago, one I could scarcely then have imagined:
Each time Elise answered my objections or demolished my
literary conceits, she’d draw me into the rare and splendid
precincts of her mind. And in doing so, she’d bestow just the
sorts of insights you’ll find in the pages of this book. I speak
now not of such matters of common sense and good profes-
sional practice as double-checking names, though these
count, too. But rather of a rich sensibility of respect. For lan-
guage. For ideas. For people. For the surprising and the deli-
ciously weird in us all. And most of all, respect for the
world, the endlessly enthralling “real” world outside us.
Elise is the supreme nonfictionist; you won’t find that word
in the dictionary, but I know she would approve. Many writ-
ers, unconsciously or not, subscribe to a hierarchy that
makes fiction the goal to which any real writer aspires, non-
fiction a sad second-best; bitterly they toil in nonfiction
vineyards, dreaming of novels and stories they will write
some day. Not so Elise. She read fiction, gobs of it, of every
kind, from Jane Austen on down, even the occasional ro-
mance novel; her imagination was vigorous and playful, en-
riched by fictional worlds.Yet I never sensed in her any re-
Foreword
xiii
gret at being sadly stuck in a workaday world of real people
discovering drearily real things about the immune system,
estuarine ecology, or gluons. Rather, I learned from her that
there was wonder in the world and that a writer’s greatest
pleasure was to tell of it.

Elise resolved that Johns Hopkins Magazine would cover it—more
particularly, that I would cover it.What a team! She had no
grounding in molecular biology. I had never taken so much
as an undergraduate biology course. But so what? We could
do it. And we did. The result was “Pandora’s Box, Chapter XI:
Splicing the Double Helix.” It reads a bit breathlessly today.
But, then again, that was the atmosphere of the time, even
among some normally circumspect scientists. And our read-
Foreword
xiv
ers became conversant with issues that, in new forms, linger
with us today.
I learned a little biology. But more, much more, I learned
to swim out from shore and into the rough seas of hard sci-
ence, and not worry too much that I would drown.
Over the years, I’ve kept a journal of writing advice that I
share with my students or otherwise draw from. I’d thought
of this as altogether fresh, reflecting my own experiences as
a writer, my own particular take on things. So it was chasten-
ing to read Elise’s book and see that many ideas and insights
I’d thought were distinctively mine were, in fact, distinc-
tively hers.
Oh, at times I found myself thinking, No, that’s not how
I’d do it. Elise says to use a tape recorder, that all journalists
do. Well, most journalists do, but not all; I don’t. Elise says
that after immersing yourself in your material you should
hold off writing, think things through first; begin writing
only “when you’re clear enough that you won’t go wrong.” I
never get that clear. I use the act of writing itself to find that
elusive clarity, slogging through swamps of nonsense and in-

work; to my friends and colleagues at other university
magazines, who were always just a phone call away; to the
dozens of writers with whom I sat on the floor and ar-
gued over manuscripts until we got it right; and to the
readers of this book, who I hope will carry on the good
work with the care and integrity I have valued in all
these people.
Acknowledgments
This page intentionally left blank
Ideas into Words
This page intentionally left blank
one
To write nonfiction, whether “science writing” or any
other kind, is an act of intimacy.You are inviting the
reader into your world—into your mind, no less. As your
close companion, the reader will share the alien cadences
of your thought. He will borrow your vocabulary, no
doubt of a flavor not quite his own. He will be at the
mercy of your skills to see, to hear, to think and feel, to
assess people and draw them out, to persist until you re-
ally know—and, of course, to put what you know into
words. It requires a certain trust, to be a reader.
Once the words are in print, however, it’s the writer
who has to trust, because the reader now holds the reins.
If an author loses me, I can stop reading. Or I can skip a
chapter, or three, or skim, or read each paragraph five
times, analyzing and underlining in several different col-
ors until the words droop and die. Whatever the reader
does, the writer has no recourse.
Yet how intertwined we are, reader and writer, sharing

know anything I want or need to know? Is it comfortable
breathing the same air? Can I trust him to get it right? And
will he promise not to bore or puzzle me in the meanwhile?
If you have never sat in a train station and watched some-
one flip through a magazine, try it some time. It’s humbling.
About a third of people flip from the back, not the front
(which is why many magazines run those inviting final
pages of essay or photo), and the pages turn about once a
second. Flip . .. flip ... flip ... two-second pause; no, not this
. .. flip ... flip ... flip .. . three-second pause; eyes are scan-
ning . .. flip ... flip ... till finally something catches. (As the
reading begins, there is often a small, overall shake, like a
bird settling onto a nest.) Keep watching, though—the
reader may quit several paragraphs in, if the initial promise is
not fulfilled.
Since you are reading this book, I am assuming you want
to be that writer, the one who catches the reader, then deliv-
ers the goods.You want to be a person who can find some-
thing worth sharing and capture it in words.As for me, I
want to help you become that person—both to BE that per-
son and to DO the work.
A lot of the Doing is skill; to have any useful inklings
about people, communities, science, or the natural world is a
large skill, and so is writing.You will need both abilities,
preferably based in good brains, education, and talent for
making the language sing. (But hard work helps more than
one would think.)
Beyond that Doing (and possibly the hardest part), you
will need to Be the sort of person whom readers trust with
their attention—and the readers cannot be fooled, because

dering thought on yourself and how well you are writing.
Instead, you’ll be fixing one mental eye on the reader and
the other on the fascinating thing you have found, and you
will write by laying out the details that make up your mental
picture. Basically, you’ll just be talking to the reader, as to any
other person in your life, except this talking will be in writ-
ing. As a process, writing as if you’re talking is easier (and
more effective) than manipulating technique. Not only that,
all the techniques make far more sense when they are
grounded in the social skills you’ve been practicing all your
life: connecting with other people.
The first step to writing nonfiction, especially science, is to
know that you can do it.
Do not let new material intimidate you: it’s okay to be a
beginner. The moment you believe that you cannot under-
stand something, whether it be a physical science, a social
science, or the Dead Sea Scrolls, it will be true, so don’t
A Matter
of Attitude
3
admit the thought. Just don’t go there. Instead, tell yourself,
“I am a beginner at [whatever it might be].” Grant yourself a
learner’s permit.
That thought is so important I’ll say it again—grant yourself a
learner’s permit. Enjoy your ignorance. It’s exciting. Every time
you tackle a new subject, you are doing something that will
take you into a new and bigger world.
In fact, within reasonable limits, ignorance is an asset. It is
likely that you will never understand the world in the way a
scientist does—but the readers don’t either.When you ask

catch HIV from a toilet seat.
Go explore. It’s a big world out there, and never have
human beings had a greater need to understand how our
Ideas
into
Words
4