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
slightest bit better.
Only then did she look up and acknowledge me.
I didn’t realize it right away, but that eager, egoless, un-
guarded “Oh, yes, certainly” stuck with me: Thank you, Elise.
From a distance of twenty-five years, I write now of a tricky
little professional situation. But for her, I am certain, it didn’t
exist. For her there was no editor or writer, no senior or ju-
nior, no man or woman, no vanity, no pettiness, no person-
alities. There were only the words, and the ideas they ex-
pressed, that were our job, together, to get right. Nothing
else mattered. And everything that mattered was on that page.
I write of a time during the late 1970s and 1980s when I
and a few other young writers—freelancers, interns, office
assistants, kids just starting out—worked with Elise at the
magazine. Most of what I know today about writing, espe-
cially writing about science, medicine, and other difficult
subjects, I learned then. Others did, too. Those who came to
see the ceaseless flow of red ink as the gift that it was went
on to great things. They wrote for Time and Discover and Life.
They edited the magazines of elite universities. They wrote
books, won awards and fellowships, made names for them-
selves. And their writing lives mostly started in that little of-
fice in Whitehead Hall that Elise, with her madcap creativity
and breathtaking intelligence—you’ll see ample evidence for
both in the pages that follow—made entirely hers.
Elise had become editor a couple of years before and had
set about making her little bimonthly into something far
more than a mere alumni magazine; what the New Yorker was

Capably enough? That didn’t mean you were the next Tom
Wolfe or John McPhee. Just that you had some slight feel for
language and seemed to understand what you were writing
about. Elise was always relieved when one of her new writ-
ers proved as curious as she was, got the facts right and the
story straight.You could have all the word magic in the
world, she used to say, but if you were going to misquote
distinguished scholars, and skate superficially over the life’s
work of world-class scientists, and think you were going to
get away with spinning pretty verbal webs around what you
couldn’t be bothered to understand, then how could she
work with you? Elise was interested in science and ideas, and
she was impatient with writers who weren’t. So, while I
hadn’t the sheer verbal facility of some who came through
her door, I had enough of this other quality to keep landing
assignments. A conference on war gaming. A peculiar mov-
ing-walkway engineering project. Then, longer pieces on re-
combinant DNA, evolution, the ecology of the Chesapeake
Bay, particle physics, laser surgery. Over the next ten years or
so, I did about three dozen pieces for her, most of them long
and ambitious. And always—at least at the beginning, before
word processors, when I still used my old Smith-Corona
portable—the time would come when we’d sit down with
the manuscript.
This is the part that usually gets freighted with nostalgia,
with sepia visions of crisp white paper smacked by those
Foreword
xi
great old typewriter keys, of ink smudges and red editorial
squiggles and slashes garlanding the page, and great XXXs

I can attest to the wisdom of the writerly injunctions
you’ll find in these pages because at times I’ve ignored them
all. For example, Do not confuse a topic with a story idea. That’s just
what I did once with a long piece about memory. What
about memory? Well, everything about memory. Elise helped
me save it, almost; I wound up saying that an understanding
of memory still eluded researchers, and that it was a multi-
faceted phenomenon, duh. But the piece was never as good as
it should have been because my topic, one of Elise’s dreaded
noun-ideas, never found its proper focus. It was all over the
place. Literally so: The piece was littered with enough side-
Foreword
xii
bars to tell any savvy reader that its author didn’t know what
his story was about.
Before first meeting Elise, I’d written a mercifully unpub-
lished book about urban life with a good title, City Sunrise,
but little else of merit. After we’d begun to work together, I
let Elise read it. At the time, she was tactful, even gentle. But
later, whenever I wrote something that pleased her, any com-
pliments she dispensed would take the form of how, yes, I
had certainly made progress since City Sunrise.
Even after my work began to enjoy her favor, she’d freely
poke fun at its infelicities. My prose, she said, reminded her
of a noisy, congested city street, cabs whizzing, pedestrians
darting, horns honking, all calling attention to themselves to
maddening effect. By now, of course, this image is acid-
etched on my brain tissue, helping to pull me back from my
worst excesses. And through a hundred such vivid images
and stern directives, Elise remains beside me today. She

there was wonder in the world and that a writer’s greatest
pleasure was to tell of it.
Tell of it, mind you, not to the already expert but to every-
one else. Technical reports for technicians? Scholarly articles
for scholars? These had no place in Elise’s magazine.When
her writers took on stories in anthropology, oncology, or
cosmology, they wrote not to specialists or other scientists
but to Elise’s “educated curious”; this made it “science writ-
ing,” not “scientific writing” or “technical writing.” Science
writing is so hard to do well because it dares aim intellectu-
ally formidable material at just those readers presumed to
have little background, education, or interest in it.
Science writers and editors needn’t start off knowing
much science. Some of the best of them do, but some of the
best of them don’t. They must, though, be able to learn sci-
ence, be eager to wade into its complexities, ask intelligent
questions, and shake off the high intimidation quotient of a
dense, jargon-laden article in the Proceedings of the National Acad-
emy of Sciences. Elise was a member of this breed; she was an
English major in college and took only a handful of science
courses.Yet in sending her magazine out to joust with sci-
ence, medicine, and technology, she was fearless.
Once, long ago—before the genome project, before the
rise of the big biotech companies—two Johns Hopkins re-
searchers figured out how to snip DNA, the molecule that
embodies life’s genetic heritage, at particular points. Pretty
soon, scientists were taking pieces of DNA from bacteria and
slipping them into other organisms. Some people began to
worry about the dangers and called a meeting at the Asilo-
mar conference center in California to discuss them.

never get that clear. I use the act of writing itself to find that
elusive clarity, slogging through swamps of nonsense and in-
coherence to get there.
But far more typically, there they are in black and white—
insights, ideas, strategies, and preoccupations I’d identified as
mine plainly culled from Elise over our years together. For
example, her highlighted, boldfaced kernel of pure Elise wis-
dom: LISTEN, really listen. And mundane things: How, be-
fore an interview, you carefully set out written questions—
then, during the interview, mostly ignore them. How, before
you write, you compose a headline or title: I’d always been
pleased with myself for abandoning the more common ad-
vice that a title came last, after the hard work of writing.Yet
here Elise reveals it for the profound compositional trick it
really is. Writing a headline, she writes, “will force you to
get precise about both topic and approach.”
Reading Elise’s book today reminds me that wisdom and
good sense can get passed down, that sometimes we truly can
learn from one another.
I am so proud to be Elise’s student. Read this book and I
suspect you will be, too.
Robert Kanigel
Foreword
xv
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Many thanks to John Marcham, former editor of the
Cornell Alumni News, who trained me; to E. B. White and
Will Strunk Jr., who were my mentors through their
classic book; to Rob Kanigel and Jackie Wehmueller, who
egged me on; to Jack Goellner, Katherine Hancock, and