As you know, Bob, not everything needs to be explained
Jennifer Rohn is a cell biologist and novelist whose first novel, Experimental Heart, is about to be published. She’s blogging at Mind the gap about writing what she calls LabLit (as opposed to Science Fiction), and lots of it applies to general science writing as well. She’s arguing, quite correctly, that as a writer, getting your reader hooked and committed to read your stuff necessarily has priority over educating your reader with precise scientific detail. Recently, she’s been writing about a couple of pet issues of mine: First, that you don’t always have to explain every single thing that you mention (in fact, sometimes the explanations will in themselves make readers feel more stupid than if you just left them out), because very often, the context will provide enough information that your readers get the gist of what’s going on anyway. And second, that infodumps and informative dialogue is pure evil. (I’ve gotten used to calling them “As you know, Bob”-passages, so I’ll stick to that. They’re varieties of “As you know, Bob, what we’re trying to achieve with this project that we’re both working on, is a better understanding of exactly how this new drug that we recently developed and called Xterminyl, affects the system, and that is the reason why you, as leader of the project, decided last week that we would do this double-blind trial that we’re now about to start”.) Infodumps stand out more as genuinely bad writing in fictional literature, but it’s perfectly possible to put readers off by bad “educational” writing in magazine or newspaper articles as well.
I think these are things that are important to keep in mind even when writing about science for the general media. Many scientists are afraid that readers will get “confused” if they’re not teaspoon-fed the scientific details in a language that’s precise enough to exclude all possibilities of misunderstandings. In fact many journalists are, too, at least when they write about science. It’s quite frustrating, really: On the one hand, we (the journalists) shouldn’t “dumb down” the science for fear of loosing hard-earned presicion, on the other hand, everyone seems to agree that science is by definition something so complex and unintelligible that even the most straightforward experiment needs to be “simplified” so that everybody and their grandmother may be able to understand (as if the only reason why everybody’s grandmother doesn’t eagerly read every science story she can get her hands on, is that they’re not simple enough).
I have long thought (and lots of people disagree with me) that it’s actually quite possible to write a journalistic piece about science without having to describe in detail how the science works. Of course, journalism is by definition meant to inform, so one has to aim at conveying information. Still, there are many ways of doing that, and there are many layers of information to be conveyed, and who’s to say that the good old lecture-style is the only way of doing it – or, for that matter, that scientific detail is the only information worth conveying?