SO’09: The structure of a Saturday

On Saturday, I attended these ScienceOnline’09 sessions:

1. You are a science blogger but you want to publish a pop-sci book?
2. Transitions: Changing your online persona as your real life changes
3. Rhetoric of science: Print vs. web
4. Alternative careers: How to become a journal editor
5. Blog carnivals: Why you should participate
6. How to become a (paid) science journalist: Advice for bloggers

Do you smell a pattern, especially with #1, #3, #4 and #6?

In “How to become a science journalist,” Tom Levenson and Rebecca Skloot mentioned how blogging does not necessarily improve writing skills (thank goodness for community college writing courses). They particularly stressed one topic for writers: structure, structure, structure. Essentially, it’s how the writing is broken down and organized, since strictly chronological is necessarily the most interesting, and the inverted pyramid is dependable but can be a little bland.

Writing structure is hard, but it is important; that was the take home message if I really wanted to condense it down to so few words. The structure controls the flow of information as not to overwhelm the audience. It paces it, keeps the information interesting and lets storytelling narratives to be woven in.

Levenson and Skloot also vindicated one of my favorite strategies for learning structure: watch movies and study their plot structure.

When I think about structure, I sometimes think about the This American Life episode “81 Words.” In it, reporter Alix Spiegel uses a simple but brilliant structure to bookend her story on how the American Psychiatric Association stopped defining homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. She starts off talking about how her closeted grandfather was the APA president-elect, then launches into a complex but largely chronological story involving dozens of people (her grandfather is scarcely mentioned) before concluding it by going back to the story about her grandfather.

This bookending structure is common, but how Spiegel uses it in her story is rather brilliant. It starts with the story on one person before jumping off of it as a springboard into the true meat of the story. It anchors the story early on with a recognizable figure (a family member) that listeners can quickly grasp, but then it completely avoids sensationalizing that person as a lone hero. Overemphasizing a single person—and overlooking team players—is a problem I sometimes see in science writing, or any nonfiction writing with complex narratives, so I was immensely overjoyed the first time I heard “81 Words.”