Some people in science like to use big words.
You know what I’m talking about. Climatology, prehistoric, proteomics. Or phrases that tie us up in knots.
I’m a fan of small ordinary words. Words that all of us use every day. The great cartoonist Randall Munroe of xkcd created a cartoon about labeling the parts of a Saturn V rocket – using only the most common 1,000 words in English. Hint: upgoer is the best way to describe a rocket if you can’t use the word rocket.
His colleague, Theo Sanderson, thought this idea was so much fun that he created a text editor gizmo where you can try it for yourself – and immediately get the red pen if you accidentally use the wrong word. About 180,000 people have already used the upgoer gizmo and many people post their creations to Twitter using the hashtag #upgoverfive.
Because I am a huge fan of this idea of distilling your science into ordinary words, I volunteered to give a public talk about upgoer at Seattle Town Hall as part of the Ignite Seattle nonprofit project. The video of that talk is above.
That audience laughed a lot about the examples I gave from a competition. You can read more about that competition at my earlier blog post – “Hair Having animals.”
But here are some thoughtful stories about science writing:
Using metaphors: