As a science writer, my job is to translate complex concepts into stories that the average person can understand and appreciate.
I’ve done this both as a journalist and a public information officer. While the motivations behind those positions are different, their core objectives are the same.
Readers come into science stories without the context to answer their most pressing question about the topic at hand:
So what?
Readers can lose interest in an unfamiliar, niche subject or become confused by technical language. With this in mind, I use the principles of narrative fiction to help researchers define and refine the stories of their own work.
People are interested in stories because they want to know what happens next; they want to see what changes that makes the end of the story different from the beginning.
I’ve found that science topics are a natural fit for this structure. Every experiment is an attempt to generate new information about the world that wasn’t there at the outset.
My job is to explain what makes the acquisition of that information worth the effort.