Introducing environment Tackling writing

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Claire Boone
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Introducing environment Tackling writing Pip Surgey Palaeontologist,, has written a number of popular science books, including Life - An Unauthorised Biography, and The Hidden Landscape.

1 Introducing environment Tackling writing Pip Surgey Palaeontologist,, has written a number of popular science books, including Life - An Unauthorised Biography, and The Hidden Landscape., went to see him at the Natural History Museum to discuss writing about science. I'm sitting here in the Natural History Museum in London talking to Richard Fortey. Richard, when you write something, who are you thinking you're writing for? Well I like to think that I'm writing it to a friend really, somebody I know quite well, somebody who wants to not just acquire the facts but get a feeling for how the facts are acquired. Of course it partly depends on the circumstances. I mean if you're writing using certain conventions, then you write in a different way. So if you're writing say a scientific paper you've got a different tone of voice, and then it's not to a friend, but to a colleague - perhaps one that you rather secretly wish to impress, and also of course for science you have to at least pretend to be entirely objective, which means you use a different voice than if you're writing for a popular audience. So to a certain extent, how you write and how you address people depends on the circumstances you're writing for. What sort of conventions are there? Well there are conventions of voice, for example, in science writing it's always the passive voice. You don't say I conducted an experiment, I did field work. You don't do field work, you say Field work was carried out in central New South Wales in 1992 and so on. But if you re trying to write for a popular audience, then your tone is naturally very different, and I personally feel that by introducing your own name and your own experiences into something, it s a way of making people who aren t in a particular field aware of the fact that doing science, like everything else, is a very human activity. So, the convention of scientific reporting is actually rather artificial and the way, in fact, you give a popular account of what you're doing and why you do it and the rivalries that exist and the desire to be first and so on, that's probably truer to the real experience than the scientific paper. Then of course there are reviews which are something else again, so you might be reading somebody else's book, and giving a report to that. Well, how you do that is partly again down to which sort of journal you're doing it for. You do it in a different way for, say, a Sunday paper than you would for a scientific magazine. When you write, say, a scientific paper, is your vocabulary the same there as when you re writing for a different audience?

2 Well there's the business of technical terms. A scientific audience has in a way its own private language which you use to communicate with other scientists. This is why it's a little esoteric or a bit like a priesthood. In many cases those words are not actually necessary, but they're a kind of badge of identity - you know, if you can show yourself to be fluent in the use of these words, then it shows you're a proper scientist. At least for things like palaeontology or biology it's actually possible to express most of the ideas using simpler words. Or at least more every day words, it's nice to have a full battery of words to tackle a complex idea, but technical terms are not absolutely necessary in many cases. Can you remember when you were a student and you came across this new vocabulary, and you came across new words? Can you remember how you dealt with it? I think when I first became a student, the idea of getting hold of new words and using them, felt like a sort of empowerment. You know, it was your badge of admission to a more exclusive club if you could actually trade in words for which you'd learned the meaning not so long before. So I was rather pleased, there's even a slight hint of the train spotter about it, you know, of er, being able to converse with a number of people who know what you're on about when the rest of the world doesn't. As I've become more into it of course, I've become less and less concerned with being exclusive myself than with trying to be inclusive and bringing other people into the world, which is something of course you can do by writing. And presumably you write a number of drafts of anything you write? I work actually quite slowly. I mean, I do rather well if I do 500 words at a single session in a day, and I will do at that stage two drafts. That is, I'll write the first draft and then I'll correct it, or re-write at that stage. Then of course in the case of a book it goes off to hopefully a very eagle eyed editor, who will spot all kinds of things you didn't notice, and some months afterwards you'll have to do a third and, hopefully, final draft, cursing and swearing underyour breath as you do. So that's the way I work - three drafts, I mean I can't imagine doing six drafts but apparently plenty of people do. But there's nothing worse than that kind of tone of voice whereby you the scientist explain it to a grateful and ignorant public. You know what I mean, a slightly Olympian tone. It's much better in my mind, to make the thing feel like a mutual voyage of discovery, so that the reader will think "well I never knew that" and feel pleased with having learnt it. I mean facts themselves are dull things, but treated the right way they can become animated and lively and entertaining and so on, but most of that's down to the way you do it. The fact itself remains unchanged. You seem to write a very wide range of things. How important is structure? For me it's really rather important. That is, I actually find it liberating to have a design laid out, say of a chapter, within which I can then move with some freedom. If I've got the design, then you can spend more effort on trying to get

3 the words right. It's nice to know where you're going. Sometimes you can simply lose the thread if you think that you can plot it as you go along. So I think structure, a formal structure, is rather important and I think that applies whether or not you're writing for a scientific audience or writing for a wider audience. For scientific papers or journalism, you usually have the design laid out anyway you're commissioned to do it to a design. If you're writing a book of course you've got much more freedom, but I find it extremely helpful to have the categories - things I want to talk about - arranged in a logical order. But if you get an essay that you think is badly structured, what sort of advice do you give to the student? Well the advice I would give is: state at the outset the points you're trying to make, then show how your reading supports your point of view. And then round it up by a brisk, succinct conclusion. That is, don't just stop the essay in mid air, and if you get a nicely constructed essay of that kind, it's a pleasure to read, and if the facts are right, cos that has to be true too, then they get you know a good mark at the end of it. It's surprising that quite a lot of students, who should have been through the formal education system, have never really been taught how to structure an essay in that fashion. Different for exams I think because people are under such pressure that sometimes the niceties of structure and argument and so on go in the heat of the moment. And I think for course-type essays, it's an important thing to get them well drafted as well as well researched. Do you use diagrams a lot in your writing? Well of course professional scientific papers, the very stuff of them, is diagrams. So for other kinds of writing I tend to not use formal diagrams, but again to use pictures which can illuminate or make the text more entertaining. It s just occasionally, maybe something that's odd that's referred to in the text, that you feel the reader would appreciate to see illustrated. For example just a few yards from where we're sitting, upstairs there's a tablecloth mounted on a wall, and this tablecloth used to be on the tea table of one of the former keepers of palaeontology in the Natural History Museum, and when he lived in London he used to invite famous scientists of the day to come have tea at his house. And afterwards these scientists would sign the tablecloth, and then his wife would embroider the signature. And it's a wonderful thing cos it's a kind of living archive if you like, of some of the famous names in science. And I just felt that that's something that really ought to be illustrated for people to say it really exists, he wasn't making it up you know - there it is. So, illustrations like that I think can be amusing and enlightening and add to the pleasure people get from reading. But presumably when you're working on something you're writing notes of some sort? Oh yes. What sort of form do these notes take?

4 The first form of the notebook for a palaeontologist is the field notebook which is what you take out with you when you go to Nevada or Australia and record your actual observations, because when you get back to the ranch you're going to have to remember exactly where you found things and lay them out in order and so on. So the field notebook is the most precious possession of most palaeontologists and geologists. You may not work on something for ten years after you've collected it, and without the field notebook it would be completely worthless. And then if you're writing a scientific paper you'll start sometimes with a notelike draft, which then gets fleshed up as gradually add the data and so on. And of course in science there's a extra phase which is the referee phase. It's not like sending an article in for a magazine or something where they say thank you for your article, here's the money or, thank you for your article we don't like it. Science is done by peer review which means that you send in an article and you get back three months later, or maybe three weeks later if you're lucky. You get the thing back, when you don't want to see it again all covered in red scrawl and with rude comments from several of your rivals, which you then have to sit down and deal with. So that's quite a different sort of experience from writing. How do you deal with the comments from other people? You gnash your teeth once or twice, and then usually if you're sensible you compromise. Just occasionally you think that a comment that somebody's provided is completely misguided, and you can argue that out with the editor if you dare. But I'm a real compromiser: if I find some way round it I will, even though I curse at the time. You said when you were doing three drafts of your writing, in particularly with a book that it would finally go to an editor, and then comments would come back. How do you check through your own writing? The practical way I do it is I read through the following day what I wrote the day before, sometimes out loud. Obviously you pick up the routine typos and things like that at that stage, but more importantly without having seen it immediately, you get a feel for the sound of it and whether it sounds good, and very often pick up something that you hadn't noticed the night before when you were feeling rather pleased with a phrase you might have subsequently discovered it doesn't actually fit in terribly well and it's got to go. It's much easier to do that the following day than when you've just minted it. How ruthless can you be about cutting your own writing? I'm not too bad about that, but I prefer to let a little time elapse. For my last book for example, I lost a whole chapter at the editor s suggestion, and I did shed a bit of a tear over that, but in the end I thought his advice was correct, and the chapter went. So, one can't be too sentimental about these things. Anyway, you know, you never know- it might be useful at some other juncture and in some other context. So you ve saved it?

5 Oh yeah, never throw anything away that might be useful. Is there anything in particular that has influenced your writing? I suppose it's er as far as science writing is concerned, it must be a reaction against things I don't like. You know, I've read - I won't name any names but I've read writing by quite well known popular writers - and I thought I don't like the way they're doing it. I think it could be done another way. Particularly I, I mentioned earlier this rather Olympian tone of, I the great scientist will admit you, the reader, into this special world providing you behave yourself and, don't touch the furniture. So I reacted against that at one stage to make something which was altogether more humane. So, yes you could say a lot of my influences have been of that kind, reactive rather than proactive. Is your writing today the same as it was 10 years ago? No I don't think so. I think the way you do things evolves. If you write quite a lot too you learn tricks. Skills is a better word. That means you don't or shouldn't make the mistakes you made in the past. So these things do change, even scientific writing changes because, I think when you're younger you probably express yourself at greater length than when you're older, partly because you feel you've written these things before and you don't want to repeat yourself I suppose. So no it does definitely change as time goes by, and hopefully gets better.

"Of course you always lose your voice," she said "Your technique is wrong." And from that moment on, my life would never be the same.

raesent Tempor Introduction "Of course you always lose your voice," she said "Your technique is wrong." And from that moment on, my life would never be the same. Yes, this is a story about one of my hobbies: