Writing Tips

Silverblatt’s interview raised an important point that most interviewers fail to do: “mirror” their interviewee. To journalists, we are almost always focused on getting information that we neglect to know the story behind the interviewee. Silverblatt also mentions the role of reading. From the article, I gleaned an idea that conducting an interview is like reading. To know how a story ends, we must be engrossed in it.

“Clear thinking becomes clear writing”. This statement summarizes the idea of Zinsser. I like how he used examples of a “cluttered” writing to emphasize the necessity to make a concise writing. Through his examples, he magnified writing as a hard task that must be given much thought. How a writer picks the right words and the way he glues them into sentences may or may not interest the reader.

The blog post A Farewell to Science has tackled the importance of blogging. Some media practitioners do not consider the world of blogging as a media form. In this blog post, it is stated that “scientists and journalists share some common ethical principles: transparency, authenticity and truth-telling”. Most people regard blogging as merely a way of ranting but it is related to the media in the way it disseminates information, whether scientific or not.

By looking through these articles, a journalist who writes about a scientific topic must be a good interviewee, read about the topic he wants to cover, be transparent with facts and be concise. It takes a whole lot of discipline to write a scientific article. The problem starts with how to gather information and how to verify them and ends with finding out how to create an interesting article using this information.