Entering the Conversation

From Liberman’s article on science writing for popular audiences, one can conclude that science must be put in simple terms when being published for the public. All people must be able to understand it, no matter what knowledge they might or might not have in relation to extensive scientific research. Liberman thinks that most, if not all, science writers write articles in a style that was much too complicated for the average person to understand; the average person would be someone who is not in any sort of scientific profession and only has the basic knowledge to understand simple published works of science. To support his argument, Lieberman uses examples of science writing by Denis Campbell on news about how fish oil basically makes a person more attentive and smart; however, this article actually proves to be false because when a study was done on the subject it proved the exact opposite. When one first reads the article, all of the content is very confusing. The writing is somewhat backwards and the viewer cannot take anything away from this. If the average person cannot understand what the article is trying to tell them, they will not learn anything from the article or understand the news given. The evidence Liberman gives proves to be helpful because the article is a perfect example on how science writers can be confusing, and in this case, wrong.

There are many ways that this issue of science writers could be corrected. Lieberman thinks that “Any newspaper or magazine that has a Science writer should also have a Bad Science writer, whose job would be act as a sort of intellectual ombudsman.” This means that he thinks that there should be a person to check over the initial article to make sure that it is correct, according to the data that it may be reporting, and written in form that is understandable to all people who might be viewing it. Another way that I personally think that this problem could be solved is to have somewhat of the same thing that Liberman said to have, a person to correct to not understandable text; however, with my solution I think that the science writer should be cut out altogether. This solution could save money for publishing companies and this would make everything a lot easier to understand. If an average writer with no specific science skills wrote these articles, then there would be no confusion as to what they are saying. As long as the public can understand the content, the person who wrote it proves to be unimportant.  Altogether, something has to change in the way that science is reported to the public. Just because some, if not most, average people do not have extensive knowledge in the science field, that does not mean that they do not what to know what is currently going on in the scientific world. If science writing could become more simplistic, then there would be less confusion as to what scientists are trying to convey to society.