Helen FieldsScience Writer

Another nice blog post by Sarah Zielinski at Smithsonian about my work – in this case, about my wacky idea that scientists are also people. I know! It’s a crazy idea, but I think it might be true!

A month ago, Dave Grimm, my editor at ScienceNOW, e-mailed me about quotes:

“as you know, i hate to flatter you.  but you do tend to get awesome quotes for your stories.  also as you know, i’m teaching a science writing class at hopkins in the fall, and i’ve got a section on how to get good quotes.  but i’d like some advice from the master.  any tips i could pass along to the students?”

So I wrote back a whole essay about how I get quotes. I spoke to his class about quotes yesterday, and here’s a modified version of the original message.

A lot of it is ear, I think – I just listen for funny/colorful/illuminating things the person says, and make sure to write those down. Often they’re kind of throwaway comments; I don’t stop typing just because the source is done with their major exposition. If I’m at their lab and recording, I leave the recorder running until I’m in my car.

Once when I was an intern at the Monterey County Herald I interviewed a marine biologist about how marine protected areas can’t be everything to everyone, and he said, “They might generate ecosystems that have low numbers of particularly luscious and juicy species that you’d like to eat yourself.” I can’t remember the context – I think he might have gotten irritated and busted out the sarcasm.

I ran into him a while later at a talk and he was like, augh, as soon as I said that, I knew that was the quote you were going to use. Heh. I told him, of course, what a wonderful and evocative quote it was, and how it would drive home the point to readers better than anything else I wrote.

It’s important to set the tone – in part so that the scientist doesn’t talk over your head and use jargon, and also so that you’ll get them to talk naturally. The good quotes are ones that sound like natural speech; you need the interviewee to relax and say, “The poo just sort of stands out at you.” (That story here.) I often try to change the tone and loosen interviewees up by laughing at something that’s only marginally amusing. I make vaguely funny comments and observations myself and hope they’ll run with it.

That sounds like some creepy manipulation, but it’s not. That’s just my personality – I laugh at things that are only marginally amusing and make vaguely funny observations all the time. It’s how I talk to strangers at parties, too, which is not that different from a phone interview.

A few weeks ago I was interviewing a paleoanthropologist about how he studies the habitats of early hominins, our ancestors, and he was talking about how you need this whole multidisciplinary team. He said, so, I’ve learned how to identify diatoms to species. And I said, sarcastically, “which is why you went into anthropology” and he laughed and gave me this absolutely beautiful quote about how fun it is to be a paleoanthropologist, which I think I ended the story with: ”That’s one of the beauties of paleoanthropology, for me, is it allows you to be kind of like one of those old-fashioned natural history types. Naturalists, they used to be called. It allows you to study like crazy to learn a heck of a lot about a lot of different things.” (This guy.)

Another science writer I know asks people questions he know will piss them off if they’re being boring. I imagine the key to making this work is finding something that is natural for you and makes other people want to say interesting things, whether it’s because they’re amused or annoyed. I really just want people to relax and talk naturally. (Although I bet my amused-at-everything personality annoys some people, too.)

Digressions are helpful. I’ll often take the interviewee away from the main topic, like asking them what else they’re working on, or about something else they mentioned, or whatever. I do this because it’s interesting, and it’s fun to have smart people on the phone. This person has agreed to be on the phone with me – they’ll answer questions about anything. But it has the side benefit that when they get back to the main topic, they often have something newly interesting to say.

Sometimes you get lucky. Whitey Hagadorn from this story – he’s just a great talker. He’s clear, non-jargony, insightful. And I talked to a totally hilarious scientist about working in Antarctica a few weeks ago.

I do think a lot of it is ear. I think people say pithy, illuminating things all the time, and you just have to recognize them, and realize which ones fit into your story.

One of my favorite quotes ever is from a Random Sample about four-leaf clover genetics. The grad student said: “Three years of looking for a four-leaf clover on 200, 400 plants each time, you get pretty good at spotting them.” This wasn’t actually the first quote I chose for her, but I was going back through my notes and realized how much it accomplishes at once. It tells you the length of the study and how many plants were involved, it tells you it’s possible to learn how to spot four-leaf clovers, and it’s funny. Perfect for a 220-word story.

It also probably doesn’t hurt that I type really, really fast.

Someone bought a facebook ad to sell experts to people like me:

You know what? Thanks, random advertiser, but I can find my own experts. I wonder if there are reporters who use services like this? I find google gets me a long way.

Or an Honorable-Mention-er, anyway. I entered a story in the D.C. Science Writers’ Association’s first annual Science Newsbrief Award and, hey, they liked it! I write a lot of short pieces. They’re pretty tough. Explaining science is hard enough without being limited to a couple hundred words. It’s nice to have an award that focuses on short writing.

Here’s the press release about the awards. UPDATE: Science re-posted the story, so you can read it here.

For Immediate Release
April 17, 2010

D.C. Science Writers Association Announces Inaugural Science Newsbrief Award Winners

Washington, D.C.—The D.C. Science Writers Association (DCSWA) is pleased to announce the winners of the first annual Science Newsbrief Award.

Most science writing awards go to complex, multipart stories, but those awards often fail to recognize one of the most challenging — and most common — tasks of the science writer: writing short. Done well, short, accessible, accurate pieces make an enormous contribution to the public understanding of science.

DCSWA founded the Newsbrief Award in 2009 to reward journalists who excel at short science writing. All DCSWA members were eligible to submit written entries of 500 words or less.

The winner of the inaugural award is ScienceNOW’s Sam Kean, for his piece “Mother’s Cancer Can Infect Her Fetus.” Judges said Kean used clear and straightforward reporting on a little-known topic with broad implications. One judge said the story was very readable and written in a tight, concise manner. Another said it “used compelling storytelling to convey an interesting medical story.”

Sam works as a correspondent for Science and has written for The New York Times Magazine, New Scientist, and Mental Floss, among other outlets. He was the 2009 national runner-up for the NASW’s Evert Clark/Seth Payne award.

Two honorable mentions were also chosen. Helen Fields was recognized for “Groovin’,” published in ScienceNOW. According to one of the judges, “I found myself smiling every time I read this.” Another called it charming and a gem of a story.

Sarah C.P. Williams got an honorable mention for “The Power of One” in the HHMI Bulletin. Judges said this original story had a nice use of metaphor, and the clear storyline meant that readers did not get lost in the science.

A panel of five judges, past presidents of DCSWA, selected the winner and honorable mentions. They are Aaron Levin of Psychiatric News, freelancer Lisa Orange, Joe Palca of National Public Radio, Gail Porter of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Mitch Waldrop of Nature.

An award ceremony will take place during DCSWA’s annual Professional Development Day on April 17 at the American Geophysical Union building in Washington, D.C.

The D.C. Science Writers Association is an organization of about 500 science reporters, editors, authors, and public information officers based in the national capital area. For more information or to join please visit www.dcswa.org. Details on how to enter the 2011 Newsbrief Award will appear on the Web site by the end of the year.

I don’t know the other winners – I look forward to meeting them Saturday.

You’d think rainforest birds would be ok with rain – and you’d be right, to a point. But when the rain really comes down hard, the birds stop flying around. Today I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about a study that shows birds get stressed out in the rain, at least this one super cute bird called the white-ruffed manakin – in heavy rain, levels of a stress hormone go up, and they seem to maybe not be able to get as much food as they need.

Here’s how this works. Every week I get a bunch of press releases from science journals, like Nature and Biology Letters. My editor at ScienceNOW gets them, too, and so do tons of other science writers. This is how we know what’s coming out in the journals the next week; there’s a list of articles, with a summary and contact information for each one. When my editor assigns me a story, the first thing I do is e-mail one of the authors. I do that before I read the article or anything. I know I’m going to have to talk to them, I have limited time, and I want to get moving on scheduling that interview.

So last week he assigned me this story and I e-mailed one of the authors, who had a charming British last name and works in Wales, asking him if he could talk to me about his tropical bird research, blah blah blah. Half an hour later I was looking at the article, and looking through the references, and thought, wait, who wrote this article? These people are Canadian. And none of them has a charming last name…uh-oh.

Yeah, I’d grabbed the wrong contact information off the press release and sent a message about tropical birds to a computer scientist. The best part is, he studies errors. If I ever write a story about errors, I’ve already got a personal anecdote and a source ready to go. (Fortunately, he was amused.)

photo: Alice Boyle

This is fun – an article from the New York Times about “crash blossoms.” Those are headlines that don’t make sense because they’ve dropped too many of the little words that help make English understandable. Most of them hinge on the fact that a lot of English words can be both nouns and verbs, and the third person singular of the verb is the same as the plural of the noun. Thus: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Heh-heh. Waffles.

So, I’m sitting here at my desk at Die Welt a few minutes ago and my neighbor’s phone rings. This happens often. But then I notice that she’s leaning over, looking at my phone, and reading off my phone number. She hung up and told me it was a secretary, and shrugged – she didn’t know what it was about.

The secretary calls and says, “Frau Fields? Do you speak German?” And I said, “More or less.” She said, “I have a reader on the line, I’ll transfer you.” And I was like, uhh, uhh, and there he was. Yesterday the 19-year-old intern and I co-wrote a story about chronic kidney disease and kidney failure. (Really, it was mostly her – she’s young, but she’s good. Also, she speaks German and can interview people.)

The nice man told me he’d read my article in today’s paper about kidney disease, and I’d mentioned a test to detect protein in the urine. Well, yesterday his wife had a blood test at the hospital, and he had the test results, and could I tell him what the line about protein meant?

Uhhhhh….no. No, I could not tell him that. We chatted a bit about tests for kidney function, agreed that it was best to talk to the doctor (he relayed this to his wife) and he thanked me for such an informative article and told me to keep up the good work.

I pretty much feel like now I am a German superstar, although I didn’t understand everything he said, I stumbled a bit while talking, and, yeah, I totally couldn’t answer his question. Man, I haven’t gotten a call from a reader in forever. It’s the last day of my fellowship – not a bad way to end.

Back in the fall, when the media world started feeling the drop in advertising and laying off lots of people, the blog hosting people at Typepad came up with a nice little program: Typepad for Journalists. They’d give you a free pro account, tech support, maybe help you put ads on your site. All about helping newly-unemployed journalists by giving them a home in the digital world.

When I got laid off in November, I knew one of the first things I wanted to do was set up a website and a blog. I figured the two best choices were Typepad and Wordpress, so I sent off an application to the Typepad for Journalists program to get that ball rolling in case it ended up seeming like the better deal. But I decided Wordpress would work better for me, and I kind of forgot about the Typepad thing.

So here’s a little timeline. Dec. 17, 2008: I send a message to Typepad telling them I want a blog. Jan. 16, 2009: They tell me I’m accepted to their program. (Everyone was – I’m not that special.) Sept. 25, 2009: They send me my discount code so I can register and start blogging.

Uh, yeah. Waiting nine months to start a blog – that’s definitely the way to show you’re on top of the news.

Today I wrote my first story in German! Ok, actually my second story in German. I wrote a little tiny story last week at Bild, but something went tragically wrong and it didn’t get published. But today’s story went into a layout and went to the presses and will be in newspapers tomorrow! Real live newspapers! Which, apparently, people in Germany still read.

The edit went a lot better than you’d think, considering German is not my best language. It’s not even in my top three. In the first go-round, the editor corrected my grammar (which wasn’t *too* bad, but I’d guessed some genders wrong and messed up some cases) and fixed the two or three expressions that made no sense. I made the corrections, and then he went through and did an edit that was a bit more rewritey while I watched over his shoulder and suggested alternate phrasings and the intern at the next desk looked up words on Leo. In the final version, I still know what all the words mean, and it still ends with something funny I thought up. (My other funny was cut for space. Sigh.)

The editor and I bonded over our mutual love of the letter ß. It was taken out of a lot of German words in the spelling reform of 1996, presumably because it’s weird and people who don’t speak German don’t know what to do when it shows up in a text. It’s called the “eszett” and it makes an “s” sound. I’d used it to write the word “daß,” because cmon, there’s a ß key right on my keyboard, and that’s how I learned to spell “daß” in 1990, and besides, I love that letter. But the spellcheck on his computer caught it and he replaced it with “ss,” and we had a little grumble about it.

The people at Die Welt still seem to think I speak German. I suspect that I actually speak a unique hybrid of German, Norwegian, and German-accented English. But they keep speaking German to me, so I keep speaking my mishmash, and everyone seems happy.

Today was my first day at the new workplace, Die Welt. (“The World.”) It’s got the same publisher as Bild but is somewhat higher-brow. For example, there are no naked ladies on the cover and very few exclamation points in the stories.

I wasn’t optimistic about my first day – I’d never managed to reach my official contact before starting, and when I reached a secretary on Friday, she appeared to be mad at me – but it went really well. I already have an assignment for tomorrow. And it’s for a story I proposed myself. At a meeting. IN GERMAN.

I showed up in the morning and spoke German and somehow they took this to mean that I actually speak German, rather than just being able to fake it in brief, uncomplicated encounters, and they keep speaking it to me. (And repeating themselves more slowly and with simpler vocabulary when I’m confused, bless their hearts.)

I’m afraid the editor thinks I am also writing my story in German. My written German is like that of a five-year-old who has only learned one or two sentence structures and has a severely limited vocabulary and was probably also raised by wolves (see example of corrections here). Of course, everyone here reads English perfectly well and I’m sure I’ll be able to get translation help if I need it. But it’s for Wednesday’s paper. So they’d better help fast.

Wish me luck.