Welcome to Econnect Communication's October 2002 newsletter. We are always happy to have your feedback. Please also remember articles in this newsletter are © to Econnect Communication Pty Ltd and its employees. If you do use any of the information provided our newsletters, please acknowledge Econnect and this newsletter as a source.

Regards,

The team at Econnect Communication

(Lin Martin, Jenni Metcalfe, Louise Ralph, Michelle Riedlinger on assignment in South Africa)

Okay, I'm finally admitting it. I'm a stripper by trade. I make no apologies and I'm not about to give it up.

I take a huge, overdressed concept and start to strip it back bit by bit. I play with it, readjust it and take a bit more off. Finally, I strip out the adverbs, fling off the adjectives - and now I've got something my audience will pay attention to.

If you want to be read, you're going to have to do a bit of stripping yourself. Most people won't bother wading through convoluted prose to get your point.

Here are some ways to make your writing sizzle:

• Short is sweet: use short sentences with one thought to a sentence - cut long, rambling sentences into two or three short, punchy sentences.
• Looking good: keep paragraphs short to avoid big slabs of text on the page, especially if your work will appear in columns.
• Stay active: lose the passive voice. Look for 'by' in your sentences and rework them - have the scientist doing research, rather than research being done by the scientist.
• Liven it up: turn nouns into verbs, e.g. 'provision of' (noun) can become 'will provide' (verb)
• Keep it simple: Use less words to get your message across, e.g. 'close proximity' becomes 'near', 'are in agreement' becomes 'agree', 'despite the fact that' becomes 'although'
• What the.? Avoid tautology or stating the obvious - new innovation, future potential, mutual cooperation. and clichés - cutting edge, world beating, revolutionary

.now, where's that feather boa.?

American Barry Lopez is one of my favorite writers on humans and nature. In a collection of his essays 'About this Life' he reflects on how he was asked for advice for someone's 15 year old daughter who wanted to be a writer. This is what he found himself saying.

"Tell your daughter three things. Tell her to read. tell her to read whatever interests her and protect her if someone declares what she is reading is trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention beyond anyone's attention, to things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, love and human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writings of Alexandra Neil, or To the Lighthouse.

Second. tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and studying books about grammar and organisation of ideas, but that if she wants to write well she has to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs and speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose does not come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.

Finally. tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her to do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then when she returns, she will be better able to tell us why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things. Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar."

On his own writing Lopez says he writes "to contribute to a literature of hope. in which men and women can find trustworthy patterns. Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader; each story in the end is social. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again."

South Africa held its second national African languages olympiad this month to encourage students to use the official languages more creatively - http://www.fest.org.za/alangolympiad.html

Of course there are many challenges for science communicators in South Africa. Terms for simple scientific concepts just don't exist in many of the 12 official languages. Even communicating about something as simple (but important!) as the coming solar eclipse in December can be fraught with difficulty.

"Eclipse" and "diagonal" have no translatable equivalents in many languages and concepts like "umbra" and "penumbra" are impossible to explain briefly in IsiXhosa and IsiZulu languages. This is timely reminder for all of us that scientific terms need to be handled with care in writing.

Scientific terms make our working interactions easier because we can discuss quite complex ideas using simple agreed-upon words. But for many communities, scientific terms indicate that a piece of writing is not for them, that they are not part of the "group".

It would be more convenient if scientific terms were better recognised. But we know from experience that people only stop to look something up when they believe it is vital for their physical or economic survival.

Scientific terms that we don't understand shout at us "this piece of writing is not for you because you don't understand what these words mean". More often than not a term that is not explained can stop us reading on.

All the good work that has gone into a piece of writing can be wasted by one word in the first paragraph. To avoid this happening, you can:

• find out what those you are trying to reach already understand and what they are inspired by
• employ a competent person who deals with the community you want to reach to explain your messages
• go out and talk to the people you are writing for as often as you can so that you really get a feel for their interests and concerns

Pretty simple really - and scientific terms can be simple too (but only when you know what they mean).

During a month's sojourn in Alaska in June this year, I studied sea otters, spent a week on a small cruise boat (much better than the big ships - see www.yachtalaska.com), and then flew in a seaplane to see the "grizzlies" in Katmai National Park.

The trip so inspired me that I thought I should shake the dust from my freelancing journalism skills and write some articles about the experiences. To help me free the cobwebs after years of writing media releases, consultancy reports, promotional brochures etc, I enrolled in an online travel writing course with UCLA, under the tutorship of Peat O'Neil who is on the staff of The Washington Post Magazine. Peat and other workshop participants provided great personal feedback to various draft articles.

I have found since that the skills honed over this 10-week course have helped in all my other writing. Some key tips that I think are helpful for ALL writing are:

• Good writing 'shows' the reader rather than 'tells' them
• Active writing helps to keep the copy tight and provokes reader interest
• Consider the 'journey' in your writing and try to provide 'a sense of place'
• Write for the audience of the publication you're targeting - not for yourself
• Understatement has more power than a string of adjectives
• Read your writing aloud to check it makes sense, and get someone else to look at it before you submit it
• Edit, edit, edit and then re-edit
• And, if you're like me, go back and check the grammar books - the way we speak these days does not match the correct way of writing and it's easy to make simple grammatical mistakes which sound or appear correct

(See 'Travel Writing - See the World, Sell the Story', by L.Peat O'Neil, published by Writer's Digest Books)

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