Andrew Moore

Wiley-Blackwell, Weinheim, DE

Andrew Moore's background is in molecular biology (PhD from the MRC-LMB, Cambridge, 1998), but he soon decided that his knowledge of biology and interest in communicating could be turned to good use in the support of scientists who had decided instead for a research career. From 1999 to 2008, he was Programme Manager for Science & Society at EMBO, where he developed activities ranging from stakeholder conferences and education workshops for teachers to media communication workshops for scientists. His longstanding involvement in writing and editorial lead to his move to the position of Editor-in-Chief of the journal BioEssays in 2008.

Title & synopsis
Writing a paper, or writing for the newspaper: less different than you would think!

The first step in successful communication is the recognition that your audience always knows less (often very much less) about your subject than you do. This concept gives rise to principles of communication that apply to, and can be very successfully used in, very different communication settings: from writing a scientific paper to writing science for the local paper. Such a claim may well be met with surprise and disbelief by many scientists, but I will give a small number of concrete examples of it, and ideas for improving communication across a broad spectrum of audiences. Scientists often need skills of "ex laboratorio" communication in its broadest sense. Media communication is one of these, but it lies on a continuous scale with other audiences, right down to peers at a scientific meeting. Essentially, most people with whom a scientist communicates are outside that scientist’s laboratory, and know between slightly and much, much less than the scientist in question. Bridges to audiences are made with titles and abstracts: if these are not written with interest and understandability as the main criteria, the rest of the paper is immaterial to a large sector of its potential readership.

Claire Ainsworth

is a science journalist who has been training students and researchers in science communication and media skills for nearly ten years. She completed a doctorate in developmental biology and genetics at Oxford University before joining New Scientist magazine in 1999, where she worked as a reporter and a features editor, and won an Association of British Science Writers Award in 2004. She then joined Nature as a Senior Reporter and Features Editor, before going freelance in 2007. She now writes for a variety of publications, including New Scientist, Nature and Science while also running her company SciConnect Ltd, which offers courses in science communication.