Title - On Writing Well book notes Tags - booknotes
Writing can help you understand who you are and your heritage.
You can write to leave a record of what you’ve done, thought, and felt.
The essence of writing is re-writing.
Use any method that helps you say what you want to say.
To write is to put part of yourself on paper.
The challenge is to find the real person behind the tension.
The product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about but who he or she is.
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next.
There’s a tendency to inflate what we say and write in order to sound important.
Inflations usually occur in proportion to education and rank.
A simple sentence, it is assumed, must have something wrong with it.
The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Walden is a good example of a writer saying what is on his mind in a plain and simple way.
Clear thinking becomes clear writing. One can’t exist without the other.
The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who was being given to much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
Writers must constantly ask: what am I trying to say?
Contrary to popular belief, good writing doesn’t come naturally.
Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves (during the act of writing).
If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.
Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there.
Examine every word you put on paper.
Beware of the long word that’s no better than the short word.
Put brackets around every component of a piece of writing that isn’t doing useful work.
Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.
Be grateful for everything you can throw away.
Simplify, simplify.
Few people realise how badly they write.
You have to strip your writing down before you can build it back up.
First, learn to hammer the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.
Trying to add style is like adding a toupee.
Be yourself. Relax. Have confidence.
No rules, however, are harder to follow.
You are not alone. All writers have good days and bad days.
Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.
Use ‘I’ and ‘we’ and ‘us’.
Who are you NOT to say what you think?
Nobody else thinks or feels in exactly the same way as you.
People will care what you have to say if you tell them something interesting and tell them in words that come naturally.
‘One’ is a boring guy. I want a professor with a passion for his subject to tell me why it fascinates HIM.
We have become a society fearful of revealing who we are.
The organisations that send us their brochures sounds remarkably alike, but surely they were founded and are still sustained by people with different dreams and visions.
Writing has deep psychological roots.
Americans (and Brits) are unwilling to go out on a limb.
In previous generations, our leaders told us where they stood and what they believed.
Leaders who bob and weave like aging boxers don’t inspire confidence — or deserve it. The same is true for writers.
Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal.
Believe in your own identity and your own opinions.
Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.
Write for yourself.
Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it.
If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in.
If you go about writing with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.
There’s no excuse for losing readers through sloppy workmanship.
You are who you are, he is who he is, and either you’ll get along or you won’t.
First, work hard to master the tools.
Your chances of losing the reader will be smaller if you ground your sentences in solid principles.
Relax and say what you want to say.
Be yourself when you write.
Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation.
Put your passions and crotchets on paper without care for whether the reader will share them.
Good writing can be enjoyable to read even if it’s about a subject you have absolutely no interest in.
Hold firm opinions and say what you think.
Write for yourself and don’t give a damn what the reader might think.
Never be timid or evasive.
Reflecting on a passage from How to Survive in Your Native Land by James Herndon, Zinsser says, ‘Any writer who uses “ain’t” and “tendentious” in the same sentence, who quotes without using quotation marks, knows what he’s doing.
Develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive.
Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.
Surprise readers with unusual words and oblique looks.
Care deeply about words.
Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what was written by earlier masters.
Writing is learned by imitation.
Read the people who are doing the kind of writing you want to do and try to figure out how they did it.
Get in the habit of using dictionaries.
Be a word freak.
If you have any doubt of what a word means, look it up, learn its etymology, and notice what curious branches its original root has put forth.
Get yourself a dictionary of synonyms.
The thesaurus is a reminder of all the choices - and you should use it with gratitude.
Read The Elements of Style by E.B. White once a year.
If you try to rearrange any phrase that has survived for a century, you will struggle to recreate the poetic nature of the original.
If all your sentences move at the same plodding gait, which even you recognise as deadly but don’t know how to cure, read them aloud.
See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, or by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, or by altering the length of your sentences so they don’t all sound as if they came out of the same machine.
Words are the only tools you’ve got.
The Careful Writer by Theodore M. Bernstein is an excellent book.
The laws of usage are relative, bending with the taste of the lawmaker.
The spoken language is looser than the written language.
Today’s spoken garbage may be tomorrow’s written gold.
‘Ongoing’ is a jargon word whose main use is to raise morale.
‘Prioritise’ is jargon, a pompous verb that sounds more important than ‘rank’.
‘Bottom line’ is good usage - a metaphor borrowed from the world of bookkeeping that conveys an image we can picture.
Use good words, if they already exist - which they almost always do - to express yourself clearly and simply to someone else.
You learn to write by writing.
The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to write a certain number of words on a regular basis.
You must choose the tense in which you are principally going to address the reader.
Any tone is acceptable, but don’t mix two or three.
Writers who pursue every last fact will find themselves pursuing the rainbow and never settling down to write.
Nobody can write a book or article ‘about’ something.
Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write.
Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.
An unwieldly writing task is a drain on your enthusiasm.
Every successful piece of non-fiction should leave the reader with one provovative thought that he or she didn’t have before.
Decide what single point you want to leave in the reader’s mind.
The act of writing generates some cluster of thoughts or memories that you didn’t anticipate.
The most important sentence in any article is the first one.
The lead is a progression of sentences, each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked.
Readers want to know - very soon - what’s in it for them.
Anything lead do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and tugs at his sleeve.
Every paragraph should amplify the one that preceded it.
Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph - it’s the crucial springboard to the next paragraph.
Make the reader smile and you’ve got him for at least one more paragraph.
Salvation often lies not in the writer’s style but in some odd fact he or she was able to discover.
Always collect more material than you will use.
But at some point you must stop researching and start writing.
Look for your material everywhere - not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people.
Look at signs and billboards and all the junk written on the roadside.
Try to give your lead a freshness of perception or detail.
Narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone’s attention.
Always look for ways to convey your information in narrative form.
Approach your subject in a manner that most naturally suits what you are writing and who you are.
Sometimes you can tell the whole story in the first sentence.
Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realise.
An article that doesn’t stop where it should stop becomes a drag and therefore a failure.
We were taught at school that every story should have a beginning (I), middle (II), and end (III). If you’re going to write good non-fiction, you must wriggle out of III’s dread grip.
You will know that you have arrived at III when you are about to repeat in compressed form what you have already said in detail.
A good last sentence, or last paragraph, is a joy in itself. It gives the reader a lift, and it lingers when the article is over.
The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right.
It’s like the curtain scene in a theatrical comedy. You’re in the middle of a scene (you think), when suddenly one of the actors says something funny, or outrageous, or epigrammatic, and the lights go out.
When you’re ready to stop, stop.
Often it takes just a few sentences to wrap things up.
Ideally, encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that jolts us with its fitness or unexpectedness.
Bring the story full circle - strike an echo of a note at the end that was sounded at the beginning.
What usually works best is a quotation.
Surprise is the most refreshing element in non-fiction writing.
Verbs push the sentence forward and give it momentum.
Use active verbs.
Active verbs help us visualise an activity.
Use precise verbs.
Of the 701 words in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, a marvel of economy in itself, 505 words are one syllable and 122 are words of two syllables.
William Shakespeare and the King James Bible are examples of how active verbs give vitality to the written word.
Most adverbs are unnecessary.
Most adjectives are also unnecessary.
The concept is already in the noun.
If you want to make a value judgement about daffodils, choose an adjective like ‘garish’.
The adjective that exists solely to as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.
Make your adjectives do work that needs to be done.
Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw.
Good writing is lean and confident.
‘Very’ is a useful word to achieve emphasis, but far more often it’s clutter.
Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don’t diminish that belief. Don’t be kind of bold. Be bold.
Most writers don’t reach the period soon enough.
Break the long sentence into two short sentences, or even three.
Among good writers it is the short sentence that predominates.
If you want to write long sentences, be a genius.
The exclamation point has a gushy aura, the breathless excitement of a debutante commenting on an event that was exciting only to her: ‘Daddy say I must have had too much champagne!’
Construct your sentence so that the order of the words will put the emphasis where you want it.
Humour is best achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an exclamation point.
The semicolon should be used sparingly by modern writers of non-fiction.
It bring the reader, if not to a halt, at least to a pause.
Rely instead on the period and the dash.
The dash will get you out of many tight corners.
Use the dash in two ways: (1) to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part, and (2) to set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence using two dashes.
Many of the functions of the colon have been taken over by the dash.
It can still serve the role of bringing your sentence to a brief halt before you plunge into, say, and itemised list.
Alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence.
It’s easier for readers to process a sentence if you start with ‘but’ when you’re shifting direction.
It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.
‘However’ is a weaker word and needs careful placement.
Don’t start a sentence with ‘however’ - it hangs there like a wet dishrag.
And don’t end a sentence with ‘however’ - by that time it has lost its howeverness.
‘Yet’ does almost the same job as ‘but,’ though it’s meaning is closer to ‘nevertheless.’
Words like ‘meanwhile,’ ‘now,’ ‘today’ and ‘later’ save confusion when you change timeframe.
Your style will be warmer and truer to you personality if you use contractions like ‘I’ll’ and ‘won’t’ and ‘can’t’ when they fit comfortably into what you’re writing.
The only contraction to avoid is ‘I’d,’ ‘he’d,’ ‘we’d,’ etc - because ‘I’d’ can mean both ‘I had’ and ‘I would,’ and readers can get well into a sentence before learning which meaning it is.
Don’t invent contractions like ‘could’ve.’
Stick with the contractions you can find in the dictionary.
Always use ‘that’ unless it makes your meaning ambiguous.
In most situations, ‘that’ is what you would naturally say and therefore what you should write.
If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs ‘which.’
Don’t overstate. You didn’t really consider jumping out the window.
Let the humous sneak up so we hardly see it coming.
Credibility is just as fragile for a writer as for a president.
Don’t inflate an incident to make it more outlandish than it actually was.
Dictating for someone else to type is a false economy that saves some time and blows your whole personality.
If you must dictate, at least find some time to edit what you have dictated, making sure that what you finally write is a true reflection of who you are.
Every writer is starting from a different point and is bound for a different destination.
The hares who write for the paper are overtaken by the tortoises who move studiously toward the goal of mastering the craft.
Your only contest is with yourself.
Surprisingly often a difficult problem in a sentence can be solved by simply getting rid of it.
Look at the troublesome element and ask, ‘do I need it at all?’
Remove it and watch the afflicted sentence spring to life and breathe normally.
Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
A long clunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.
A succession of tiny paragraphs is as annoying as a paragraph that’s too long.
Paragraphing is a road map constantly telling your reader how you have organise your ideas.
Almost all of the good non-fiction writers think in paragraph units, not in sentence units.
Don’t use contructions that suggest that only men can be settlers or farmers or cops or firefighters.
One solution is to find another term - a generic substitue: e.g. ‘chair’ for ‘chairman’.
Every writer should visualise ONE reader struggling to read what he or she has written.
The best solutions simly eliminate ‘he’ and its connotations of male ownership by using other pronouns or by altering some other component of the sentence.
One other pronoun that can help is ‘you’. Instad of talking about the ‘the writer’ or ‘he’ does, you can address the writer directly (‘you’ll often find’). It doesn’t work for every kind of writing, but it’s a godsend to anyone writing an instructional book or self-help book.
Always look for ways to make yourself available to the people you’re trying to reach.
Rewriting is the essence of writing well.
Most writers don’t initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could.
Clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.
Careful writers can’t stop fiddling.
Writing is like a good watch - it should run smoothly and have no extra parts.
You don’t write well until you understand that writing is an evolving process, not a finished product.
Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try.
Much of it consists of making sure you’ve given the reader a narrative flow he can follow with no trouble from beginning to end.
Keep putting yourself in the reader’s place.
Make an arrangement - one that holds together from start to finish and that moves with economy and warmth.
I don’t like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity.
The savings in time and drudgery, by using a computer to write, are enormous.
The computer provides the writer with crucial gains: time, output, energy, enjoyment and control.
Trust your material.
There’s nothing more interesting than the truth.
Your job is to present the colourful fact.
People will write better and with more enjoyment if they write about what they care about.
Don’t annoy your readers by overexplaining - by telling them something they already know or can figure out.
Try not to use words like ‘surprisingly,’ ‘predictably’ and ‘of course’ which put a value on a face before the reader encounters the fact.
There’s no subject you don’t have permission to write about.
If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.
Write about your hobbies: cooking, gardening, jogging.
Write about your work: teaching, nursing, running a business.
Write about a field you enjoyed in college and always meant to get back to: history, biography, art.
No subject is too specialised or too quirky if you make an honest connection with it when you write about it.
The great preponderance of what writers now write and sell, what book and magazine publishers publish and what readers demand is nonfiction.
Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night is a great piece of American literature.
Disciplines that were once regarded as academic, like anthropology and economics and social history, have become the domain of nonfiction writers and of broadly curious readers.
Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal, whatever its constituency.
Lewis Thomas’s first two books, Live of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail, were first written as essays for the New England Journal of Medicine.
Every writer must follow the path that feels most comfortable. For most people learning to writer, that path is nonfiction.
Most people will write far more willingly about subjects that touch their own lives or that they have an aptitude for.
Motivation is at the heart of writing.
The only important distinction is good writing and bad writing. Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.
Nothing so animates writing as someone telling what he thinks or what he does - in his own words.
Learn how to conduct an interview.
All forms of nonfiction come alive in proportion to the number of quotes you can weave into it as you go along.
Find people with a fierce attachment to what they are doing to tell your story and it won’t be drab.
The interview is one of the most popular nonfiction forms, so you should master it early.
The best way to practice is to go out and interview people.
To learn the craft of nonfiction, you must push yourself out into the real world and pretend that you’re writing for a real publication.
Choose as your subject someone whose job is so important, or so interesting, or so unusual that the average reader would want to read about that person.
Choose someone who touches some corner of the reader’s life.
You will never again feel so ill at ease as when you first try interviewing someone.
The basic tools for an interview are paper and some well-sharpened pencils.
Keep your notebook out of site until you need it. Take a while just to chat, gauging what sort of person you’re dealing with, getting him or her to trust you.
Never go into an interview without doing whatever homework you can.
You will be resented if you inquire about facts you could have learned in advance.
Make a list of likely questions. Perhaps you won’t need the list. Better questions will occur to you. You can only go by intuition. But a list of questions will save you the vast embarrassment of going dry in mid-interview. It can also help you bring the conversation back on track.
Often you will be talking to people who have never been interviewed before, and they will warm to the process awkwardly, self-consciously, perhaps not giving you anything you can use. Come back another day; it will go better.
Question-and-answer interviews, obtained by tape recorder, have the sound of spontaneity. This form isn’t writing, though. It’s a process of asking questions and then pruning and splicing and editing the transcribed answers. The seemingly simple use of a tape recorder isn’t simple; infinite stitchery is required. A writer should be able to see his materials. If your interview is on tape, you become a listener. Be a writer. Write things down.
I do my interviewing by hand, with a sharp No. 1 pencil. I like the transaction with another person. I like the fact that person can see me working - doing a job, not just sitting there letting a machine do it for me.
Consider using a tape recorder in situations where you might violate the cultural integrity of the people you’re interviewing.
If you need to, tell them to stop. Just say, ‘Hold it a minute, please,’ and write until you catch up. What you are trying to do with you feverish scribbling is to quote them correctly, and nobody wants to be misquoted.
With practice you will write faster and develop some form of shorthand.
When you get home, type out your notes.
Single out sentences that are most important or colourful.
Your job is to distill the essence.
Your ethical duty to the person being interviewed is to present his position accurately.
You are dealing with a person’s honour and reputation - and also with your own.
But after that your duty is to the reader. He or she deserves the tightest package.
If you find on page 5 of your notes a comment that perfectly amplifies a point on page 2 - a point made earlier in the interview - you will do everyone a favour if you link the two thoughts, letting the second sentence follow and illustrate the first. This may violate the truth of how the interview actually progressed, but you will be true to the intent of what was said.
If a speaker chooses his words carefully you should make it a point of professional pride to quote him verbatim.
Nobody wants to see himself in print using words or phrases he would never use.
Remember that you can call the person you interviewed and ask them to check a few of the things they said.
When you use a quotation, start the sentence with it.
Don’t strain to find synonyms for ‘he said.’
Conducting a good interview is related to the character and personality of the writer, because the person you’re interviewing will always know more about the subject than you do.
It’s just not possible to write a competent interview without some juggling and eliding of quotes.
Writing is a public trust.
When you get people talking, handle what they say as you would handle a valuable gift.
People and places are the twin pillars on which most non-fiction is built. Every human event happened somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.
In certain cases, like the travel article, descriptive detail will be the main substance.
However much place description is needed, it’s very hard. It’s in this area that most writers produce not only their worst work but work that is truly terrible.
Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveller home from his travels. He’s so excited that he wants to tell us all about it. But we don’t want to hear ‘all’ - we only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? What can he tell us that we don’t already know?
We don’t want him to describe every ride at Disneyland. But if one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, that would be worth hearing about.
The article that records everything you did on your trip will fascinate you because it was your trip. Will it fascinate the reader? It won’t. The mere agglormeration of detail is no free pass to the reader’s interest. The detail must be significant.
One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.
To write well about a place requires style and substance. First, choose your words with unusual care. Strive for fresh words and images. As for substance, be intensely selective. Eliminate every fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are significant.
Your main task as a travel writer is to find the central idea of the place you’re dealing with.
Practice writing this kind of travel piece (referencing the way Tom Wolfe described the Mojave Desert in the early chapters of The Right Stuff). You don’t have to go to Morocco or Mombasa. Go to your local mall, or bowling alley, or day-care centre. Wherever you go, go there often enough to isolate the qualities that make it distinctive. Usually that will be some combination of the place and the people who inhabit it. If it’s your local bowling alley, it will be a mixture of the atmosphere and the regular patrons. If it’s a foreign city, it will be a mixture of the ancient culture and the present populace. Try to find it.
A master of this feat of detection was the English author V.S. Pritchett, one of the best and most versatile of non-fiction writers.
Distill the imporant from the immaterial.
If travel is broadening, it should broaden more than just our knowledge of how a Gothic cathedral looks or how the French make wine. It should generate a whole constellation of ideas about how men and women work and play, raise children, worship their gods, live and die.
When you write about a place, try to draw the best out of it. But if the process should work in reverse, let it draw the best out of you.
One of the richest travel books written by an American is Walden, though Thoreau only went a mile out of town.
What brings a place alive is human activity: people doing the things that give a locale its character.
Never be afraid to write about a place that you think has had every last word written about it. It’s not your place until you write about it.
What we’re all looking for is individuality. We’re looking for whatever it is that makes you unique. Write about what you know and what you think.
You get permission to write about yourself - about what you know and what you think - by being born.
Write in personal detail about what is closest to you.
A friend of the author agreed to spend mornings writing about his life. He could hardly believe what a liberating journey it was - how much he discovered about his father that he never understood, and about his own life.
If you’re a writer, give yourself permission to tell us who you are.
If you write for yourself, you’ll reach the people you want to write for.
The physical act of writing is a powerful search mechanism.
Your memory is almost always good for material when your other wells go dry.
Excessive writing about yourself can be hazardous to the health of the reader and the writer.
Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work. Write about yourself, by all means, with confidence and pleasure. But see that all the details - people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas, emotions - are moving your story steadily along.
What gives memoir its power as a form is that is the narrowness of focus. Unlike autobiography, which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The memoir writer takes us back to some corner of his or her past that was unusually intense - childhood, for instance - or that was framed by war or some other social upheaval.
Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life.
To write a good memoir, you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organising idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
The crucial ingredient in memoir is, of course, people. You must summon back the men and women and children who notably crossed your life.
But the most interesting person in a memoir, we hope, will turn out to be the person who wrote it.
Virginia Woolf was an avid user of highly personal forms - memoirs, journals, diaries, letters - to clarify her thoughts and emotions.
Give yourself permission to write about yourself, and have a good time doing it.
Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.
Science writing can be defined loosely to include technology, medicine, and nature.
Nowhere else (compared to science and technology writing) must you work so hard to write sentence that form a linear sequence. Fact and deduction are the ruling family.
As a technical writer, you can never assume that your readers know what you assume everybody knows, or that they still remember what was once explained to them.
The best way to practice science writing is to describe how something works. This is valuable for two reasons. First, it forces you to make sure you know how it works. And then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you.
The principle of scientific and technical writing applies to all nonfiction writing. It’s the principle of leading readers who know nothing, step by step, to a grasp of subjects they didn’t think they had an aptitude for or were afraid they were too dumb to understand.
Imagine science writing as an upside down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more. The second sentence boradens what was stated first, making the pyramid wider, and the third sentence boradens the second, so that you gradually move beyond fact into significance and speculation - how a new discovery alters what was know, what new avenues of research it might open, where the research might be applied. There’s no limit to how wide the pyramid can become, but your readers will understand the broad implicatikns only if they start with one narrow fact.
You can take much of the mystery out of science writing by helping the reader to identify with the scientific work being done.
Another way of making science accessible is to write like a person and not like a scientist.
It’s not necessary to be a ‘writer’ to write well. We think of Rachel Carson as a writer because she launched the environmental movement with a book, Silent Spring. But Carson wasn’t a writer; she was a marine biologist who wrote well. She wrote well because she was a clear thinker and had a passion for her subject.
Every scientific discipline has a fine literature of its own.
Read the scientists who write well in fields that interest you and use them as models for your own writing.
About 98 percent of people who hold a doctorate in physics can’t write their way out of a petri dish, but that’s not because they can’t. It’s because they won’t. They won’t deign to learn to use the simple tools of the English language - precision instruments as refined as any that are used in a physics lab.
Only through clear writing by experts can the rest of us make educated choices as citizens in these areas where we have little or no education.
Any subject can be made clear and robust by all you writers who think you’re afraid of science and all you scientists who think you’re afraid of writing.