 Accessible science writing is science writing for a general audience might be like your parents, brothers or write to a popular science magazine or just even newspaper which is read by many people. So suppose you want to convey your technical work to a general audience what are the principles to be followed. So the three important principles are the clarity and there has to be a vigor. You have to show that enthusiasm and there has to be some human elements to it. So these are the three things I will bring out. So how many people have watched this? Not many, okay. How many people have watched this? This one? No. This one? Okay. So I think this is not a good slide. Essentially what I wanted to bring is these three are, these both are, is a crime scene investigation. So it is completely, if you look the way they argue it is a normal serial. But there is one or two important science concepts, it will be a physics based problem or chemistry based thing or something biological, okay. Using one of these concepts they figure out who has conducted the crime. So it is a nice way to actually convey a very heavy science topic but mingled in several other usual murder, there is that, several other things, okay. Similarly this is on numbers, on math. So every serial has got a nice puzzle which has been solved, okay, but again in a broader crime scenario. And this one is completely humor, right, is it all serious, it is completely humor but again there are also some few concepts of science will come here and there. And this one I do not watch. So what I am going to talk is you want to be able to write the content, whatever you did to be accessible to non-specialists, people in other disciplines, policy makers or to school students, a general public like you write in newspapers and so on, okay. But very importantly we are all scientists and engineers at one level but we are also a normal parent or normal people going to malls and buying everything, all quite normal. So can you explain the work to yourself in a simple way, okay. So what are that qualities that you need to look for to be able to do that, okay. The purpose of this is that at many times citizens have to make choices, is GM good or bad, climate change is there, happening or not happening, correct. So many such questions come for the citizens to make choice, mobile phone radiation, good or bad, several such things, these are highly technical subjects. But people working in that area, how do they convey it, if you are working something so specific how do you convey it to general audience, okay. So that is, can we express this clarity to general audience. So this is entirely from this book by Zinsa on writing well, on writing well is on several topics, I have just taken only those topics relevant to science and technology communication, okay. The first thing is that clarity, so I said clarity, vigor and humanity, clarity must be there. So this one will not be so structured as you are writing abstract, it has to involve little bit of free writing, little bit exaggeration and so on. I will give you lots of examples here, you can read up yourself. So you start with one fact and then build it up slowly, how is it relevant. So each article should have that one important fact, what is that one important fact you are having, not several facts, one important fact. And that fact you need to build upon, vigor is you are a person who had drawn into this problem, what was that aspect that brought you there, okay. These are some things people can relate to, right, they are not technical audience, remember, technical people know all these things very well. But there is a person in you who said, okay, I need to do this because I was affected by something else. Those things can be easily related by anybody else, right. So I wanted to work on climate change because my neighbouring village farmers had this suicide. Anybody will understand that. You bring that vigor in your work. All this will not form a general report, right, general science in a purely technical context in a paper, thesis, you are not going to bring all these things. Because people care only for the content, people don't care about all these things there. But here you are talking to a general audience. How do you bring this? How did it change the author's life, right? So things like that. What were the thrills and mysteries? So maybe you had to go and find out some things, some data. People who are doing field work, when you talk to somebody, maybe you went to slum areas, you talk to people there, you are affected by some things. Many of those things you could bring. So that is the vigor part. And lastly the human elements is how are you going to be able to help the reader identify with you? One possibility is, I am going to give you a few examples now. What do you mean by humanity in a writing, right? So for example, there was an article on the states of the brain, okay. It's a purely technical article if they had conveyed to the technical audience they would have said brain has this state, blah, blah, blah, so many things. But now the same author wants to write it for a general audience, okay. So this is how the author begins. She writes, there was a chimpanzee in California, okay, with a talent for playing tic-tac-toe. You know this tic-tac-toe game, this one, right, this one. So the author begins by telling about a chimpanzee in some zoo which was playing tic-tac-toe. Tic-tac-toe everybody plays. It's not that scientist than anybody plays. Now if you start an article saying that there was a chimpanzee playing tic-tac-toe, there are two contradictory things, right. So this is what makes bringing some human element, right. Another experience is you bring in your own experience which anybody else can relate to, okay. So this is an article which I am going to tell you now. It's an article about human memory and how things are stored in memory. What is the biochemical things and what are the networks that are formed. So some of these things is the work this author has done. So when she writes the same thing to a general audience, okay, see how she relates. She writes, more than 30 years have passed, but I still feel the anger and humiliation of that day when a playmate tossed a handful of sand in my face, okay. Somebody 30 years back when we were all our kids, somebody would have hit you or put thrown mud at your face, right. Anybody can relate to this and something of this stays in your memory for long and she then goes on to tell about other things, why certain things are there in your memory, certain things are not, which is purely a technical part. But the way she begins the article is to tell about an incident which anybody of us can relate. So this is what I meant by a human element in your writing, which a general public can appreciate. So there are some more examples I'll, for the want of time I'll skip that, okay. Just one interesting part. So this one is about a rare kind of poisoning, okay. A rare kind of poisoning which was found in the US, okay. But when the author writes it, he writes it with as though he's writing a novel, okay, as though he's writing a fictional novel. So see the way he writes this. At about 8 o'clock on Monday morning, September 25, 1944, a ragged, aimless old man of 82 collapsed on the sidewalk of Day Street, near the Hudson Terminal. Hudson Terminal is a terminal in New York. The old man's nose, lips, ears and fingers wear sky blue, okay. So normally, if you look at New York, there is a person dead on the street, okay. It's usually some murder or somebody came and shot somebody mugging, killed somebody for money or something like that, okay. This is an article about some kind of vague poisoning that they discovered for the first time. But the writer writes as though it is a fictional description of something. So all these things are not permitted in a purely technical, when you communicate technical audience. But here, the audience is self-general public. Something probably would be reading tabloids. So you bring out something which they immediately relate to and then slowly build up the story to tell what this poison is about, where did it come for the first time and so on, okay. So there are some more examples and I think I should probably stop here with a couple of things that writing is a craft, okay. Writing, this is from Zinsa. He says writing is a craft, which means you need to perfect it. It is like you're making a statue. The person who makes a statue makes it perfect over and over again by doing it over and over again. So a clear sentence, if it comes from a person, it is not just by accident, they had some vision and they got the line. It's not that, it is mostly that they have worked on it again and again and again and perfected it. So science writing for a general audience is also like that. You cannot easily bring out in one shot a very beautifully made article. No, it's most likely written on several drafts, okay. One last thing I will leave you with is that essence of writing is rewriting it, okay. Write it and rewrite it and you have to have this obsessive pride to make, even iron out the small details, okay. So there are some more tips which is given here. Some things of good usage and bad usage, excessive words and removing to simpler, but I will stop here for the want of time. But these things will be covered in a lecture, okay, in small modules with small exercises. And we'll have some short tutorials in the end, okay. So thank you, so we'll break for tea now.