“As soon as I tried to release myself from wakefulness, my mind would sink into the pool of sexual energy, and I would feel this horrible sense of joy and happiness towards children.” ![]() In a 2020 story on pedophilia, for example, she quoted a man going by the pseudonym Joseph Parker who described how his condition affected his sleep: “Rather than summarize what they are going through or thinking about, I let them speak for themselves.” “I find it best to hear straight from them,” says Love. In health stories, quotes from people living with a particular condition or disease help convey their subjective experience. This includes researchers, as the example above shows, as well as the people their research could affect. Quotes offer a window into people’s interior emotional lives-their feelings, reactions, and physical sensations-says Brooklyn-based science journalist Shayla Love, a senior staff writer at Vice News. Kathy, one of my production team, came out and said: ‘Look at these babies!’ We were like, ‘Oh my God!’ That was the day when we knew we had enough, and we could get it into somebody’s arm in three weeks’ time. “There’s a stage where you have to centrifuge the material through a gradient, and all of the vaccine lines up in one layer. ![]() In a 2021 Guardian story by Oliver Franklin-Wallis about the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, this quote from Cath Green, head of a clinical biomanufacturing facility, captures the thrill of when her team managed to grow small amounts of coronavirus DNA into enough material to make trial vaccines: “The purpose is to enrich the story by letting the voice of those close to the action be heard.” “It’s the one time we hear speaking in their own words,” Witze says. Science writers can use quotes to humanize the scientific method and bring the struggle, hard work, and joy of being a researcher to life. Yet scientific papers tend to be written in the passive voice and seldom give scientists the chance to express emotion or personality. Science is a human process, performed by people. But one thing is constant: Quotes should always serve a purpose, and that purpose is to reinforce the main idea of your story. ![]() The number, length, and type of quotes you use will vary depending on whether you are working on a news or feature story. They can present a source’s opinion, give factual information or context about how a study was conducted or about its results, suggest a metaphor or analogy to explain a concept or process, or express why a scientific discovery matters. Quotes serve many different functions in science stories. Deciding which quotes to use is a key step in the writing process, and one that requires skill and careful thought. “I had to work really hard to avoid that.”Īfter conducting interviews, journalists typically have a lot of information and quotes to choose from. “I didn’t want people all saying the exact same thing,” says Witze. So Witze paraphrased their quotes in order to enrich the story without making it into a long series of quotes. She chose to do this because, while the other two interviewees made similar comments to Gao that they thought the telescope should be renamed, they also offered additional details, such as potential alternative names for the telescope. Witze, a journalist based in Boulder, Colorado (who is also on The Open Notebook‘s board of directors), mentioned all three astronomers in her story but used a quote from only one of the three, Peter Gao. She interviewed three astronomers-Peter Gao, Saurabh Jha, and Johanna Teske-who all observed that, in their opinion, the telescope should be renamed. To make sure that this diversity of opinion was captured, she carefully selected quotes from numerous sources. When Alexandra Witze was writing a story in July 2021 on the controversial question of whether to rename NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, she spoke to dozens of sources who had lots of opinions on the issue. Degree Programs in Science, Health, or Environmental Writing
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