You might know that I’ve been taking a class on science writing for popular audiences this semester.  There are two required readings for the course, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011, ed. Mary Roach, and A Field Guide for Science Writers, ed. Deborah Blum, Mary Knudson, and Robin Marantz Henig, and I’ve been enjoying them so much that they’ve become oatmeal reading.  Wait, didn’t you know that?  I do all my reading for fun over oatmeal in the morning.

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Source: Amazon

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011  The book is pretty much what it sounds like: a collection of the best stuff published in popular science magazines in 2011.  The articles range in subject from how you collect semen samples from chimpanzees* to shock reporting on the Gulf oil spill to a meditation on the limits of what physics might be able to discover.  The book feels like reading many issues of Discover magazine and The New Yorker, because that’s where many of these articles come from.  Except that this book is a highlights reel.

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Source: Goodreads

A Field Guide for Science Writers  This is pretty exciting stuff, because it gets into the nuts and bolts of how one goes about writing about science.  The book is divided into sections, one of which is about actually writing well, one about the peculiarities of certain fields such as medicine, and one about working in all the various print markets.  Print markets.  The biggest problem with this book is that it was published in 2006, and the written word has been through an upheaval since then.  I’d recommend this book for the section on craft alone, but the ten pages on writing for the Web left me wanting more.

I’m leaving this class with more conviction than ever that science writing is very cool stuff.  What could be better than science and writing put together?

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*  A section of PVC pipe lined with K-Y Jelly, in case you were wondering.