Breaking the communication barrier between scientist and civilian

As a science journalist, one of my goals is to make science more accessible to the public. There are a lot of cool things going on that people don't know about, either because they're convinced that science is scary or bad or because they think it's too hard to understand. Science can contain a lot of jargon that someone who didn't specifically take that class might not be familiar with, and even if they did take the obligatory science class, it might've been so long ago that they don't remember. There's also the issue of communication styles: journalists and such are used to the short, sweet, and to the point style of speaking, whereas scientists can tend to go into drawn-out explanations, which are inevitable given the subject matter but don't always help the audience comprehend.

I found this post today on Twitter about the tendency for researchers to explain rather than describe, and the interview that this communication consultant used illustrates the difference pretty well. It took place in January 2013 between a fiction writer and an astrophysicist, and here's what the former had to say:

"…if somebody says why does a clock tell time, you can describe the mechanism of the particular clock or you can say people arrived at a convenient definition of one day, divided it into arbitrary segments, and made a mechanism that would measure those segments because culture required timekeeping with that degree of precision. Now, that's not a complete explanation but it is explanatory whereas the other one is only descriptive."

The astrophysicist responds with the idea that the "this is how it is" tendency of scientific rhetoric because their jobs are based on trying to make sense of the real world, hence the speech about how rather than the speech about why, which is what civilians generally understand better.

The issue of scientific communication and how to interact with the public is a hot topic, and while a lot of research has been done about public opinion of science (we already know that people don't trust science journalists), this weekend's American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston will have a session specifically for scientists' understanding of the public. This can then help determine the best approaches to communicating their information in an accessible way to not only inform their audience but avoid making them less liked.