Technical Communication in Science

by David Wilcocks, UNT Student

Fields of science have always revolved around effective participation and conveyance of ideas. These are two key elements of innovation, and are essential for success in any progressive field. Unfortunately, even today a shortfall exists in effective communication worldwide, as there always has been.

Following the development of the scientific method in the early seventeenth century by René Descartes, the biggest problem facing science was not the means used to collect data, it was finding a way to portray the new data as exactly that. Galileo Galilei experienced firsthand that presenting the sun, not the earth, as the center of the solar system in the wrong manner will only get you as far as admonished and labeled a heretic.

Today, the ramifications of how we share ideas are not as personally detrimental as they were in the early 1600s, but they do impose a great significance on the speed and direction of development.

In 2002, a three-day workshop held on the island of Tobago, hosted by the Caribbean Academy of Sciences, developed a series of necessary implementations to better the communication of science. The following is a condensed list of key points SciDev.Net and the InterAcademy Panel devised to put science and development back on track:

• Capacity Building: developing communication skills for scientists, professional skills for public information officers, and comparable skills for journalists interested in writing about science
• Developing fields of science journalism should take a scientific approach and portray issues that impact growing nations, such as fields of health, environment, agriculture and food production, and energy.
• Increasing the number of professional journalists who are able to write knowledgably and accurately about science.
• Convincing newspapers and magazines to allocate more space to articles highlighting current developments and the impact various fields of science are creating in communities.
• Making scientists more available to journalists to more accurately spread information on work they are doing and to increase their overall accountability in the public's opinion.

These points are all good general starting points that should serve as guidelines in development as well as an illustration of how crucial communication is to progress. They are universal and are, therefore, applicable to any progressive field where exchanging technical ideas is of significance to the expansion of that field.