you don’t popularize science;
rather, you popularize the demand.

or you match the need with the supply, you don’t push the supply (top to bottom approach in the dissemination of technology; this is supply-pushed) and look for the need; instead, you should look for the need and then supply the technology (bottom to top approach – this is demand-driven). i learned supply-push demand-driven from nsta director general emil javier in 1981 or 1982. he had that good a grasp of technology diffusion, marketing, whatever you call it.

(did i tell you i now use my own photographs in my blogs as much as possible? this one i call ’stone gate’ – another attempt to be creative, to show you that it is helpful, in fact, it’s necessary, to look at things differently, so that you can get a new or different story from something that you think is ordinary. what i shot is ordinary, an ordinary gate, but i shot it a different angle. a change in perspective. look at the result.)

whether you are the scientist doing the r&d of a technology, or the inventor, or whether you are the science writer, it is paramount that you know the need before anything else. if you are the science writer and you are stuck with the technology, what do you do? the same thing: look for the need. that’s what you determine first, and then when you find it, that’s where all your writing will lead to.

what you usually refer to as popularizing science is, of course, translating or transforming technical language into popular language, what i call the language of the marketplace: farmer? worker?manager? fisherman? forester? logger? entrepreneur? whoever your target reader or audience, you cannot connect to him if you don’t know his need.

when i think of popularizing science, i think of attitude first. your attitude is your article. if your attitude is that of a know-it-all, then you’re like most science journalists – you know what’s good for your reader and you’re telling him to just go ahead and do it! that, my friend, is insulting the intelligence of your reader.

don’t forget that technology diffusion is marketing, marketing of a product or service. the same rules apply. the most famous person in marketing, or communication, is? aida. awareness, interest, desire, action. in other words, you don’t write an article and then you’re done with it. of course, sometimes a product or service can be so successful that one article or one advertisement is enough. but mostly marketing needs to grow from awareness to interest to desire to action. your brochure or flyer is first of all for awareness; a follow-up brochure with more details is for interest; a demo is for desire and, hopefully, what follows is action – adoption. it doesn’t always happen that way. aida is the most neglected person in the world – most people would like other people to buy what they are selling with just one article, one ad, one brochure, one public announcement. that’s possible only one in a million chance.

you have to gather more data and information, even if you think you know enough – you don’t. i never do, even if i’m a wide reader, as i have always been since high school, and that is 50 years ago. and you cannot be interesting – you have to be interesting – if you can’t cite sources other than your own. the lazy journalists don’t bother to gather more information. you can’t be a lazy journalist and succeed in selling ideas. you can only succeed in selling yourself to people who want their press releases published without much ado. you are not writing a mere press release – you are popularizing science.

so what do you do with all those notes and materials you have and you have only one article to write? you have to learn to organize the chaos. i recommend that you learn the outline-organize feature of microsoft word 2003 (same feature as you find in word 1997 or word xp). the outline-organize feature of word is so powerful you can simply assign heads and subheads and sub-subheads and when you collapse them together with the text, you can move pages up or down with just one click of the mouse. yes, if you are not computer literate, i pity you – i can’t teach you how to be the best writer you can be.

when you’re learning to popularize science, when you’re learning to write well, it’s okay to imitate the good writers. that’s how i started, imitating ernest hemingway (short sentences), imitating nick joaquin (interesting title, suggestive and coherent subtitles, superb ending), following the advices of rudolf flesch in his book how to write, think & speak more effectively which i read sometime in 1965, my copy of the book was manny alkuino own copy which he gave to me when he saw how interested (rapt) i was with reading and learning from it. and i learned from edward de bono’s lateral thinking, which i first encountered in his book the mechanism of mind whose copy was my good friend orli ochosa’s own copy which he gave me in 1975 while we were both copywriters of pacifica publicity bureau. those two books changed my creative life.

you also need a dictionary, a thesaurus, an encyclopedia. if you don’t have those, you must be connected to the internet all the time. that’s how i work in any case. and i’m telling you it helps me greatly, tremendously.

it is important that you have a complete draft, even a very rough draft. then you let that draft sleep, say overnight. leave it alone. you can’t write the first time and be good at it. it happened only once in my life, and i can’t do it again.

why do you set aside your draft and do some other things? you need to rest from it so that you go back to it, you have fresh ideas and you can look at it with ‘new eyes’ so that you will know how to improve it. so you see why the draft is important, even if it is incomplete or bad: it will tell you where to proceed, because it will tell what’s missing, what’s too much maybe, what to revise, what to add if at all. if you keep postponing coming up with a draft, you’ll never finish writing. in the same manner, if you insist on writing a ‘beginning’ right from the start of your writing, you’re beginning in the wrong way.

and you know what? these blog entries are in fact drafts of my own essays written as the thoughts come; i call frank’s each one a stream-of-unconsciousness because they just come unbidden and i don’t organize them. because that’s how to be creative – generate the thoughts first and then you organize them. those of you who want to begin the very first paragraph with ‘a good one’ is trying to revise what is not there – that explains the common writer’s block.