Goucher College 2020-2021 Undergraduate Catalogue 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Goucher College 2020-2021 Undergraduate Catalogue PLEASE NOTE: This is an archived catalog. Programs are subject to change each academic year.

WRT 312 - Science Writing: Process and Poetry (4 Cr.)


This 300-level course will engage in an overview of the field of science writing with an emphasis on understanding this work as an act of translation, or, as science writer George Johnson once put it, “explaining the strange in terms of the familar.” We will focus on the thinking and writing skills needed to write in a clear, compelling, entertaining way about science for a general audience. The course will cover how difficult scientific concepts and natural processes can be made clear to a general audience by using an array of techniques common in nonfiction reporting and storytelling: interviewing, observation, research, narrative, scenes, character, action, and metaphor, which one writer has called the “lifeblood” of science writing. Readings will include book excerpts and articles from such mainstream publications as Discover, Scientific American, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Orion. Prerequisite: WRT 181 . Fall semester, repeated spring semester. First offered 2021. Hirsch, Professional Writing and Rhetoric Staff.