Why Communicate?

For scientists, the rationale for communicating within our own community is embedded in our training. We share information, report discoveries and get help from colleagues through informal communication like hallway conversations at conferences, as well as through formal means like journals. We make web pages for our labs to publicize our work and create a repository for lab group members.

Communicate with who?

Communicating outside our own communities is a little trickier, in part because we're forced to speak a different language than we speak within our community, and in part because there is no immediate payoff such as a research collaboration or invitation to speak at a professional conference.

There is, however, a payoff in communicating outside our usual circle of friends. Legislators need to be aware of how scientific work impacts everyone's daily lives from global warming to cancer treatments. A better understanding by legislators about the importance of science and technology resulted in The American Competitiveness Initiative, for example. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education explains the importance of also educating lawmakers about research in order to lessen the geographic gap in research. For that matter, the average person needs reliable sources of information when making decisions about whether to buy a hybrid car or replace the windows on their house. To put it bluntly, there isn't anyone who doesn't need to know something about math, science and/or engineering because it is such an intergral part of everyone's lives.

For the purposes of classification, you can divide the 'general public' into two very broad categories: People who know they need to know something about science and people who don't know they need to know something about science. The first group are the people who buy Scientific American, popular science books, and generally seek out information about science and science-related topics. According to research done by Margaret Wertheim (the author of Pythagoras' Trousers among other books), this is a very narrow segment of the general population. The top eight science magazines sell about 4.5 million copies per month and the readership of these magazines skews overwhelmingly toward white, middle-to-upper class males. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this; however, in a country whose population is over 300 million, it means there are a lot of people who aren't looking to learn about science, technology, engineering or math (STEM).

Margaret makes the point in an article she wrote for BioScience that there is a great need for material that reaches the second segment of the population: the people who don't know they are interested in science -- yet.

So whether you are interested in writing papers on your latest research that only other specialists in your field will comprehend, translating those results into language suitable for the reporter from your local newspaper, or writing books for pre-schoolers that introduce them to the wonders of science, there are plenty of places for you to apply your communication skills.

Much of the material contained here is the result of the workshop Communicating Math, Science and Engineering to Broader Audiences held at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln on April 12-13, 2007.