Common Threads
Some common traits of popular science productions include:
- Entertainment value or personal relevance to the audience
- Emphasis on uniqueness and radicalness
- Exploring ideas overlooked by specialists or falling outside of established disciplines
- Generalized, simplified science concepts
- Presented for an audience with little or no science background, hence explaining general concepts more thoroughly
- Synthesis of new ideas that cross multiple fields and offer new applications in other academic specialties
- Use of metaphors and analogies to explain difficult and/or abstract scientific concepts
- Very limited mathematical formulas or complicating details
Read more about this topic: Science Writing
Famous quotes containing the words common and/or threads:
“The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers’ seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)