Teller on Communicating Science

No, not Edward Teller, but Teller of the magic act Penn and Teller.

The Smithsonian magazine’s March 2012 issue has an article written by Teller, available online. In the article, Teller explains seven principles for how magicians convince the audience of the trick. After reading them, I think many could be equally applied to convincing your audience through the written or spoken word. For example:

2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.

I could translate this for scientific writers in making the manuscript flow smoothly and the figures legible. Text that is easy to read doesn’t write itself; it takes a lot of effort. Also, often the most clear figure is the one created without the default settings in the software.

(Image by AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)