Communicating Science

Complete guide to university branding, including messaging.

The Writers Workshop provides writing consultations, writing groups and writing retreats, and workshops and presentations throughout the academic year.

Campus communicators should use this guide to prepare print and digital external university communications intended for general audiences. It is based on “The Associated Press Stylebook” and “Webster’s New World College Dictionary.” Follow University of Illinois System guidelines when writing for the system.

Some acronyms are useful and are widely understood, but many of the acronyms used in scientific papers hinder understanding and contribute to the increasing fragmentation of science. Here we report the results of an analysis of more than 24 million article titles and 18 million article abstracts published between 1950 and 2019. There was at least one acronym in 19% of the titles and 73% of the abstracts. Acronym use has also increased over time, but the re-use of acronyms has declined. We found that from more than one million unique acronyms in our data, just over 2,000 (0.2%) were used regularly, and most acronyms (79%) appeared fewer than 10 times. Acronyms are not the biggest current problem in science communication, but reducing their use is a simple change that would help readers and potentially increase the value of science.(eLifeScience, 2020)

Open any book on writing and you’ll find the same advice: Never use ten words where five will do. But identifying what to cut is often easier said than done. That’s where Grammarly’s conciseness checks come in.

Identifies difficult or hard to understand words in your writing.

Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear. Put in text and see where you can simplify your prose.

Publicly curated list of scientific terms that have different meanings for scientists and the public.

Guide from the University of Wisconsin Writing Center on how to make your writing clearer and easier to understand.

With the Measure Of Things tool, you can take a physical quantity - like 84 kilograms or 23 cubic meters - and see how it compares to a list of famous or well-known objects. For example, 84 kilograms is the weight of about 17 gallons of paint, while 23 cubic meters is about twice the volume of a cement mixer truck. Using these types of comparisons makes it easier for lay people to understand how large or small something is.

Posts targeted at science journalists but also useful for scientists who write for the public.

Automatically detects passive voice in a block of text.

For anyone outside of academia, journal articles can be incomprehensible. Here, Iva Cheung outlines the importance of plain-language summaries and how they are key to effective knowledge translation.

Plain language – content that is clear and easy to understand – is critical to helping the public to make sense of their obligations and benefits. These guides are designed to help web managers and content strategists to understand why and how to create content that readers can understand. Not only is plain language more efficient and effective. It is also the law.

These OWL resources will help you conduct research and compose documents for the workplace, such as memoranda and business letters. This section also includes resources for writing report and scientific abstracts.

This Readability Analyzer estimates the readability of a passage of text using the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease, Gunning Fog Index, Kincaid Grade Level, SMOG formula and Dale–Chall Score and Fry Reading Graph metrics.

If you want your work to be highly cited, here’s one simple tip that might help: Steer clear of discipline-specific jargon in the title and abstract. (Science, 2021).

Explains what 'scientific consensus' means within the science community.