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Levitsky, McElroy, Rha

Proposal for the Ethnographic Research Project

Introduction:

This research project studies a science journalist, Jeffrey Marlow, in order to

distinguish the demands and requirements of journalistic science writing compared to
academic science writing. We will compare artifacts from both fields, organize
information using heuristics from Chapter 11 of Solving Problems in Technical
Communications, and conduct interviews to gain better insight to Marlows thought
processes. Artifact and interview data should focus around the needs of the audience,
diction usage, sentence structure, and idea organization. The comparison of these
points of data will expose how Marlow creates his journalistic versus academic media
tailored to the intent of the works. By compiling this information we will extrapolate how
to implement these techniques in our own futures as technical writers within the
scientific world.

Research Questions:

A. Conception and Definition: Tell me how youre conceiving of and defining your
topic and your terms. What is your project? What is your purpose?
We are planning to interview Jeffrey Marlow, a writer and scientist from
National Geographic. Our hope with the ethnographic research report is to gain a
better understanding of how science writers convey their studies and research to
not only other scientists, but to the general public. We also hope to understand
how one maintains the interest of both audiences in the different medias.
Through interviews and examination of how Jeffrey Marlow approaches
journalistic science writing compared to academic science writing we can gain
the better understanding we seek.

B. Significance: Discuss the significance of your topic. Why are you writing about
this topic? Why is it a worthy topic for investigation for this course?
The significance of our topic is the knowledge we can gain from it as
students and as future professionals. It is personally significant to us because we
all love science and writing and thus find this topic personally interesting. We
know the knowledge we gain from it will likely be applicable to our future careers
making the topic even more significant to us. The topic will help us to analyze
how different audience types impact the methods and structures our subject,
Jeffrey Marlow, uses in his writing. The idea of the audience impacting the
methods and structures used to create a piece of writing is something discussed
in our course and thus worthy of investigation in our report.
Chapter 11 of Solving Problems in Technical Communication (SPTC), discusses
this idea in terms of context. The context of a piece of writing includes the
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audience this piece is written for and the intent of the writer in creating the work.
We ask- how will the context of Marlows two types of works impact his rhetoric?
C. Connection: Tell me how this topic relates to your intellectual, gendered,
academic, literate, cultural, professional, or maybe your emotional development.
Analyzing Jeffrey Marlow and his work will allow us to gain a better
understanding of academic and professional writing for a broad audience.
National Geographic caters to a vast range of ages and cultures that they must
take into account when creating their articles. By analyzing how this diverse
audience is addressed through the writing of an article versus the audience of a
scientific journal article we can help to further develop our academic knowledge
and skills. In addition to our academic knowledge and skills development, this
ethnography will exemplify how to successfully integrate how to translate
scientific fact into a digestible medium - a skill which is highly beneficial for
science careers. We all have an interest in science and writing so it is likely this
topic and the resulting analysis we produce will help us prepare for our future
careers.

Questions to Explore:

1. How do they approach writing science articles for the public differently than
research papers?
Jeffrey Marlow is a researcher and science writer for National
Geographic magazine. He is responsible for conveying complicated,
detailed findings to a general audience while still maintaining the interest
of more advanced readers. Because of the varied knowledge within all
National Geographic viewers, Marlow has to approach these scientific
articles with a very different mindset than he would for research papers.
He also has to be aware of the age of his readers as they are not only
adults, but young adults, and teens as well. Complex data must be
simplified and edited to accommodate this vast range.

Significance of answers:

The current system for the dissemination of scientific knowledge is bifurcated;

new advancements within the body of scientific understanding are first originated within
a research team, who then drafts and (hopefully) publishes a paper discussing their
observations. This paper is written by experts for experts, it will be drafted with the
intention of convincing their peers as to the validity of their research. This brand of
writing is dense, detailed, and filled with jargon. An article written in this way requires
specialized knowledge to read and will often span many pages. Writings within this
sphere are esoteric, inaccessible for the laymen. The average citizen cannot be
reasonably expected to have a collegiate understanding of every topic they are mildly
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interested in and they cannot be expected to take the time to read 200 page theses to
gain an understanding of these topics. Scientific knowledge then, must not disseminate
via research papers but rather through scientific journalism.
Scientific journalism, or scholastic journalism, is the reporting of science as news.
Articles are short and written in plain English; they are overviews of a topic which
cherry-pick the most interesting points of a study and present them in a digestible
manner. Journalists must be good writers more-so than scientists, as a result articles
are often tertiary and can be rife with inaccuracies or misrepresentations of scientific
fact.
In todays political situation however, when it is up to the ordinary citizen to make
choices which will eventually impact the globe, scientific journalism cannot afford to
misrepresent the facts. Scientific journalism is often the only way a person will ever be
exposed to the impacts of pollution, climate instability, vanishing wildlife, and many
other scientific studies. It is paramount that we, as a class and as a society, examine
the role of scholastic journalism and how it is created to gain a better understanding of
how science is translated to the public. Through the ethnography of Jeffrey Marlow, a
man respected in both scholastic and journalistic spheres of writing, we hope to
distinguish the specific needs of journalistic writing for science through the eyes of a
scientist himself. Our questions for Marlow are intended to isolate the factors which
make each brand of his writing effective; the significance of Marlows answers is thus
that through the applications of our findings we, ourselves, may better be able to create
effective writings in these fields. In application of more effective scientific writings we
optimize the dissemination of good and true information, better informing the world en
masse.

Research Subject:

Jeffrey Marlow is more than just an accomplished science writer, he is currently a

geo/astrobiologist and post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. He writes for scholarly
journals such as the Journal of Geophysical Research, the Geomicrobiology Journal,
the International Journal of Astrobiology, Nature Communications, and Frontiers in
Microbiology; Marlow also writes as a scientific journalist for Wired and National
Geographic, and served as a TEDxCalTech speaker on scientific exploration. He even
wrote and directed a short film about NASAs Mars rover Curiosity and hes started an
educational outreach project, Mars Academy. His writing centers around molecular
biology and DNA synthesis. The information he presents relates to environmental
practices and how we can turn methane emissions into biofuels by studying microbial
metabolisms in the deep sea.

Marlow is a graduate student from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

and currently working with Harvard University studying exotic microbial metabolisms in
an attempt to understand the limits of life on Earth and beyond. Both Caltech and
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Harvard are highly prestigious and highly competitive, to be affiliated with both lends
credibility to Marlow as an expert in his fields. Further, Marlow is an active writer for
scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. Marlow takes an active role in the furtherment of
scientific research as well, many of the articles he publishes are based in part on his
original research. This means that Marlow is respected in the scientific community and
capably communicates his findings at a high level, appropriate for fellow experts in his
field. The fact that Marlow is such a foremost expert and that he conducts his own
research makes his publications primary or secondary documents. The prestige of
Marlows academic background and the scientific origins of Marlows academic works,
mean that Marlow writes an objectively higher quality document than many of his peers
in scholastic journalism. These factors, Marlows scientific background and bifurcated
body of work, identify Marlow as an excellent candidate for our research.

Data Collection Methods:

To understand the process by which Marlow creates science-based media for the
public, we will analyze some of that media and interview the man himself. We will
examine Marlows published works, both scholarly and journalistic, that we find online,
preferably comparable works on the same topic. If we can find comparable works,
writings on the same topic, created by Marlow we can analyze how he approaches
communicating the same scientific topic to both the scientific community and the
general public. In addition, we will also interview Marlow via video chat (if he is not
available for video, then via email), as to his methods and processes when it comes to
the writing of each type of publication. To get an additional sense of his approach to
scientific communication, as well as his character, we will watch and analyze his TED
talks.

Data we plan to analyze:

Comparable published works: academic and journalistic.

Interview with subject.
His TED talks (TEDxCaltech and TEDxBeaconStreet
Data Analysis:

In studying Jeffrey Marlows work we will be studying communication, for our

analysis we will use the Communicative Event Models (CEMs) analytical device as seen
in Chapter 11 of Solving Problems in Technical Communication. CEMs involve
analyzing chains of communicative events, these chains provide an easily comparable
description of event sequences. Every communicative event is an action representing a
choice the writer made in response to context, this choice is portrayed as strings of
verbs and objects. By analyzing the sequence of those choices and events the patterns
become clear. These patterns are what make CEMs easily comparable because it is
easy to notice sequential divergences when comparing the patterns of the writers
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works. We will use comparable samples, academic and journalistic writings on the same
topic, of Jeffrey Marlows work and use the CEMs analytical device to analyze that work.
We will explore the differences in rhetoric, writing style and the amount and type of
specific data provided, with the goal of collecting information on how each media differs
to address its specific audience better.

Marlow has an extensive and successful background in both academic and

journalistic writings, he thus can be considered an expert in each of these types of
writings. By comparing two writings of congruent subject and author, we can isolate the
rhetorical factors which make each writing distinct from the other. Using Marlows works
as standard, we can triangulate the common threads of each academic and journalistic
writings and extrapolate which factors made each writing effective.

We will use our opportunity to interview Jeffrey Marlow to ask questions that will
help us to analyze his work, as well as his processes and methods. By gaining an
understanding through interviewing for why he writes the way he does and the
processes and methods he consciously uses it will help us to see things in his writing
we may not have noticed otherwise. By noticing everything we may have missed in the
comparable samples we can form an analysis more clearly and concisely.

In addition to interviewing him we plan to watch his TED talks, which, like the
interview, will help us to see things in his writing we would not have otherwise. It will
enable us to notice differences in the way things are communicated in his academic
versus journalistic works. It will also help us to to gain a better impression of his
character and how he approaches communicating scientific information.

We will map and analyze Marlows writing process to identify the differences
between his academic and journalistic writing. Main points of consideration include the
length and quality of each type of writing. We will compare lengths of each - general
article length, paragraph/sentence length, and ease of reading. Then we will compare
the relative qualities of each, including the rhetorical strategies implemented, difficulty of
diction, and processes for writing. Through these physical manifestations of writing we
can assume how each genre interacts with their respective audiences to create the
specific effects intended by Marlow.

Schedule of work:

10/11/17 Ethnographic Proposal - First Draft

10/16/17 Ethnographic Proposal - Peer Review

10/18/17 Ethnographic Proposal - Final

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10/18-11/10 Conduct research and interviews, and gather data for analysis.

11/11-11/14 Begin complete analysis of all data collected and construct first
draft of report.

11/15 Ethnographic Report - First Draft

11/17 Ethnographic Report - Peer Review

11/20 Ethnographic Report - Final Draft