Yuan 1

Chang Yuan

January 26, 2023

Lopatko

Writing 2

Reflection on Translating a Scientific Article into a Popular Science Blog

Sleeping is probably one of the most important things that humans do to maintain life. I

translated the article “Work by day and sleep by night, do not sleep too little or too much: Effects

of sleep duration, time of day and circadian synchrony on flanker-task performance in internet

brain-game users from teens to advanced age.” into a popular science blog which is aimed

primarily at those who are trying to figure out a better sleeping strategy and also to anyone who

is curious about this topic. The major claim of the article is that maintaining a 7 hour habitual

sleep duration can maximize our performance in the daytime. Using the genre of a popular

science blog, I presented the information in a readable and relatively enjoyable way to my

audiences.

The article “Work by day and sleep by night, do not sleep too little or too much: Effects

of sleep duration, time of day and circadian synchrony on flanker-task performance in internet

brain-game users from teens to advanced age.” researched mainly about how different sleeping

durations and habits affects people’s performance over time. As we can probably notice from the

complicated title, this is a hardcore scientific article. My objective is translating this scientific

article into a friendly popular science blog.

I choose my audience to be those who are trying to figure out a better sleeping strategy

and anyone who is curious about this topic. I am a person that inherits a certain level of sleeping

disorder. Sometimes it’s very hard for me to fall asleep. I crave for solutions as well, sometimes I
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try to read some articles about sleeping myself. I’m well aware of how tiring it is for a normal

person to read a research article. As for my audience, they probably won’t have a lot of

knowledge on the topic, but they have the urge to learn more about it so they can apply these

strategies on themselves to achieve higher efficiency, or just have fun learning more about

sleeping scientifically. In order to do a successful translation, I removed all the jargon, kept

everything simple and wrote in an informal and interesting tone to keep the reader interested. As

for the content, after a hard time of choosing, I decided to keep only the major findings, since I

have to keep the blog post short enough with the most relevant information or my audiences will

lose interest. Doing this is not that easy, as Mike Bunn stated in his article “How to Read Like a

Writer,” “... to consider the effect of those choices on potential readers (including yourself). Then

you can go one step further and imagine what different choices the author might have made

instead, and what effect those different choices would have on readers.” (72) In other words, I

need to stand at the perspective of a targeted audience to analyze this blog as I’m writing. After

all, it’s for them to read, not just a boring lab report.

Why is there such a big difference? Or why can these two types of articles face two

different groups of people while talking about the same thing? The key factor is the different

genres that they have. You may wonder again: what exactly does the word genre mean? In my

own words, genre describes people’s rhetorical situations. For example, “what am I trying to

achieve by this writing?”, “who should be my primary audience?”, or “to what extent should I

persuade my audience?”. In Kerry Dirk’s “Navigating Genres”, Dirk used a quote by Amy

Devitt, a professor who specializes in the study of genre theory to explain the idea of genre in a

professional way — “genres develop, then, because they respond appropriately to situations that
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writers encounter repeatedly.” (252) Putting these all together, it’s important to be aware of the

function of the piece and the audience group while choosing the appropriate genre.

There’s a huge difference between a scientific article and a popular science blog, though

both of them are talking about science. A scientific article utilizes data collected from various

experiments and lots of reasoning to prove arguments that usually contain some innovation. Its

primary audience is those in the research field, people who need to base their research from the

given information. While a popular science blog tends to present the known scientific facts in an

easy-to-understand way. Its primary audience is the general public. In other words, everyone

should be able to understand and enjoy a popular science blog! The tone and format of these two

types of writing are also distinct. A scientific article uses a rigorous and professional voice, there

is a lot of unexplained jargon because the writer thinks that the readers should know these by

default. The formatting is also academic. There are subtitles such as “abstract” and “discussion”

which clearly state the function of each portion and a lot of tables and experimental pictures in

the article. On the other hand, a popular science article uses a sincere and enlightening tone.

There are no jargons at all. Every concept and terminology is explained so that the reader can

understand everything without having a hard time. A popular science blog may also contain

subtitles, but their function is mainly to keep the readers’ interest. The paragraphs are much

shorter than the scientific article, and there are pictures for the purpose of amusing. Moreover,

the popular science blog will contain few or none experimental data or pictures. Most likely,

there will be only results. The reason is that there’s no point in showing the general public

something that they don’t have interest in and can’t understand. All these elements are working

together creating a conversational, informal, and relaxing atmosphere that fits the needs of its

target audience, the general public. Unlike the researchers targeted by the scientific articles,
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which care mostly about the information and experimental data in the pieces, the general public

are more likely craving for better reading experiences.

There are certainly challenges. One of the major challenges that I faced is that my

original genre included way too many claims and results. Since these claims and results are all

logically related with each other. I probably have some blood of a completist running inside me,

it really took me a while to decide to just pick the most important ones without mentioning more

and more new concepts. I decided to delete the part that is non-sleep relevant. Although they

may have something to do with the conducted experiment or the new findings, they are less

related with my blog’s content. An example of something that I deleted is “ large-scale repeated

measures data is advantageous for examining the relationships of interest”. The scientific article

mentioned this because they conducted a five-year experiment over around 50,000 participants,

an experiment with this scale has never happened before. Actually I didn’t just simply delete it. I

move it to my intro paragraph to serve as a credibility booster. Also, I tried to merge some of the

similar claims into a bigger, broader one. My plan was to have a subtitle for every claim to try to

grab my audiences’ attention throughout the whole blog. But thinking from the perspective of an

audience, I realized that my popular science blog doesn't need that many subtitles and contents.

In fact, too much subtitles may even stress out the audiences.

Another challenge would be to rephrase the sentences using a more casual tone. I'll need

to make clear explanations and simple examples while trying to be interesting at the same time to

keep my audience. In the meantime, I cannot lose credibility by producing a blog that is too

informal. This reminds me of a quote that Peter Elbow wrote in his article “Teaching Two Kinds

of Thinking,” “For one of the main things that holds us back from being as creative as we could

be is fear of looking silly or being wrong… Similarly, one of the main things that holds us back
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from being as critical as we could be is fear that we’ll have to reject everything and be left with

nothing at all.” (61) I think I’m going to take Elbow’s suggestion and work on the two tones

separately so that they can “flourish yet reinforce each other.” (61)

I also gained something throughout this translating and reflecting experience. I learned a

lot about how to read scientific articles after reading Rosenberg’s "Reading Games". As an

undergraduate researcher in a biology lab, I need to read research papers now and then. Most of

the time the papers are hard to understand and cost me a lot of time. Now that I learned the

proper reading technique, I can go through the abstract, introduction, conclusion and the subtitles

to get a broad aspect of the paper, so the rest of the reading will be much easier. I learned the

concept of changing genre accordingly with the targeting audience and my purpose. This is really

important and useful because different audience groups are attracted by different types of genres.

Use the appropriate type of genre and I’ll get more audiences and spread the information more

effectively. I also learned the format of a popular science blog and hopefully can apply it later on.
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Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genre.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 1, edited by Charles

Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2010, p. 252.

Elbow, Peter. "Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking." Embracing Contraries: Explorations in

Learning and Teaching, Oxford U Press, 1986, p. 61.

Mike Bunn. “How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, vol. 2, edited

by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 2011, p. 72.

Richards A;Kanady JC;Huie JR;Straus LD;Inslicht SS;Levihn-Coon A;Metzler TJ;Neylan TC;

(n.d.). “Work by day and sleep by night, do not sleep too little or too much: Effects of

sleep duration, time of day and circadian synchrony on flanker-task performance in

internet brain-game users from teens to advanced age.” Journal of sleep research.

Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31631467/