Around town: Operation Med School
This one’s for you if you have a high school student around the house who is thinking that med school could be a good option for post-secondary.
professional development
Bench to blog: Part 2
At Talk Science to Me, we receive requests throughout the year from people who are right at the beginning of a career shift from science to science writing. Although we don’t have entry-level positions available, we do have experience in making The Switch. In this two-part series (see part 1 here), Amanda, our science writer, gives some insight into why and how she made the move out from behind the bench.
Read More »Bench to blog: Part 2
Bench to blog: Part 1
At Talk Science to Me, we often receive requests from people who are right at the beginning of a career shift from science to science writing. Although we don’t have entry-level positions available, we do have experience in making The Switch. In this two-part series, Amanda, our science writer, gives some insight into why and how she made the move out from behind the bench.
Read More »Bench to blog: Part 1Peeking in the designer’s toolbox
I am amazed by what our designers can do. I copy-edit a document and send it to Talk Science to Me designers Mari Chijiiwa or Jeff Werner as a Word file, just blocks of black and white text for pages on end. Then they work their alchemical magic and return it as a beautiful PDF file, with colours, images, graphics, pull quotes and stylized headings.
Forget zombie nouns–watch out for vampire verbs
I don’t often leave a six-hour seminar with more energy than when I came in, but if it’s six hours of language stuff, I’m pumped. This past Saturday the BC branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada hosted a workshop called Eight Step Editing, delivered by veteran editor and writer Jim Taylor, who developed the program in the 1980s. Jim has taught this process literally for as long as I’ve been alive, and I soaked up all the expertise I could. Eight Step Editing provides a framework for the editing process, a systematic way to approach editing that begins with making the fewest changes to the author’s words and becomes progressively more in-depth. I won’t go into the eight steps (you can find a good summary here), but I will share with you what got me so excited.