Explaining Science: A Guide for Authors of Popular Science Texts

The popularization of science and the flourishing of scientific communications is a vivid trend in recent years in the cultural life of the Russian-speaking space. But how to write competent popular science? Is it necessary to be a scientist for this? Is it justified to compare a popularizer to a translator from the "bird language of science" to plain language? Why can a news piece turn out to be incorrect, even if it does not contain a single factual error? How to avoid convoluted formulations and write, addressing several readerships at once?

Igor Ivanov, a theoretical physicist and active popularizer of physics, who has been combining scientific research with the work on popular science materials for 20 years, describes his perspective on the topic in this book. Not limited to general recommendations, he elaborates in detail, with numerous examples, on what to focus on when writing a popular science news piece, how to structure the text, how to choose formulations, how to work with sources and with one's own text, and how and why to "accompany" the news after its publication.