Commissioning science or technical content is no easy task. For example, should you choose that specialist author who knows their stuff but has the tendency to presume too much knowledge on the part of the audience, or do you hire a diligent generalist who will spend much of their time explaining the fundamentals of, say, load-bearing concrete? It’s not easy, but here are some simple tips to help you along the way.

Research your writer
That question about the specialist or generalist is a persistent one, and there is no easy answer. So when choosing your writer, perhaps you might start by looking at some other qualities. As J.D. Metz, Director of Business Strategy at iAcquire, suggests, credibility and influence are worth thinking about. If credibility is close to your heart, then you should probably opt for that specialist. If you want to have your content shared and well read, then you’d need an influential writer that people are interested in reading, but who may not be a specialist.

Define your topic
As human knowledge and understanding expands, the more science has been compartmentalised into niches. A few hundred years ago, for instance, “philosophy” was a catch-all term for science, where sitting in an armchair reasoning about the world was the preferred method of understanding, whether the topic was the arrangement of the planets, logic, ethics or the mind. Skip forward a few centuries and you see that not only is philosophy a separate discipline, but that science itself is fragmenting. For instance, within chemistry, previously a discipline on its own, there are now such exotic sounding fields as molecular biochemistry, neuro chemistry and quantum chemistry. In these fields there are further specialisms.

So if you are commissioning a writer to delve into a topic, be specific about the exact area they have to tackle, and importantly, the type of experts they should consult for statistics, opinions and quotes.

And on the topic of quotes…
This may not be considered standard journalistic practice, but it is worth running by any quotes with quoted experts again. Insist that your writer supplies the relevant contact details with the submitted work and, preferably, lets the interviewee know you’ll be in touch to double check the context and phraseology of their quotes.

Ask for sources
Ask for the references of any statistic that your writer uses. Sometimes even the best writer can be guilty of human error and it’s good to double check figures before you publish. But there is another reason why sources are valuable: science works by consensus and corroboration, so any one study a writer quotes should be examined to see how different it is from other research. Tell the writer to be on guard for atypical research results, and ask them to provide some context in the article if they decide to quote the figures regardless.

Tangible examples
Given the often abstract nature of science and technical subjects, it’s easy to lose your readers, especially if your audience is general in nature. To keep readers interested in what you are publishing, ask the writer to provide examples that illustrate those abstract points. Perhaps electrical current can be likened to water flowing through a hose, with various properties represented by the thickness of the pipe, the speed of the water and the pressure inside. If the writer understands the subject, as they should, then a handy metaphor or two shouldn’t pose a problem.