Insights

Today has marked the official birthday of Skolar, a new platform and training program for science communication. On the site, you can find easily approachable science-based content, as well as tips on how to improve communicating your own work.

For now, Skolar is available only in Finnish, but luckily Miko, Samuli, and I had the opportunity to be a part of the pilot project this Spring, so here’s some of the guidelines we’ve learned:

1. You are not writing a mystery novel – put the best part upfront to give sufficient motivation for someone to start reading your text.
2. Make reading your text as easy as possible. Don’t force the reader through complicated sentence structures. If you ask a question, answer it in the very next sentence.
3. Make abandoning your text as hard as possible. Keep giving new “juicy bits”.
4. Be concise. Leave consecutive adjectives for novels.
5. Empty space is your friend. Formats such as lists promise an easy read.
6. Twitter is also your friend, try it in addition to more traditional media and practice the art of making 140 character summaries. Follow us at @TuaBjorklund, @mikolaakso, @samulimakinen, and @SkolarMe.

And if you understand Finnish, we recommend reading more on such topics as addictive addiction studies, what we should realize about the proposed Guggenheim museum, how religion is changing, being bored at work, and much more!