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"Seducing the Reader:

Suggestions from a Science Writer."

by Susi Skomal, AAA Press Officer.

"Cracking the Code-

Anthropologists and Science Writers"

by Merry Bruns, CASC Director

"What is

AnthroJournalism?"

by Merry Bruns.

"AnthroJournalism"

by Randolph

Fillmore.

"Newspaper Writing" -

A brief overview.

What we've learned as academic writers doesn't always work for communicating anthropology to a general audience, but the skills aren't that dificult to learn. And with practice, it's not impossible to write for both. Both the goals and the methodology differ in several crucial ways:

• With general writing, you're trying to lure an audience with what you've written, and the way you've written it, and you'll need to grab their attention immediately.

• General audiences sometimes want to learn something new, but much of the time they just want to be entertained or casually informed.

• Sometimes they want actual news. If it's science news, you'll need to work harder to convince readers that what you're saying is relevant to their personal lives, and the things that interest them.

But always, your job as a general writer for anthropology will be to communicate the excitement you feel about your subject to readers, and make them understand why your subject is important to you.

Here are some resources for general writing - more will be added as this section expands.

If you've done general writing in the fields of anthropology and science, and have written about your experiences, please contact me - I'm always interested in what anthropologists are doing in this area .

Cheers,

Merry Bruns
CASC Director