Here’s how:

*You still gotta eat. Don’t eat alone. Use meal times to network with other science writers. You don’t even have to leave campus. Find faculty who’ve written popular books or started blogs and invite them for coffee. Figure out who covers science in your university news office and ask them to join you for lunch. Call the editor at your university research magazine and bribe them with beer. Many of these people are seasoned former journalists. Ask them what they do and how they got where they are. One of these writers may become a mentor.

*You still gotta go to talks and conferences. That means you have something most science writers would kill for: access to the newest science. Use talks to find sources and story ideas that no one else has covered. Play reporter. Buy a cheap digital voice recorder or take notes. Invite the most interesting speakers for a follow-up chat, and ask if you can write about their research. Translate their work into engaging prose and pitch them to your university research magazine or institutional news office. The news editor you had lunch with last week may well be willing to publish your work, or give you pointers for next time.

*You still gotta call home, and generally talk to people outside your lab. Use those moments to practice telling your newfound science stories in plain English. If your cousin doesn’t get it, or your little sister doesn’t think it’s cool, you’re not quite there yet.

*You still gotta do lab work. And let’s face it, in lab work there’s a lot of down time. Use the time while your gel is running or your DNA is thawing to write a guest post for your favorite blog, or to polish that piece you pitched to your university research magazine. Remember the book, “Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day”? Other kinds of writing projects can get done that way too.

*You still gotta publish. If the journal editor asks you if you’d also like to submit a press release to go with your article — and more and more journals do — say yes. Use it as evidence that you can write for broader audiences.

*You still gotta find a postdoc, or otherwise support yourself post-PhD. Consider applying for a nontraditional postdoc teaching undergraduate writing. There are a number of university writing programs across the country that recruit newly-minted PhDs from across the sciences and humanities to design and teach writing courses in their field. I got my start in the freelancing world while teaching writing through Duke University’s Thompson Writing Program, but UPenn’s Critical Writing Program and the Princeton Writing Program offer similar fellowships. If you’ve never taught writing before (which I hadn’t), keep in mind that teaching is the best way to learn. What better way to see if you can make science accessible and interesting to a general audience than by convincing a group of 18 year-olds that science―and writing―are interesting at 8:30 a.m.? Another option is to take the summer before your next gig to work as a science reporter. Graduate students and postdocs in the sciences and engineering are eligible to apply for 10-week summer fellowships though the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellows Program. The deadline for the AAAS Mass Media fellowship is Jan. 15 each year.

Happy writing.

From that moment her curiosity turned into yearning and forced me to investigate, to learn, to listen. Somehow she send me back to the begining: I started asking questions myself. Slowly I quite flirting with travel journalism and married science writing. I moved from Argentina to Spain and begun writing for a science magazine here. That was seven years ago.

Now my daughter is a teenager, but the seed of her curiosity is still there forcing me to find an answer to the questions that some day, I hope, she will ask me.
I´m fortunate. I live of asking questions to the minds that area changing or explaining our world. I make a living of curiosity and learning. And my job is to infect people with the same need to learn, the same will to understand. I guess I started in science journalism because of my daughter, but
I´m still here because her curiosity turned out to be contagious and I want to spread it.

So, if you want to be a science writer you´d probably have two choices: either search fo the questions or the people that are asking them…Or have a daughter.
Both ways you´ll be very lucky.

Juan Scaliter is a science editor in Quo magazine, Spain.

The essentials haven’t changed since last year. My father is still a scientist, my mother is still a writer. But in the meantime, several more budding young writers have approached me wanting to know: how do I start, where do I start. Two came up to me last week after I gave a lecture at UEA and I forgot to say one thing to them, so I’ll put it here instead.

Editors don’t commission you because you’re a great writer. They commission you because you have great ideas. Yes, style helps, no question about that. But if your prose is stunning and your stories are not you don’t stand a chance in hell of getting a commission.

There are two lessons to take from this. If you’re not a great writer, that’s not the end of the road. Get out, find some cracking, mind-boggling, earth-shattering stories about little-known science then pitch them to a publication. Great story ideas are like shiny objects to science editors. We just can’t resist them. In fact, if it really is mind-boggling and earth-shattering, pitch it to us.

And if you are a writer, you are blessed. You’ve got an edge, but my advice is the same. Get out, find cracking, mind-boggling, earth-shattering… you know the drill.

Good luck. I look forward to reading your work.

Catherine Brahic is New Scientist’s environment news editor

I went to journalism school and after mulling it over chose to cover science because, as a mentor once explained to me, science is the beat of “everything in existence.” And when I really thought about it, very few other topics I read about left me with that feeling of just having absorbed something profound and universal. So I see what I do as reporting on the sometimes small, but often really, really big questions.

It was intimidating at first because I had thought you needed something like two PHDs and fluency in all sorts of esoteric knowledge to write about science. And I’m sure having a science background helps. But at school, I was encouraged to learn that, at the most fundamental level, journalism was about distilling all kinds of complex topics down to its very essence. It’s also reassuring to know that all the theories, apparatus and dizzying volumes of research that scientists employ are used to produce a few nuggets of insight.

I think as a science writer it’s best to keep in mind what Albert Einstein once said about science and simplicity: “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

Also, I believe wholeheartedly that writing is most unforgettable when it involves people — the characters that entertain, fascinate, shock, inspire, move, enthrall and affect us. And the greatest science stories are the ones where readers can follow along with the people who are taking that faithful journey of discovery.

Tuan C. Nguyen is a freelance science journalist and a contributing editor to the online magazine Smart Planet. Follow me on twitter @ ReporterTuan

Torn between a knack for languages and a never-fading interest in science (but a complete and utter failure at math), I started my college years majoring in Spanish, taking biology on the side. After a couple of semesters, I discovered that loving to speak a foreign language is very different from spending weeks debating the motives of an author who died several hundred years ago. So I made biology my major, but kept linguistics as a minor. Fascinated with science, I saw my future as a researcher.

The further I got along, though, the more I realized something that, again, Sarah Webb described perfectly: “I felt like academic science was pushing me to learn more and more about less and less.” Sure, I was passionate about my major, developmental biology, and found the question of how a single egg cell makes a whole organism the most fascinating question I could think of, but during my graduate research I found myself forced to think in terms of pipetting protocols, test tubes, and dull, boring method papers more than the great wonders of life in its making. Around the same time, I noticed that whenever my fellow science geek friends and I talked to non-scientists, I seemed to be the only one noticing how their eyes glazed over, until I took a stab at explaining what we did. I seemed to have a certain feel for where they were coming from, and what mattered to them.

Still, I didn’t enjoy writing at all. Plus, I really didn’t care too much about what other people think about the things that interest me. Bad prerequisites for a science communicator, no? During my master’s thesis research, I got a chance to write articles about all kinds of research at my university (Freiburg University) for the local paper, which gave me the opportunity to fuel my own interest and learn about all kinds of things outside my day-to-day workings, such as particle physics, epilepsy or nano-technology. As much as I loved learning about those things, writing about them still was a drag. But hey, it was the price I paid for being able to walk into someone’s lab, point my finger at fancy-looking machines and ask all kinds of, uh, basic questions.

At one point when I was nearing my thesis, a friend of mine who, unlike me, knew she wanted to be a journalist and nothing else, pushed me to apply to Germany’s most competitive journalism school (2000 apply, 45 get in). “Yeah, right, I said, that’ll work. Me? Don’t be silly. I don’t even read the paper every day.” She replied, “Come on, you have to apply just once, only to be able to say you did it.” – “Ok,” I said, “but only because you said so.” – Unbelievably, I got in. For some reason, they must have liked the idea of a science geek who didn’t give a damn about daily politics wanting to tell others about science. I guess. I still don’t know what they were thinking.

During an internship in the science department at a German newspaper, I realized that the pressure of day-to-day reporting wasn’t for me. Personally, I don’t really care too much if I hear about an interesting story the minute it breaks or tonight when I get home, or even tomorrow. If it’s cool, who cares? I know, doesn’t bode well for being a news reporter. So I crossed that off my list. My second internship took me to the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. Free from the pressures of daily deadlines, I got to learn about cool science. Works for me, I thought, even though the limited topic got a bit old after a while.

Finally, through some unlikely and happenstance circumstances, I was offered a job as a science writer at the University of Arizona in Tucson. My main motivation behind that move was the fact that I had hopelessly fallen in love with the wild nature of the American Southwest during a year spent as an exchange student in Flagstaff, Arizona. I wanted to live there. What I did, was, well, not that important (Anything but flipping burgers, I guess). And here I am. Writing about science that is not my own, in a language that is not my own. Weird. But it seems to work, at least so far.

Writing is still the hardest thing for me, so hard as a matter of fact that I sometimes doubt myself. Why am I doing this? If I truly were a writer, wouldn’t writing come easily and be a blast? On the other hand, once I have finished a piece with a lot of blood, sweat and anguish, I get encouraging feedback. People seem to like my angle and the way I boil down even the most abstract and arcane stuff.

At this point, I consider writing the price I pay for being a “science tourist” who gets to learn and tell others about cutting edge science during my day job and explore the wonders of the world in one of the most beautiful places on the planet on the weekends. For now, I’m happy. In the long run, I am hoping to put my skills to use for the better of the living world, though. I am most passionate about the ocean. I teach scuba and take every opportunity to dive in the Sea of Cortez, one of the world’s most amazing oceans. Hopefully I can do my small part in protecting it in some way, somewhere, someday.

The slightly more serious answer to the question complete with my long-haired mugshot from decades ago:

http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/two-decades-of-science-communication.html

At the end of the 1960s I intended to read English at Sydney University, but changed to Politics when I discovered how boring the teaching of English was. After graduating, I joined the Australian Dept of Foreign Affairs and was posted to Stockholm.

Journalists impinged then as gloriously independent (OK, I was naïve). In contrast, we rule-bound bureaucrats had to write bloodless memos, and read similar fare which arrived every week in the bag from Canberra. The Embassy was accredited to Finland and Norway. As the most junior diplomat in the post, I was asked to look after Australia’s relations with Norway (there were none, which was why I was asked to look after them). That meant I could travel through fell and fjord and ask people there what was going on. My eyes were opened when I went to see the then Editor of the Bergen Tidende, who talked with what seemed like intelligent abandon after the guarded phrases of my opposite numbers in Oslo. This guy – I’ve long since forgotten his name – was enthusiastic and opinionated about politics in Norway. Journalism suddenly seemed attractive.

A few years later I had the opportunity to write for the front end of Nature, from Stockholm. I hadn’t done any science since I was 16, but I reasoned that science policy would be like the other policy stuff I’d been writing about: less science, more policy. I was exhilarated to see what I wrote in print. Thanks to the indulgence of David Davies, then Editor of Nature, and later Robyn Williams at the ABC in Sydney, I was able to get enough taste for journalism to wake up, at 30, and say, “This is what I want to do!”

Since then I’ve been entranced by science itself. How did I miss all this at school? I’ve freelanced in various media and have had a ball.

I’ve read the advice other journalists in this thread have given, and agree that you should just do it however you can: blogs, podcasts – whatever. It’s amazing to be able to publish yourself, on the web. Ask people everywhere if they can help. Keep on the look-out for opportunities. If you can afford it, go on a journalism course. If freelancing appeals, get a job and make contacts before you launch out. Spread your favours. Good luck!

For my physic’s laurea (before Bologna process: it is equivalent to master degree), I wrote some web pages about cosmic rays and muon’s life time for my physic’s department. This little work seeds the passion for science writing, so when I discovered Wikipedia, I signed in and started to write physic’s pages.
In the end of 2008 I decided that Wikipedia wasn’t sufficient, so I proposed to Blogosfere to restart an old scientific italian blog. They accepted my propose, so now I regulary write science!

I have only two advices for people who start science writing: passion and expertise. Expertise is necessary to understand research language, also in different fields from our, and passion is important to feel something to our readers.

I recently start to write in english: http://goo.gl/qAzXY

My twitters: http://twitter.com/ulaulaman | http://twitter.com/sciback

Thanks to Ed, and sorry for my english!