Getting Personal

Making a story personal is hard, especially when it’s about the newly discovered oceans of methane on Titan, as Adam Frank pointed out.  But it seems like everyone agrees that relatinga topic to a reader can make it better.

“There is a collective yawn out there,” Matt Crenson said, “so how can we shake them up?”

As groups present their projects this morning, there has been an emphasis on how best to draw people in to their sites through personal narratives.  One group proposed to feature families affected by global warming by allowing them to blog about their experiences.  It could feature a family from Antarctica, who is literally at the icy edge of the controversy, and a farming family in middle America, whose crops may be suffering. 

Matt Crenson suggested including an “interactive-build-your-own-story-assembler,” feature about stem cells.  The website would include primary resources, like the original science article describing the breakthrough, and audio files of interviews with a source.  The reader would be able to take a quiz, and their responses would go into a story.  Correct answers would be written in black, and incorrect answers would be red.  Users can then rate other user’s story, which takes advantage of people’s competitiveness.

Even though stories like Titan’s seas can’t be easily personalized, their inherent beauty can carry them.  While relating stories to people can be a great hook, we should all remember that on a basic level, people do care about science, and some things are just too cool to not write about.