Alan Alda has come up with an excellent contest for scientists:

Here’s the catch. The audience for the answer is 11-year-olds. Writing this week in Science (free pdf), Alda recalls how he asked this question to his science teacher when he was 11. The answer he got was, “It’s oxidation.”

Accurate, but not enlightening. This, of course, is a challenge that science writers face every day–how to use everyday language to convey insights that scientists describe to each other and students with precise, but often obscure, terminology.

It’s not easy for experienced writers to do this, and it can be even harder for scientists who are just starting to communicate to a broad audience. When I teach workshops for science graduate