Am I Making Myself Clear?

From the title of this book, it looked more like a book for scientists to talk to their non-scientist cohorts.

Actually, Am I Making Myself Clear? is a guide written by Cornelia Dean, former science editor of the New York Times. In it, she details the best way for scientists to communicate with the press.

It's a great book. Even though it has very little relevance to my career at this stage, I really enjoyed hearing the nature of the interactions between the press and science.

A fair amount of the book showcases Ms. Dean's frustration with the fact that scientists and journalists view each other as "boring and overly concerned with details" and "completely not concerned with the process or important details. Ms. Dean seems to be frustrated by the fact that along with funding being slashed, these two groups cannot seem to find any common ground. This leads to very little of the important information that scientists can provide being passed on to the public by journalists.

I don't want to go through too much of the book---it's mostly tips for each different type of media interaction that scientists might encounter.

I would definitely recommend this book. It's not very useful for someone at this stage of my career, but it was definitely really interesting to see the media viewpoint on scientists. I'll give it a 4/5---here's to hoping this book will become really useful to me in the future!