Switching Registers: The Future of Alzheimer’s Medication
Modifying your scientific writing to appeal to a general audience can be challenging because you must take very complex and often dry material and spin it in a way that can keep anyone entertained. When writing about scientific topics it is often difficult to initially snag the reader’s attention which is crucial especially in forums such as blogs or articles. With this in mind, the first stylistic and structural change I made to the post involved creating an opening hook to draw attention. In the technical post, I immediately began explaining what AD is and describing the severity of its burden on our nation treatments because in a scientific setting these are the factors that draw attention. However, for the general audience, I began by addressing misconceptions about AD to which most people can relate. Another technique I used to catch the attention of a general audience was listing the many horrible side effects associated with AD to draw attention to how serious the disease really is. While in the technical post I simply stated that it was a neurodegenerative disease assuming most members of a scientific audience would know how serious those disorders can be.
Another important factor in switching between scientific and general audience registers is reducing the complexity of the scientific concepts without sacrificing the important details. Some material is interesting from a scientific perspective, but for those who don’t science very well it is only confusing and can, therefore, be omitted when switching registers. For example, in the technical post I described that some scientists think that beta-amyloid may be toxic because it disrupts calcium ion homeostasis leading to apoptosis, but for a general audience you can simply say that scientists believe beta-amyloid is toxic neurons. When omitting this information no crucial information is lost and the main point of the paragraph remains intact. Another common way to simplify scientific concepts is to chose what scientific jargon is crucial to know and define or clarify it. For example, when naming enzymes in the technical post I would simply write their names and never mention the fact that they are enzymes. I do this because all enzymes end in the suffix -ase, therefore, anyone in the scientific field would understand that I am talking about an enzyme. In the general audience explanation, however, I needed to specify when I was talking about an enzyme and explain that it is catalyzing a certain reaction. Also, in the scientific post, I do not explain anything that is a commonly discussed topic in science for example, acetylcholine. This is one of the most famous neurotransmitters in science and anyone in the field would know at least generally what it is while those outside of the field they may not have even heard of it. To account for this gap of knowledge, I explained to the general audience that acetylcholine was a neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory.
I feel that when switching registers, I was able to conserve the complexity of the topic by carefully choosing which scientific concepts were crucial to understand and explaining them while omitting the complex scientific content that was unnecessary for a general understanding of the issue. The main aspect lost in the second post is specificity. For example, in the first post I wrote that the deficient levels of acetylcholine disrupted long term potentiation which is a vital process involved in learning and memory. This process is too specific for a general audience member to understand and I don’t want to waste too much of a post defining terms, so I replaced it with only learning and memory in the second post. The same point is conveyed in the second post but the specificity of the exact pathway affected is lost. I believe that by using these as well as other techniques I was able to successfully replicate my technical post in a way that was informative, comprehensible, and relatively interesting for a general audience.
