Patricia Fara: preference

Transcript context

…You talk about this in one of your interviews, that you had a small — within the family — tech company of sorts, and you had to do writing for the company.? Right, okay. My husband and I both — foolishly, probably — in our early 20s, both left our work, and we set up a small company making educational material about statistics and about computers, and my role in that was to write the script. I had to translate some quite complex ideas about computer programming and about statistics. I already knew about them, but I had to translate them into very simple phrases, and each one had to be matched to an illustration. That’s probably why I have so many images in my book, because we were making — they don’t exist now, but they were called tape-slide programs, the 35-millimeter slides that were synchronized with a tape cassette. You had to present an image and an idea together in very simple, basic terms, and I think that was fantastic intellectual training. What do we need to do, then, to produce more highly intelligent, popular writers on science? If you needed to learn to write that way, that suggests it’s pretty hard to get more through the pipeline.…

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