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A review by astrocourt
Tweeting the Universe: Very Short Courses on Very Big Ideas by Marcus Chown
4.0
The book: Tweeting the Universe: Very Short Courses on Very Big Ideas
The author: Marcus Chown and Govert Schilling
The subject: 140 chapters, each dedicated to a scientific topic, explaining the topic in tweet-length bites.
Why I chose it: I like science and Twitter, and also think that trying to write something as briefly and succinctly as possible can help you to see if you truly understand it.
The rating: Four out of five stars
What I thought of it: First of all, this isn't quite as impressive as shrinking an entire topic down into one tweet; instead, each topic is covered by a series of tweets, with no sentences spread over multiple tweets. This helps strike a good balance between being too brief and missing all the details and just writing prose. The authors don't use too many shortcuts either (such as writing words as letters or abbreviating words), which helps make it more readable.
In fact, I found this book incredibly clear despite its novel style. I think it would be a good read for anyone who needs to learn how to be concise when writing about science, in conjunction with lots of practice. Some people may find the choppy writing difficult to get along with, but since I'm used to how Twitter works I had no problem with it. There were a lot of interesting tidbits of information that I bookmarked for later investigation and reference. I think my favourite chapter was number 98, "Where did the Big Bang happen?". I really liked the analogy used for the expansion of the universe: raisins in an infinite cake!
This was a fun book and definitely a unique contribution to the world of popular science. It does cover mainly astronomy topics, so further books with the same style but covering different topics would be great. It could even be spread out into a series.
Just one more thing: Here are the authors' Twitter accounts: Marcus Chown's account (his tweets are repetitive, but interesting if you follow him for a short time), and Govert Schilling's Dutch and English accounts.
The author: Marcus Chown and Govert Schilling
The subject: 140 chapters, each dedicated to a scientific topic, explaining the topic in tweet-length bites.
Why I chose it: I like science and Twitter, and also think that trying to write something as briefly and succinctly as possible can help you to see if you truly understand it.
The rating: Four out of five stars
What I thought of it: First of all, this isn't quite as impressive as shrinking an entire topic down into one tweet; instead, each topic is covered by a series of tweets, with no sentences spread over multiple tweets. This helps strike a good balance between being too brief and missing all the details and just writing prose. The authors don't use too many shortcuts either (such as writing words as letters or abbreviating words), which helps make it more readable.
In fact, I found this book incredibly clear despite its novel style. I think it would be a good read for anyone who needs to learn how to be concise when writing about science, in conjunction with lots of practice. Some people may find the choppy writing difficult to get along with, but since I'm used to how Twitter works I had no problem with it. There were a lot of interesting tidbits of information that I bookmarked for later investigation and reference. I think my favourite chapter was number 98, "Where did the Big Bang happen?". I really liked the analogy used for the expansion of the universe: raisins in an infinite cake!
This was a fun book and definitely a unique contribution to the world of popular science. It does cover mainly astronomy topics, so further books with the same style but covering different topics would be great. It could even be spread out into a series.
Just one more thing: Here are the authors' Twitter accounts: Marcus Chown's account (his tweets are repetitive, but interesting if you follow him for a short time), and Govert Schilling's Dutch and English accounts.