Exercises — Chapter 28: Blog Posts, Articles, and Science Communication
Writing is learned by writing. Most of these ask you to produce or revise prose, not pick a letter. Where a task is open-ended, a self-assessment rubric follows in place of an answer. Selected solutions: appendices/answers-to-selected.md.
Difficulty: ⭐ approachable · ⭐⭐ moderate · ⭐⭐⭐ challenging · ⭐⭐⭐⭐ extension.
Part A — Analyze This ⭐
Read each example and diagnose what works or what's broken. Name the specific principle (§ references help).
A1. A blog post opens: "Customer churn is an important metric for any subscription business. In this post, we will explore the key drivers of churn and discuss strategies for improvement." Name two things wrong with this opening as a hook, and which section of the chapter each violates.
A2. Here are two analogies for the same concept (a database index): - (a) "A database index is like a B-tree that gives you logarithmic-time lookups." - (b) "A database index is like the index at the back of a book: instead of reading every page to find 'photosynthesis,' you flip to the index, which sends you straight to the right page."
One is a good science-communication analogy and one is not. Say which, and why—in terms of the source and familiarity (§28.2).
A3. A writer explaining encryption says: "Encryption is like a locked box. You put your message inside, lock it, and only the person with the key can open it." Then, three paragraphs later: "And because it's a locked box, anyone who steals the box can just smash it open if they're determined enough." What has the writer done wrong with the analogy, and what's the rule from §28.3 they violated?
A4. Identify the opener type (scene / surprising fact / question / stakes) used in each, and judge whether it opens a genuine curiosity gap: - (a) "The most dangerous part of flying isn't turbulence. It's a clipboard." - (b) "Today we're going to learn about the TCP/IP protocol stack." - (c) "At 11:38 p.m. the night before the launch, an engineer sent the memo he'd been dreading." - (d) "Why do two people who eat the exact same meal end up with completely different blood sugar?"
A5. Count the technical terms a general reader would not know in this sentence, and decide whether it's within a reasonable jargon budget: "Our endpoint's p99 latency regressed after the deploy because a synchronous call to the auth service blocked the event loop under load." (§28.3)
A6. A pitch email reads: "Hello, I'm a researcher and I'd like to contribute an article to your magazine on an interesting topic in my field. Please let me know if you would be interested in a collaboration. My CV is attached." Name three reasons an editor ignores this, using §28.8.
A7. Two titles for the same post about reducing early customer churn: - (a) "The Silent Goodbye" - (b) "Why New Customers Quit in the First Month — and How to Keep Them"
Which is better for findability, which (if either) keeps a hook, and what does §28.7 say about choosing between findable and clever?
A8. A popular-science article about a real study opens with two paragraphs describing the study's sample size, control group, and statistical methods before mentioning what was found. Name the structural failure (§28.5) and the prior chapter whose lesson it repeats.
Part B — Revise This ⭐⭐
Rewrite the given text for a general audience. Give your rewrite, then one sentence naming the principle you applied.
B1. (The headline task.) Rewrite this jargon-dense paragraph for a general audience, using exactly one analogy. Keep the real idea; spend your jargon budget wisely.
"A neural network learns by adjusting the weights on its connections to minimize a loss function via gradient descent. On each pass, the backpropagation algorithm computes the gradient of the loss with respect to each weight and nudges the weights in the direction that reduces error, iterating until the loss converges."
Your rewrite should: open with or quickly reach an analogy a general reader owns; keep the core idea (it learns by repeatedly adjusting in the direction that reduces its mistakes); use at most one or two technical terms, defined; and—if your analogy pushes past the relationship it faithfully maps—flag where it breaks.
B2. Rewrite this opening as a hook that opens a curiosity gap (any of the four openers): "This article discusses the importance of sleep for memory consolidation and reviews the relevant neuroscience."
B3. This analogy is unflagged and will mislead. Add one sentence that names where it breaks (§28.3): "DNA is like a blueprint for building an organism—every instruction for the body is written in it." (Hint: a blueprint is read once and is a fixed plan; the cell does something a blueprint doesn't.)
B4. Bring this passage within a jargon budget of two or three terms. Circle (list) every term a general reader wouldn't know, then rewrite: "The API returns a paginated JSON payload; clients must handle the cursor in the response metadata and respect the rate-limit headers to avoid throttling."
B5. Rewrite this method-first blog opening as narrative (hook → journey → payoff), inventing the story beats you need: "We analyzed two years of support-ticket data using topic modeling and clustering to identify the most common categories of user problems. The results are presented below."
B6. A title and meta description for a post explaining why passwords get reused and why it's risky. Current title: "Thoughts on Credential Hygiene." Rewrite the title to be searchable and compelling, and write a meta description under 155 characters (§28.7).
B7. This sentence dumbs down to the point of falsehood: "Basically, your immune system just kills all the germs, so vaccines are like giving it a head start to kill them faster." Rewrite to keep it accessible without the inaccuracy (the immune system doesn't "kill all germs"; it recognizes specific ones), using an analogy.
Part C — Write This ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐
Produce the document described. Aim for publishable quality; apply the chapter's own tests to your draft.
C1. (The three-headlines task.) You have this finding: "Patients who received a follow-up phone call within 48 hours of discharge were 30% less likely to be readmitted within 30 days." Write three different headlines for this finding, each using a different opener type from §28.4 (e.g., one surprising-fact, one question, one stakes). Then write one sentence saying which you'd choose for a general health-news outlet and why.
C2. Pick one technical concept you understand well (from your field, a hobby, anything). Write the opening hook (2–3 sentences) and the nut graf (1–2 sentences) of a blog post explaining it to a general audience. The hook must open a curiosity gap; the nut graf must orient the reader to what the piece is about and why it matters to them.
C3. Take the same concept from C2 and write the one core analogy you'd build the piece around. State the source, name the one relationship it maps, and then write the sentence that flags where it breaks (§28.2–§28.3). If the break is off to the side and doesn't matter for your point, say so and explain why.
C4. Write a complete pitch email (≈150–200 words) to a real publication you've read, proposing the blog post from C2/C3. Include all five parts from §28.8: an intriguing subject line, a hook opening, the angle (with a sentence on why it fits that publication), why-you, and a clean dated ask.
C5. (Capstone of the chapter — your Portfolio Piece 7.) Write a complete 600–900 word blog post explaining one technical concept or finding to a general audience. It must contain, and you should be able to point to: a hook (§28.4), a nut graf, at least one analogy with its break flagged if load-bearing (§28.2–§28.3), a jargon budget of two or three terms, narrative structure with the "so what" landed (§28.5), and a searchable-compelling title plus a sub-155-character meta description (§28.7). Then write a two-sentence note: who is the specific reader, and where did you make a deliberate jargon-budget cut?
Part D — Synthesis & Critical Thinking ⭐⭐⭐
Integrate across chapters; find the flaw; translate across audiences.
D1. (Translate for three audiences — the spine of the book.) Take this single finding and write three short openings for three readers, the way Chapters 2 and 27 trained you:
Finding: A new caching layer reduced average page-load time from 2.4 seconds to 0.4 seconds.
- (a) For a fellow engineer in a technical postmortem (Chapter 34's audience).
- (b) For a VP deciding whether to fund more of this work (Chapter 27's recommendation memo).
- (c) For the general public on the company blog (this chapter—hook + analogy).
Then write one sentence on what stayed constant across all three and what changed.
D2. (Find the flaw.) A science blogger writes: "Quantum computers work by trying all possible answers at once, so they'll instantly crack any code and solve any problem classical computers can't." The piece is vivid and gets shared widely. Identify (a) the broken/over-extended analogy, (b) the unflagged break that turned into a falsehood, and (c) why the shareability makes the error more of a problem, not less (connect to the ethics preview in §28.4 and Chapter 38).
D3. Chapter 7 said "tone is a choice you set, not an accident." Chapter 3 said "clarity is not the enemy of precision." This chapter says "translate, don't dumb down." Write a short paragraph (4–6 sentences) explaining how all three are the same underlying claim aimed at three different decisions a writer makes.
D4. The chapter argues that good SEO and good writing are the same choices. Construct the strongest counterargument (a case where optimizing for search would hurt the writing), then rebut it using the honest-test from §28.7. (Hint: keyword density vs. readable prose.)
D5. A colleague says: "Analogies are fine for kids' books, but real experts should just state things precisely." Write a rebuttal grounded in §28.2 and the curse of knowledge (Chapter 2)—including the case where an analogy is more honest than a precise-but-opaque statement, and the case where your colleague is partly right (when not to use an analogy).
Part M — Mixed Practice (Interleaved) ⭐⭐–⭐⭐⭐
These mix this chapter with earlier ones, so you must first decide which approach the situation calls for.
M1. You're handed a finding and a reader and must choose the genre and structure. For each, name (i) the right document/genre, (ii) recommendation-first, findings-first, or narrative, and (iii) the single biggest risk: - (a) Your VP needs to decide whether to approve a budget, today. - (b) A general reader found your company blog from a Google search. - (c) A peer reviewer needs to verify your analysis before it's published. - (d) A new hire needs to do a setup task they've never done.
(Pulls on Chapters 2, 22, 26, 27, and this chapter.)
M2. Here is a paragraph. Decide whether it's primarily failing on clarity (Chapter 3), tone/register (Chapter 7), or audience translation (this chapter)—it may be more than one—then fix the dominant problem: "It is important to note that the utilization of our platform's functionality by end-users is, in many cases, contingent upon the successful completion of a non-trivial onboarding workflow, the optimization of which represents a significant opportunity."
M3. A blog post has a great hook and a good analogy but the paragraphs don't flow—each sentence starts a new idea with no connection to the last. Which earlier chapter's tool fixes this, and what is the tool? Apply it: rewrite these two sentences to connect: "Caching stores results so you don't recompute them. Stale data is a risk that requires invalidation strategies." (Chapter 8.)
M4. You wrote a blog post and a one-page data memo from the same finding. A teammate says "just send the blog post to the VP, it's more engaging." Explain, using Chapters 2 and 27 plus this chapter, why that's the wrong move—and what each document's reader actually needs.
M5. Your popular article cites a study. Using Chapter 11 (citing sources) and this chapter's honesty rules, explain how you'd reference the study in a blog post for a general audience (where IEEE/APA in-text citations would feel out of place) without either fabricating or burying the source.
M6. A draft blog post uses the word "significant" to mean "statistically significant," but a general reader will read it as "large/important." Name the problem (it's a Chapter 7 and Chapter 3 issue at once), and rewrite the sentence to remove the ambiguity: "The treatment group showed a significant improvement."
Part E — Extension ⭐⭐⭐⭐
For motivated readers and the Deep Dive track.
E1. Find a published popular-science article you admire (e.g., from Quanta, Scientific American, Ars Technica, or a strong engineering blog). Reverse-engineer it: identify the hook type, the central analogy and where it breaks (and whether the author flagged it), count the jargon budget, and map its narrative structure (where's the lede, the nut graf, the payoff?). Write a one-page analysis. Then write one sentence you'd improve and why.
E2. Take a single research finding (yours, or a recent paper you can read) and write two complete openings (3–4 sentences each): one for a specialist venue and one for a general outlet. Then write a paragraph reflecting on the Chapter 7 register shift and the jargon-budget difference between them—what specifically had to change, and what stayed the same.
E3. Build an "analogy bank" for your field: list five concepts a general reader struggles with, and for each, propose a source analogy, name the relationship it maps, and identify where it breaks. Rank them by how load-bearing the break is. (This is a tool working science communicators actually keep.)
Self-assessment rubric for the open-ended writing tasks (C2–C5, D1, E2): - Hook (✓/✗): Do the first two sentences open a curiosity gap the reader needs closed—not announce the topic? - Analogy (✓/✗): Is the source genuinely familiar to this reader, does it map the one relationship the point needs, and is the break flagged if it's load-bearing? - Jargon budget (count): Two or three terms maximum, each defined; circle every term and count—did you actually enforce it, or just feel like you did? - Translation, not dumbing-down (✓/✗): Is the real idea intact, or did you cut the interesting/true thing? No condescension? - Structure (✓/✗): Hook → journey → payoff, with the "so what" landed—not IMRaD in disguise? - Findability (✓/✗): Searchable-and-compelling title; meta description under 155 characters? - The non-specialist test: Could someone outside your field finish it and explain the concept back to you? (The only test that ultimately matters.)
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