Greetings from the AAAS Annual Meeting

Greetings from Chicago, where I’m attending the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Many people attend this meeting. This year about 5000 scientists are here. In addition, about 1000 members of the science journalism community are attending. About 250 of the 1000 are from countries other than the United States.

Six of my science journalism graduate students are attending with me. They are writing articles about the meeting. In addition, some have science journalists as mentors for a day. Some also are attending a science writing internship fair.

Because I’m currently a section officer of AAAS, I have some administrative meetings to attend here. In addition, I’m moderating a session I organized. The topic is style manuals that can help in writing about science.

Conveniently, two important style manuals—The Chicago Manual of Style and the AMA Manual of Style—are prepared in Chicago. I’m happy to have a speaker from each of these manuals. I’m not so happy that the session will be at 8:30 a.m. Sunday.

Because of the administrative meetings and my session, I can't attend many other sessions. I look forward to reading about some of the sessions—in newspapers and magazines, in my students’ reports, and online. If you’d like to read some reports about the meeting, you can go to the AAAS news site.

(A closing note: A week from now, I expect to be on the way to Rwanda to lead an AuthorAID workshop. I apologize if my next posting is therefore delayed.)