Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You said earlier that you are not particularly interested in dinosaurs – but to reflect all those children who are, you have chosen Dinosaur.
This is an Eyewitness book, which is an international series sold all over the world. The design is done internationally and the text locally, so they look very similar from country to country. A lot of them work with museums like The Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian, using images of their exhibits, and the attraction in some ways is a chance to view these objects when you can’t go to the museum.
With this book, you have pictures of dinosaur fossils but also artists’ impressions of dinosaurs. It’s a bit unusual for the Eyewitness style, which is normally more photo-realistic in its approach – an idea of science which is very immediate and about things you can see.
Surely people also want text to explain which bit of the dinosaur they are looking at.
That is there as well, it’s just that they are image-led – which is very different from, say, the Victorian book I’m going to talk about next or a more novel-like narrative work. The Eyewitness style is also less metaphorical than, for example, How Your Body Works. Dinosaur is in my list as an example of a famous series, but also of a style which is image-based, taking advantage of showing science not through reading as much as through seeing. It is almost meant to be like a paper version of a museum experience.
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Alice Bell is a science writer based in London, specialising in relationships between science and wider society. She also teaches at Imperial College London, where she worked as a lecturer in Science Communication for several years. Bell has a PhD in children’s science media, as well as degrees in the sociology of education and the history of science. She spent many years working in the children’s galleries at the Science Museum and has worked broadly in science education, policy and media
