My experience with the science writing tutorial (Dr. Little used that word the other day and I really liked it.  Less cumbersome than independent study) has been interesting so far.  It has become obvious at this point that my plan to use this to make myself a more prolific writer has not worked, but honestly I've realized that I'm all right with that.  I find myself so much more interested in *consuming* science news than in writing  it myself.  There are just so many people already reporting the facts of a story that it's hard to get excited about doing the same. What I've been doing is choosing current events that catch m eye and then reading the story from every news source I can find. A few weeks ago I looked at that story about how Alzheimer's may be the 3rd leading cause of death.  This week I'm focusing on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  My goals are to figure out some general trends in science reporting for lay audiences and also to identify agencies that do (in my opinion) an especially great job on a consistent basis. It's a serious mission- I've got spreadsheets and everything. I don't know what shape this is going to take over the remainder of the semester, but I'm hoping at the very least that I will leave knowing who to trust (and who to advise others to trust).  These days there's an absolute overload of information available on just about every topic, and it's impossible for even a dedicated consumer to keep up with completely. I guess this is my way of setting up for the knowledge building equivalent of "work smarter, not harder"...which ironically requires that I spend a bunch of time on trial and error, figuring out what "smarter" is.

Anyhow, I just wanted to check in and update you guys. I do have a couple of substantive pieces in the works that I'll hopefully be putting up soon, and I'm contemplating a few others.   In the meantime, let me know what you think of my newest venture. And if you get a chance, maybe check out this particularly impressive specimen of science reporting ;)