The Nobel shortcut to writing a great essay in science

The Nobel Prizes explain scientific concepts in easy-to-read summaries

I once took a course on polymer chemistry at Simon Fraser University, and I needed to write an essay about any polymer - as long as I cited scientific literature. Academic publications can be painful to read and difficult to understand, but I found a useful tactic to overcome this problem:

I chose a topic that won The Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Why is this easier?

Nobel Prizes come with press releases and related monographs; they are easier to understand for the general public, but retain rigour and accuracy about the science. Thus, I spent far less time learning the topic by reading those documents, yet I could still cite them with the assurance that they are correct.

I used this tactic multiple times in my science courses, and my professors happily endorsed this practice. Not only did I earn high marks for those essays, I also enjoyed writing them and learning the relevant topics.

For this particular class about polymer chemistry, I wrote about plastics that conduct electricity. Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid, and Hideki Shirakawa won The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on this topic in 2000. The relevant website contains

• a press release

• a monograph with background information for the general public

• a monograph about the scientific background, which is still much more readable than academic publications

I thoroughly enjoyed reading these documents to learn about this topic and write my essay.

Happy writing!