Freelancer Science Copywriter
About me
In case you missed it, I’m Bill. Reintroductions are a bit awkward, so let’s just dive in. I’m a freelance biotech and life science copywriter and content strategy person. I help people turn complicated science into words people can actually understand and – hopefully, if all goes according to plan – remember.
Which sounds obvious, but if you’ve ever read a life science website, a product brochure, press release or even a journal paper for that matter, you’ll know that obvious isn’t what always happens.
Somewhere between the lab and the marketing department or comms team, perfectly good science gets buried under a mountain of “innovative platforms”, “world-leading solutions” and “cutting-edge paradigm-shifting technology” waffle.
And suddenly no one knows what the bloody thing actually does. Well, I fix that.
I started as a scientist
Long before I wrote and sold my soul to the Marketing Gods, I spent about a decade doing science. Marine biology, ecotoxicology and evolutionary developmental biology if you want the full mouthful.
I studied and worked at Plymouth, Cambridge, Harvard and Kings College London, doing proper, at-the-bench research. Which, as you know, mostly involves a lot of reading, RSI-inducing pipetting, failed experiments, some glorious wins and a dangerous amount of coffee.
I eventually realised two things:
I really enjoyed writing about science
Most scientists are doing genuinely awesome work but are terrible at explaining it to anyone outside their lab meetings (and even there it can be a struggle!)
So I sort of drifted into science writing, and here we are.
Agency life, pharma and the weird world of science marketing
Medical communications (MedComms,as they like to call it) is where I started out in 2011, writing for big pharmaceutical companies. Then I moved into life science marketing agencies and eventually in-house at biotech and charity roles.
Over the many years I’ve help my clients write about
antibodies and immunology
stem cell research
toxicology
neuroscience
medical diagnostics
drug discovery and development
lab technologies and automation
environmental science
and more niche bits of biology than I can reasonably list here
Some of that work was for big global companies, occasionally it for a few individuals just getting their business ball rolling, most of it was for biotech firms and start-ups, and a smattering of things was for charities trying to explain complex research to the public.
In pretty much every setting, the same problem cropped up: the science was cool but the writing wasn’t.
The problem with science marketing
Science companies tend to fall into two camps. Either the writing is so technical that no one outside the field understands it, or it swings the other way and becomes vague marketing fluff that doesn’t actually say anything. This is the superlative soup from people who forget what they do is cool and try too hard to make it sound cool, with the opposite effect.
The result is an internet full of copy that totally says things, but doesn’t actually communicate anything useful or convincing. And as much as us writers like to rant bout this, it happens simply because translating complicated ideas into clear language is really difficult (which is kind of good as it keeps me in a job). Add to that the fact that most organisations are trying to do it while juggling internal politics, product teams, regulatory constraints and a dozen stakeholders who all want to tweak the wording to sound more exciting.
So the safe option wins and you have safe writing and safe messaging. Which as you can guess is rather dull.
How I help you
I like to think I sit in the middle. I understand the science well enough to talk to researchers and product teams without getting lost, and I understand the marketing side well enough to turn that science into something engaging and useful.
Sometimes that means means you a string of awkward questions like:
What does this actually do?
Why should anyone care?
What problem does it solve?
Remind me again what it does again?
Can we explain it without sounding like a corporate bot?
Most of the time the answers are in there, it’s just they’ve just been hidden under layers of marketing glitter. So I go and dig them out.
You can see some of the work I’ve done in my Portfolio.
tl;dr
I’ve been writing about science since 2011
I’ve been studying science since 2000
I live in the UK
I don’t usually work Fridays
And I have very little patience for meaningless marketing jargon
Which, oddly enough, is why many of my clients hire me.