How Science and Teaching Made Me a Better Writer

For a long time, I thought biology, music, teaching, and writing were completely separate parts of my life. Now I’m not so sure.

There is one thing I keep coming back to: I love learning something new, figuring out how it works, and then explaining it in a way that makes sense to somebody else. Apparently, I have been doing versions of that for years. It just took me a while to notice.

It Started in a Lab, Not at a Laptop

My background is probably not what you would expect from a freelance writer. I studied biology and later worked as a molecular biologist. During the COVID pandemic, I worked in a laboratory running tests.

The work mattered, but it was exhausting. Around that time, I spent a lot of time walking alone and thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. Like many people during the pandemic, I started questioning things I had previously taken for granted.

I knew I wanted more freedom. I wanted work I could do remotely, more space for ideas and creativity, and the chance to make things that had a little bit of me in them instead of finishing one task and moving immediately to the next.

A line from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 had stayed with me for years because of that idea: leaving something of yourself in the work you do. Somewhere during those long walks, it started making more sense.

Science Was Only Part of the Story

Science has always been a big part of my life, but it has never been the only one. I also studied piano.

Yes, biology and piano. A perfectly obvious combination. 🙂

I taught piano and performed too, so I already had another side to my working life that involved listening, interpretation, practice, and explaining things to other people. For years, though, I thought of science and music as separate worlds. One was analytical. The other was creative.

Writing eventually showed me that I did not have to choose quite so neatly between the two.

So I Tried Medical Writing

Medical writing seemed like the obvious first move. I had the scientific background, I could research, and I understood technical subjects. Writing also gave me the remote-work possibility I wanted.

It made sense, and I liked parts of it. But I also wanted more room to play with language, structure, ideas, and tone. That led me to copywriting.

I took courses, read books, studied ads and landing pages, and quickly discovered that editing was one of my favorite parts of the process. For a while, I thought I had found it.

There was just one rather inconvenient problem.

Then I Met Cold Pitching

If you have ever tried freelancing, you probably know this stage. You decide you have a useful skill, create samples, learn about clients, and then someone cheerfully tells you to email complete strangers all day until one of them hires you.

Cold pitching and I have never become close friends.

I tried it. Sometimes people answered. Sometimes conversations even looked promising. Often nothing happened. After a while, I found myself spending an absurd amount of time trying to find writing work instead of actually writing.

That frustrated me, and it still does if I’m being fair. But it also pushed me to think harder about what kind of writing I actually wanted to do.

Blog Writing Made More Sense

Eventually, I kept coming back to blog writing because it combined several things I liked at once: research, learning unfamiliar subjects, explaining ideas, organizing messy material, writing in a human voice, editing, thinking about what readers need, and moving between different industries.

That last part mattered more than I expected. I like not knowing something and then learning enough about it to explain it.

Give me a subject I know nothing about, and my first reaction is usually curiosity rather than panic. How does this work? Why does it matter? What would confuse someone seeing it for the first time? How could I explain it without making them feel as though they need three degrees and a dictionary?

That turned out to be a useful instinct for writing, so I chose business blogging as one of the main things I wanted to do.

If you are interested in trying it yourself, I have a beginner’s guide to freelance blogging. You can also see what my freelance blogging routine looks like.

Then Teaching Made Something Click

Later, I started teaching biology, and somewhere in those lessons, something clicked.

I noticed how much I enjoyed taking an idea that looked difficult at first and finding a simpler way to explain it. Sometimes that meant coming up with an example. Sometimes it meant drawing something. Sometimes it meant saying the same thing three completely different ways until I saw the expression on a student’s face change from “What on earth are you talking about?” to “Oh. That’s what it means.”

I love that moment.

I also love the part before it, when I have to learn something properly myself before I can teach it. That made me notice something I had missed about my own work: biology, teaching, and writing are not quite as unrelated as I thought.

In all three, I am trying to understand something and make it clearer for someone else.

Maybe Explaining Things Is My Thing

I used to think my scientific background mattered mainly because it meant I could write about science. It does help with that, of course, but I think the bigger advantage is the way science trained me to approach unfamiliar subjects.

You ask questions. You check what something actually means. You look for evidence. You separate the important part from the distracting part.

Then teaching adds another question: How do I explain this so another person can understand it?

That question now follows me into writing too. It works when the subject is molecular biology, software, marketing, laboratory procedures, healthcare, a business service, or something I knew almost nothing about yesterday.

Technical writing became especially interesting to me for that reason. It gives me a chance to combine science, research, and clear explanation instead of treating those skills as separate things.

I wrote more about that in Why Technical Writing Can Make You a More Attractive Freelancer.

And Then I Started Coffee & Content

At some point I asked myself a fairly obvious question: if I enjoy writing blog posts so much, why am I not writing my own?

So Coffee & Content appeared.

At first, I treated it almost like a digital notebook. I wrote about freelancing, blogging, working alone, motivation, routines, AI, clients, writing when tired, and whatever else I was figuring out at the time.

That personal side is still here. I still want parts of this site to feel like sitting down for coffee and talking to another writer about what freelance work is actually like.

I mean, the site is called Coffee & Content. I was hardly going to become terribly formal all of a sudden.

By the way, if that side of the site interests you, you might also like Why I Write Here (And What I Hope You’ll Find), 7 Strange Reasons Blogging Alone Makes You Happier, or How to Write a Blog Post When You’re Tired.

But the site has grown since I started it. Now it also has a whole section for business owners who want to use their blogs more effectively.

That makes sense to me too. One side lets me talk about doing the work. The other lets me help businesses do something useful with it.

I Still Don’t Have Everything Figured Out

This would be a wonderfully tidy story if I could now tell you that I made one brave career decision, immediately found lots of clients, and have known exactly what I was doing ever since.

Nope.

There have been dead ends, stretches when I barely touched the blog, pitches that disappeared into the void, and ideas that seemed excellent until I tried them.

There are still things I am working out.

But I know much more about what kind of work suits me than I did when I started. I like work that makes me think. I like learning. I like explaining. I like writing to help people understand something, not just to sound clever. And I like taking something that looks complicated and making it feel less intimidating.

That feels like a pretty good place to start.

What Does That Mean for My Writing Now?

Today, the work I am most interested in sits where several of my skills meet.

I write blog content for businesses that need useful, clear articles for their readers. I also write technical and scientific content, especially when a difficult subject needs to make sense to people who may not have specialist knowledge.

And perhaps teaching has made me better at both.

When you explain something to students, you find out very quickly whether your explanation works. Blank faces are excellent feedback.

Writing does not give you a classroom full of expressions to watch, unfortunately, so you have to imagine the questions your reader might ask. Where might they get lost? What do they already know? What needs an example? Which technical detail matters, and which one can wait?

That is the part I enjoy.

From Lab Coats to Laptops Wasn’t Such a Strange Move After All

When I first moved toward freelance writing, it felt like I was leaving one career behind and starting something completely different. Now I see more continuity than I did then.

Science taught me how to investigate. Music taught me patience and sensitivity to small details. Writing gave me somewhere to put curiosity and creativity together. Teaching showed me just how much I enjoy making difficult ideas easier to understand.

So perhaps going from lab coats to laptops was not quite as strange as I thought.

It just took me a while to see the connection.

Looking for Someone Who Can Make a Difficult Subject Easier to Read?

If your business has useful knowledge but turning it into clear blog content keeps falling to the bottom of your list, I can help.

My Blog Writing Services are for businesses that need useful articles written for the people they want to reach. If you work in science, health, biotech, laboratories, or another technical field, take a look at my Technical Writing Services for Science, Health & Biotech too.

Or contact me and tell me what you are trying to explain.

Complicated subjects are usually the ones I find most interesting.