Explaining Mould to Year 9: Writing Science for a Wider Audience
You are in Year 10 and have been asked to write a 300-word explanation of your mould experiment for the Year 9 class wiki, which parents can also read. Your teacher's marking schedule used terms such as 'incubation', 'inoculation', 'variable' and 'contamination'. You grew bread mould on three slices: one kept in a sealed bag in a warm cupboard at about 24°C, one in the fridge at 4°C, and one left open on the bench. After seven days the warm sealed slice had mould covering about 70 per cent of its surface, the fridge slice had none visible, and the open slice was dry with two small patches - and a fly landed on it twice. Your teacher's comment on your draft was: 'Accurate, but you assume the reader already knows what incubation means.'
1. Name two terms from the draft that you must explain, and show how you would explain one of them without losing accuracy.
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Two that need work: 'incubation' and 'contamination'. 'Variable' also needs a plain gloss, but those two are the ones a Year 9 student or a parent will actually stumble on.
Incubation, rewritten: 'Incubation means keeping the bread at a steady warm temperature (about 24°C) so the mould spores have time to grow.' Nothing is lost - the temperature is kept, the purpose is kept, and the word is either defined on first use or dropped afterwards in favour of 'kept warm'. Compare the original: 'The slice was incubated at 24°C', which is accurate but hides both the action and the reason.
Contamination, rewritten: 'Contamination means something else got into the experiment - in my case, a fly - so I cannot be sure the mould came only from the air.' The gloss names the problem and immediately explains why it matters to the result, which is the part a general reader needs. Defining a term and then not saying why it matters is only half the job.
2. Explain how your audience - Year 9 students and their parents - changes your sentence choices compared with the teacher's report.
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The teacher already holds the background, so their report can run two ideas into one clause and use passive voice: 'Each slice was inoculated and incubated under controlled conditions.' A Year 9 student and a parent do not hold that background, so the same content has to be rebuilt.
Three changes. First, active voice with a person in it: 'I sealed each slice in its own bag and kept it at a steady temperature' tells the reader who did what, which is easier to follow than a passive chain. Second, one idea per sentence, around 15 to 20 words, so a reader who loses the thread loses one sentence rather than a paragraph. Third, define on first use or in a short glossary box at the end, and then use the plain phrase consistently - 'the warm cupboard' rather than alternating between 'incubation conditions' and 'warm cupboard'. Accuracy is not the thing being traded away here; jargon and long clauses are, and neither of those is what makes the science correct.
3. Your open-slice result is complicated by the fly. Explain how you would write about that honestly in two sentences.
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Sample: 'The open slice also had a fly land on it twice, so I cannot be sure that its mould came only from spores in the room air. This makes the open-slice result less reliable than the sealed-slice result, which is why I have not used it to support my conclusion.'
Reasoning: the hedge ('cannot be sure') is doing real work. A fly is a second possible source of spores, so a flat statement that the open slice grew mould 'from the air' would be a claim the method cannot support, and a marker or a parent reading closely would catch it. Naming the limitation yourself reads as control of the experiment rather than as a mistake. The second sentence then tells the reader what to do with the doubt - it explains which comparison still stands (warm sealed versus fridge sealed, where both were protected) and which one you have set aside. That is more useful than deleting the open slice altogether, because the fly is the most interesting thing that happened and it shows the idea of a variable at work.