March 28, 2012
How to Write Like a Scientist
From Science:
I didn’t know whether to take my Ph.D. adviser’s remark as a compliment. “You don’t write like a scientist,” he said, handing me back the progress report for a grant that I had written for him. In my dream world, tears would have come to his eyes, and he would have squealed, “You write like a poet!” In reality, though, he just frowned. He had meant it as a criticism. I don’t write like a scientist, and apparently that’s bad. I asked for an example, and he pointed to a sentence on the first page. “See that word?” he said. “Right there. That is not science.”
The word was “lone,” as in “PvPlm is the lone plasmepsin in the food vacuole of Plasmodium vivax.” It was a filthy word. A non-scientific word. A flowery word, a lyrical word, a word worthy of -- ugh -- an MFA student. I hadn’t meant the word to be poetic. I had just used the word “only” five or six times, and I didn’t want to use it again. But in his mind, “lone” must have conjured images of PvPlm perched on a cliff’s edge, staring into the empty chasm, weeping gently for its aspartic protease companions. Oh, the good times they shared. Afternoons spent cleaving scissile bonds. Lazy mornings decomposing foreign proteins into their constituent amino acids at a nice, acidic pH. Alas, lone plasmepsin, those days are gone. So I changed the word to “only.” And it hurt. Not because “lone” was some beautiful turn of phrase but because of the lesson I had learned: Any word beyond the expected set -- even a word as tame and innocuous as “lone” -- apparently doesn’t belong in science. I’m still fairly new at this science thing. I’m less than 4 years beyond the dark days of grad school and the adviser who wouldn’t tolerate “lone.” So forgive my naïveté when I ask: Why the hell not? Why can’t we write like other people write? Why can’t we tell our science in interesting, dynamic stories? Why must we write dryly? (Or, to rephrase that last sentence in the passive voice, as seems to be the scientific fashion, why must dryness be written by us?)
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:02 AM | Permalink
Comments
One of my happier larks as a grad student was to introduce into an internal ATLAS note something like "We eschew the complacent triumphalism of Monte-Carlo-based expectations, giving a voice to previously excluded data-driven methods." Regrettably, in a note written by twenty people, it lasted a mere twelve hours before being changed to something more scientific.
More seriously, a lot of the time, writing "scientifically" involves play-acting more than anything else; you leave out what you actually did or really think, omit speculations and suspicions, and try to sound as robotic as you can. This is meant to cultivate objectivity, but it's really a whitewash, a pantomimic hollywoodized faux-objectivity imposed upon actual scientific work and thinking. No-one actually becomes more scientific because he eliminates the first person from his writing, for example.
Posted by: prasad | Mar 28, 2012 7:04:04 AM
How about:
"..So Crick and I went to the pub for a couple of beers, and there we came up with a structure that is just fucking amazing!"
Posted by: aguy109 | Mar 28, 2012 9:57:27 AM
The notion of dry writing is a vestigial appendage from the 18th century notion of "reason."
Artful writing is more natural to the modern understanding of reason we now have.
Posted by: Dredd | Mar 28, 2012 11:04:35 AM
It is incumbent upon me to note that the dryness of scientific discourse is the least of our problems: if we could only eschew the pretentious in the art of letters communication would doubtless be considerably enhanced.
Posted by: reader | Mar 28, 2012 12:13:33 PM
I feel like it is hyper-correction. My postdoc advisor actually did go through my papers and remove every single use of the passive voice. It was an abomination not to be borne.
I can trace several trends in this. One is that boring prose is safe and won't get you into trouble. Getting out of trouble in your papers is usually the point, because you want to get past the cranky referees.
Secondly, more and more people are writing in a language that isn't their own, so the field develops its own dialect, only really understandable to other scientists. It's a form of gatekeeping and signaling now that faculty jobs are so hard to get.
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Mar 29, 2012 9:57:46 AM
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