How to write good science

Don’t expect me to give advice here except to say that the best way to write any good science stuff is to read a lot of science writing and pay attention to what you find tedious and what you find absorbing.  Oh, and this: I see the principles of good popular science writing as nearly identical to those of good technical science writing.

I once taught a course on technical scientific writing, but it failed miserably. I concluded that the best way to teach it is to take a student’s papers and keep correcting them over and over until he/she develops a decent prose style.

We all know that Steve Pinker’s next book is on how to write good popular science, and I’m much looking forward to it. In the meantime, there’s a nice piece by evolutionary biologist Lewis Spurgin called “Science and the English language“on the website A Great Tree. Spurgin’s title is taken from George Orwell’s famous essay, “Politics and the English language” (everyone should read this), which, though purporting to be about political writing, is really about writing anything clearly. I always gave Orwell’s essay to my grad students.

Spurgin makes the point that technical scientific reading should be clear and lively, though in reality it’s deadly about 98% of the time. He explains why we should care about this:

Science is about finding the truth and making sense of things. An essential part of this is communicating clearly and honestly. The structure, grammar and choice of words used in science articles makes them vague and inaccurate, which is exactly the opposite of how they are intended, and pretend, to be. And, as Orwell recognised, lazy writing encourages lazy thinking. The imitative and pretentious nature of how we write science papers acts as a barrier to thinking critically about what we’ve done, and how our experiments might be biased.

Science writing is also full of cliché, crap puns and metaphors, and borderline plagiarism. In short, it lacks imagination. It is no wonder, therefore, that nobody enjoys reading science papers. We often enjoy the story contained within scientific studies, but I’d bet that even most scientists don’t enjoy reading journal articles for their writing. Must this be the case? One could argue that imagery has no place in science articles. I think it has, and there are some examples where it has been used well. In my field of evolutionary biology, probably the most famous use of imagery in a science paper was Gould and Lewontin’s article on the “Spandrels of San Marco” [3]. Gould was also excellent at using metaphor to illustrate the vastness of geological time (“Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history”). But, sadly, for every Spandrel there are a thousand Achilles’ heels, and so much light has been shed that we’ve all gone blind.

One of the most tragic consequences of the scientific writing style is the effect it has on students. Science students find it extremely difficult to get into the primary literature, and most undergraduates will not be able to properly critique a scientific paper until their final year. Complex methods used in many modern papers, and the jargon required to explain them, form a major part of this barrier, but I have no doubt that the writing is equally to blame. . .

Spurgin then gives a list of major sins of science writing, including pretentious diction, bad metaphors, and so on. I agree. If I see the words “a suite of characters” once again, I’ll hurl, and that also goes for “utilize”, “elucidate,” “facilitate” and “myriad.” And I abhor the way that even decent writers fall into tedious and jargony prose when they start writing science, as if the gravitas of a science paper demands tedium. Well, that’s the conceit of postmodernistic lit-crit, but shouldn’t be true of science. Our job is to be clear, not obscure. Granted, some humdrum stuff is necessary in a research paper, but there’s no reason why results shouldn’t be written clearly, why one shouldn’t write in the first person, or why one can’t use some humor.

Spurgin reprints Orwell’s six dicta for good writing, which I’ve tried to adhere to myself (especially number 3!), and I’ll put them here, too:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. [JAC: note that I violate this a few lines above!]

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Finally, here are some examples of either tedious or humorous writing that I’ve collected over the years (titles are mine). I omit the authors’ names to protect the guilty.

SCIENTIFIC FASCISM (in a paper on mutations in peanuts)

“Discrepancies in individual plant estimates were reviewed in congress and the reasons for the discrepancies were examined and the sources of differences in judgment were eliminated until the observers spoke with as nearly one mind on the subject of these peanut mutants as perhaps it is possible to achieve in human experience.”

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POMPOSITY (my footnotes)

“Humans are themselves embedded in a Wrightean viscous population, where behavioral proximity, measured as the relative allocation of interaction among individuals, replaces spatial proximity.  Cooperation is the product of a fragmented social environment and, for this very reason, is itself heterogeneously distributed.  We are socially viscous creatures, creating islands of solstice* within Malthusian necessity.

Wynne-Edwards seems to write from his own island; yet the processes he speaks of bind him to others.  He is imprecise yet richly intuitive, at his best when neither crisply** right nor wrong;  a difficult cantankerous man for those interested in rapid progress.  But recall Alexander’s (1987:18) view of progress:  to identify the core of accuracy and correctness in the works of all writers in a field, excise the flawed portions, and then build from the best that is left. Wynne-Edwards deserves this***, as do we all.”

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* Reference completely obscure.  Author most likely means “solace”.
**Has the author been eating crackers?
***Deserves what?

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OVERLY CUTE METAPHOR

“In terms of the subject of this review, the epistasis between experimentalists and theoreticians has been positive, although small, but its strength should be increased through selection for tighter linkage, so that our understanding could evolve to the maximum peak in the knowledge surface.”

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OBSCURANTIST ACADEMESE:

“Thus, even among the horseshoe crabs (proverbial epitomes of morphological conservatism), multitudinous nucleotide differences have accumulated among evolutionary lineages (albeit at an uncertain exact pace).”

Jerry’s Translation:  Diverse species of horseshoe crabs look alike, but their DNA is different.

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UNNECESSARY RESTATEMENT OF THE OBVIOUS

“The world is heterogeneous.  It varies from place to place and moment to moment.  As a consequence of this variation, the optimal phenotype of an individual changes.  In an ideal world, an individual would alter its phenotype to always match the optimum.  In the real world, however, organisms do not always do this.”