Why can’t they just write clearly ?
Disgruntled Postdoc A threw the paper down on his desk in frustration. A non-native speaker of English, he had spent the morning studying an aspect of a new collaboration that he was less familiar with. Having, sensibly, started with a review paper, he was following this up with an original research article.
Why do they have to use such fancy words?
he lamented. One of the things we discussed, as I helped him untangle the unwieldy sentences, was how if one is close to understanding an important result, it is easy – on first glance, especially – to understand it as exactly the opposite. Confusion arises as results – or even individual paragraphs – appear to contradict each other.
Communicating a message clearly is an essential attribute of a decent blog post, book or article aimed at a non-specialist audience. Notably in the science blogosphere – but elsewhere as well – one must be sensitive to readers for whom the language you are writing in, is not their mother tongue.
There is substantial discussion online, both on Nature Network and elsewhere, on how to write a good paper. When I am writing on my blog, I am careful not to include (too many!) culture-specific references, having been the victim more than once of a reader or commenter getting the wrong end of the stick. In part, I picked this habit up from when I used to run one of our student societies, and communicated with our members using an e-mailing list with several hundred subscribers. More than once I included some flippant comment as a sign-off resulting in a handful of worried responses from students who did not ‘get’ the joke.
I am not suggesting that flippancy was the cause of my Postdoc colleague’s confusion, but, when writing original research up for publication, do scientists explicitly consider how their research might be read by a global audience? Is there a difference in style between a well-written paper and a paper written with a non-English-speaking audience in mind?
