I read an article by Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education last week about the strained writing style of academic publications and it really got my goat.
Don’t get me wrong — it’s a good piece and makes some valid points, several of which resonated strongly with me. Reisz wonders at the lack of pleasure in academic writing among writers and readers, which leads to the inanimate style of much academic prose. He speculates that this is due to a lack of incentives for people to reach out beyond the walls of the academy — thereby automatically limiting their audience to an expert group — but is cautiously optimistic that the tendency towards inter-disciplinarity and funding agency drives for wider ‘impact’ may help to overcome that. He advocates a focus on good story-telling as an essential tool for drawing in a broader readership and criticises the academic style as needlessly obfuscatory. Reisz quotes approvingly from UEA’s Sarah Churchwell, a senior lecturer in American studies:
The measure of the intelligence of an article is not in the length of the words, but in the complexity of the argument.
Right on, Cowgirl.
But Reisz’s aim is not always so true. He misses the point of referencing, claiming that it too often interrupts the flow of an argument (thought this is the case with some formats) and is mainly done for show. He complains that there are insufficient outlets for academics to practise their non-specialist writing skills. Ironically, the author of an article that was posted online seems not to have heard of the internet — or blogging.
But what got my goat was that his eminently sensible contention that “The frequent costs of ‘academic tightness’ are lost readers and missed opportunities to participate in wider public debates“, was followed by this bombshell:
None of this may matter much in highly technical areas. Few people will care whether a paper on the minutiae of amino acids is written in snappy prose.
Come again? Perhaps you’d like to step outside Mr Reisz?
But I don’t actually want to get into an argument about Mr Reisz’s predilections for history or critical theory or his disregard of the molecular life sciences (which have profoundly affected the human story over the past 100 years). His remark stung, but on reflection it seemed more like a challenge, especially since I whole-heartedly approve of the push to make scientists engage with a wider audience.
I hadn’t considered any audience outside science when I was writing my first papers twenty years ago, in the afterglow of my PhD. But the world has changed a great deal since then. In the past few years there has been great pressure for more accessibility from the Open Access movement. In part this is driven by the consideration that free access for scientists is the most efficient way to use public money given for research. But it is also an acknowledgement of the the right of the public to see the results of the research that they pay for. However, it is no good letting people have access to scientific papers if the dry, technical style makes them unreadable.
I don’t think there is a ready solution to this conundrum since it would involve writing papers for two very different audiences. For sure we scientists could do more to eschew jargon and focus on the narrative structure of our reports from the coalface. But there is a trained tendency for precision and objectivity in scientific language. It is what we know. It is how we carefully describe the world. Added to that, we know that our peers — who will be charged with determining whether our manuscript is fit for publication — want us to cut to the essential details of the experiments and their results and don’t need the jargon explained to them. Little wonder then that any sense of the excitement is often drained from the account. The overuse of the word ‘interestingly’ is but part of the problem.
I had thought that blogging would improve the style of my scientific publications by giving more vigorous exercise to my writing muscle. I like the freedom. There are no prescriptions on format and, although I try to take some care over my sentence construction, I enjoy the relaxed style of the blog.
But in practice it has made little difference. As soon as I sit down to compose a scientific paper I can feel the strait-jacket of precision tightening around me. I know that much of my academic writing is stiff and dry. I tried once to loosen up — in a commentary piece where there is traditionally more freedom of expression — but my nerve failed me and before submission I edited the article to constrain its playfulness.
The difficulty is that careful description of a piece of scientific work requires constructing sentences built from details that, however ornate and fascinating, usually have to be scaffolded with the spars and planks of probability and qualification. There may well be a masterpiece of science underneath the cluttered prose, but like many a hapless tourist, the casual reader rarely gets a glimpse.
I’m sure I can do better and at least improve the reading experience of my scientific peers, but I doubt that my papers would be much more accessible to a more general reader. The gulf between these audiences is simply too wide. An acknowledgement of this can be found in every grant application form where there are separate sections for technical and lay summaries of the science in the proposal. But as a science blogger, I can also make a more effective effort to be heard outside the academy. Even with stories of the minutiae of amino acids.
Photo by Rebecca Smith
This question of audiences came up at the Science Blogging Talkfest which was held last week at the Biochemistry Society in London and attended by the bright and the beautiful of the capital’s science bloggers. I went along too. Excellent accounts of the main issues covered (and not covered) in the proceedings have been written by Jon Butterworth, Noodlemaz and the ever-challenging Shane McCracken (one of the organisers of I’m a scientist). There were many points about engagement during the evening but I particularly appreciated Ed Yong’s telling tales from non-scientist readers who had been deeply affected by his science writing.
It would be good if more of us could achieve that sort of reach. I was pleased beyond measure on the night of the #talkfest when several people spoke warmly about my blogging. But gratifying as they were, those comments came from a fairly narrow audience. Of course it’s important to know that you are able to communicate with the scientific and scientifically engaged community, but I’m interested to find ways to do more. The thrill of contact with the wider audience of enthusiastic school students in the recent I’m a Scientist competition is with me still and I think I need another hit.
Or several.
Thousand.
To that end I’ve been thinking of writing more posts aimed at that broader audience. I don’t mean to change the subject matter of this blog — it will stick with the hurly-burly of doing science — but I will try to open the gates a little more.
I already have in mind an idea for a post on the story behind our latest paper on the enzymology of the 2C protein from foot-and-mouth disease virus. The first line reads:
It started with an innocuous question in a bar in the frozen, winter-dark town of Inari, a few points north of the Arctic Circle.
Let’s see what happens.
Update 22-Jul-2010: There are more (and more varied) reactions to the Science Blogging #talkfest by Alice Sheppard, Andy Russell, Paula Salgado, Vivienne Raper and my newly discovered Imperial colleague, Andrew Jaffe.
thanks for share, i like it
http://www.usedconecrusher.com
I refudiate Reisz’s argument!
But in practice it has made little difference.
I thought the same as you, Stephen – that blogging would improve the style of my scientific writing – yet also found that it made little difference. Of course I blog very infrequently these days, and was never a very prolific blogger at any point.
I’ve seen a few examples of scientists who are very good at “loosening up” with their writing, in the context of review articles, commentaries, and even grant proposals, but I lack the confidence to do so. I’m working on a review article at the moment, the topic of which is a perfect match for many lines in the Yeats poem Sailing to Byzantium; yet I will almost certainly chicken out and not include any reference whatsoever to the piece. If I were an adventurous sort, I’d use lines from the poem as subheadings in the review.
Many grant agencies require lay summaries/abstracts for proposals, and some include non-scientist “consumers” in the review process. To be honest, I enjoy these interactions and discussions, in the context of review panels, and in the context of meetings for patients and families (I summarized research developments at one such meeting last November, which was a fantastic experience), much more than blogging. I’m hoping that a new responsibility in that sphere, starting this fall, will allow more of that kind of communication for me.
(Sorry about the herd of teal deer)
Interesting post Stephen. It’s easy to point to problems with academic literature, but much harder to identify a way forward. Major changes to the style of research reports or to the structure of articles will take years to achieve.
We are seeing barrios attempts to represent research in new, semantic forms that make it possible to ask a question and get an answer back. These currently rely on cunning text-miningsoftware that looks through the text and recognizes entities, statements and claims about entities and relationships. I have seen suggestions that papers should be written just as a a series of new claims, backed up with experimental detail. I can’t find a link to that suggestion, but did find “this”:http://esw.w3.org/images/a/ae/HCLS$$ISWC2009$$Workshop$deWaard.pdf which looks interesting and intelligent.
Perhaps if the burden of writing papers could be reduced it would be mor feasible to insist on a lay blurb, as PLoS do. Or maybe one of these text-miners could write a program that takes dry, precise research prose and turns it into a lay-friendly text?
Thanks Janis – I would normally delete spammers in the blink of an eye but I was genuinely intrigued by your seeking to use this outlet to promote stone-crushing machinery.
Nice try Benoit but I think you’ll find that is spelled ‘refudiatise’. And you didn’t scatter nearly enough obfuscatory caveats. 😉
Kristi – I hereby insist and charge you with the responsibility of working that magnificent poem into your review. It is something we need to do to bridge the ‘two cultures’ (and Reisz clearly isn’t even going to try). Courage my dear – I’m right behind you! (I was reminded that I did have a go at something like that in a grant application.
More seriously, I’m really glad to hear you got a big kick out of translating research for patients and families – it’s a much more rewarding challenge that many of us would credit.
But you lost me with the teal deer… are you on drugs?
Frank – that looks like an interesting link though my initial reaction was one of horror at the idea that a program could parse a scientific paper and give a decent digest of it for a lay audience. I wouldn’t like to absolve scientists of this responsibility since one of Reisz’s better points was that the very act of testing what you have to say before a more general audience is a real help in sharpening your thinking.
There is no way a scientific paper can be watered down for non-specialists without impairing the content – unless it was about a hundred times longer. I’m glad to see you’re not advocating that approach. But I do think that more scientists should explain their work – wouldn’t it be interesting if journals required all corresponding authors to submit a layperson blog summary for every paper they published, linked from the original article?
In my experience, scientists can be divided into those for whom writing is a necessary chore (and whose papers, therefore, tend to be functional but dry) and those who are really frustrated writers anyway, and for whom science provides an excuse to write for a living. These are the kind of people who will regularly be pressed into writing 800 words on something or other at short notice, and who will generally do a more than decent job of producing very readable prose.
Of course, technical writing does limit the purpleness of said prose, but (particularly with the frequent relegation of methods sections, and even detailed descriptions of results, to online appendices) this seems to be less of an issue these days than before.
Stephen & Jenny – My instinct is to agree that a machine can’t do it, but we are seeing amazing things in text mining and semantic enrichment. Part of my thinking is that when I am trying to summarise articles to put news items on our website, I struggle with some papers a) to get a clear statement of exactly what advances the paper is claiming and b) to sift through the jungle of entities to find what the function is. I think software may be able to help with that, though one problem is when there are about 12 claimed advances in one paper and I can’t judge which are the key 2 or 3.
I agree with Tom – I have found some of our people very willing and able to turn out some text quite quickly. whereas others really don’t want to.
Glad we are in agreement Jenny and I like your suggestion about obliging authors to provide lay summaries of published work. I know Nature provides readable digests of every paper published but I think there is value in placing this task on the shoulders of the authors of the paper.
As Tom says, there is a wide spectrum among scientists in terms of motivation and ability on the writing front. I guess I agree that we aren’t going to turn every scientist into a brilliant communicator but I would like to see more pressure on us to promulgate our work more widely.
That’s why I still resist Frank’s enthusiasm for machine-based approaches. As he concedes, it is sometimes difficult to sift articles for their more valuable conclusions. I’ll bet that’s relatively easy to do with Nature or Science papers which have been reviewed with wide scientific impact in mind (though not always successfully, impact being rather tricky to predict in advance!). But lower down the food-chain, I have seen plenty of examples where it is clear (to me) that the authors haven’t really thought very hard about why they did the experiments that they are reporting. That is where I see the value of having to write a digest for wider public consumption – I think it would make some of us realise that actually some of our work is a bit boring and maybe we should focus on stuff that is more interesting and worthwhile! Engagement is a two-way process.
I’m broadly with Stephen in that the styles (scientific vs. plain-language) are far enough apart that they don’t influence one another much… except in the sense that one strives (or should strive) for clarity and lack of ambiguity in both. As an _editor_ of scientific writing my main contribution is usually to cut extremely long, subordinate clause-laden, sentences in two. Or even three! But though I’ve written a lot of non-science stuff I don’t think it’s changed my own “scientific” style.
Agree with Kristi about the satisfaction of “translating” stuff for lay audiences. Funnily enough, when I started blogging I did think I was going to do more of this, though I seem to have tailed off as time has gone on. A couple of older examples are “here”:http://draust.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/glug-glug-glug-%E2%80%A6-why-those-eight-glasses-a-day-don%E2%80%99t-have-to-be-water-or-eight/ and “here”:http://draust.wordpress.com/2008/03/01/what-could-be-so-fine%E2%80%A6-as-to-be-alkaline-warning-irony/ (on health myths to do with drinking _lots_ of water, and drinking “alkaline” water, respectively).
I like Tom’s categories. I’m pretty sure I fall squarely into the _”frustrated writer”_ one.
I have read somewhere of a proposal where scientists would write papers using machine-readable style. This would free them from rewriting the same introductions with slight changes over and over again, if I remember well the author(s) used the example of malaria.
In almost every paper about malaria, there is a statement about how it is transmitted by mosquitoes. Does it really need to be repeated thousands of time a year? Ah found the paper, it is by Barend Mons and Jan Velterop: [PDF], found it thanks to Laika’s blog, which also contains much more information.
Now not only such a format would allow for much more powerful data mining tools, but the time saved re-writing the same intros etc could be spent being more creative with the discussion and/or reaching out to the public for the people who are so inclined, and the others can churn out data-dense nano-pubs to their hearts’ content.
I agree with Jennifer that there is no way a scientific paper can be understood by lay people, it is not what these papers are here for, they are for the clear communication of hypothesis, method and results to others in the same field. In the same way I do not expect to be able to understand legal papers (I can barely understand rental agreements and so forth!), they are written in a language that serves another purpose—although there is the issue that I have signed a great deal of legalese papers that are binding, and the content of which I am only vaguely capable of understanding.
In fact as soon as an activity is specialised enough there are terms non-specialists will not understand, I remember my grandfather talking about ploughing, and I had no idea what he was going on about apart from general terms like "field" "plough" and "ox".
Nice shot of my back there from Rebecca, eh!
Loving the ending, and do link to that paper when it’s out, sounds like a really amazing story 😉
@ Stephen: Heh! The “teal deer” reference was a little joke about the “excessively long” warning for comments, based on the tl;dr shorthand for “too long; didn’t read”. I think I might fall into the frustrated writer category as well – I can turn out the 800 words fairly quickly, and whereas *I* might not be happy with the results, others seem to be. The only type of academic writing that I don’t really care for (and actually detest, when restricted to the outline/bullet points format) is composing lecture notes for professional school (medical and dental) students. Boring, tedious, no flexibility, and honestly, I kind of object to the entire principle. Unfortunately, I have to do a lot of it.
I teach a graduate school course in developmental biology each spring, and rather than have the students present yet another journal article, I ask them to design an informational pamphlet for patients and families, on any developmental disorder or anomaly. I wish I could show some of the pamphlets here – many are quite good, and ready for a physician’s office or clinic with very few changes. Students have chosen topics such as Down syndrome, spina bifida, autism spectrum disorder, and tetralogy of Fallot.
Also agree that a lay summary of scientific papers is an excellent idea.
Nicolas – thanks, that proposal is what I was struggling to recall.
Thanks too all above for your very interesting comments.
Re Kristi’s remark on the ‘tl;dr’ acronym (new to me), can I issue a reminder of the house rules: on this blog no comment is too long so long as it’s kept interesting. Austin, you are always welcome!
Thanks for that link Nicolas. Just had time to glance at the abstract and the point about facilitating data mining is well made, especially because we scientists are under more pressure from funders about assessing impact. I am much more comfortable about this being done in retrospect (through assessment of the published literature – among other measures) than via predictions of how our work might lead to the next breakthrough in high-profit systems nano-cancer technology using stem cells.
However, I hope the advent of such measures is not used as an excuse by some to conform to a stricter format that leads to even more lifeless prose. I’m not sure how the proposed mechanism would free up or encourage scientists to wax a bit more lyrical in the discussion section. But maybe I need to read that paper?
Marianne – it’s a very nice back! 😉 The photo was chosen for the purely narcissistic reason that it’s the only one that shows my mug.
You’re welcome Stephen!
I understand that the idea is to code the results to be machine-readable, such that statements that “X increases the production of Y under Z conditions in W organism”, which can written in an astounding amount of differing ways of various intelligibility, is now clear and semantically searchable. My guess is that software would be involved to make this as quick and painless as possible, a sort of WYSIWIG for scientific results.
If this is quick enough, it should hopefully free up time to think about/explain/discuss the results, rather than find yet another way to say something that doesn’t need to be literary-level prose. Note that the authors do not propose to replace the traditional paper completely, but split the roles of communicating the results and commenting on them. The comments, i.e. discussion, reviews etc would be done in the more traditional way. How that fits in the current system is anyone’s guess though.
Stephen, I think Sarah Palin would be delighted at your reinterpretation of her mangling of the english language.
We have writers at our institute whose job it is to massage our text into something that reads better, and also to write lay stories based on our work. I do get frustrated reading biochemical papers in short format journals, where every second word is an acronym or jargon. I agree that the writing of a scientific paper should be more lucid, and I do like the journals that ask for a summary aimed at a general audience. I realize when I can’t explain my work to my mother that I need to think about what it really means.
Thanks for that clarification Nicolas – I guess I really a going to have to look at that paper to see what the future might hold.
Ha Benoit – so that was a Palinism? Obviously schooled by GW Bush. I read somewhere last week that a Sarah Palindrome is something that when read forwards sounds backwards! 😉
More seriously I think that setting ourselves the task of explaining our work to our mothers could work wonders!
Just updated my post with links to other blogposts about #talkfest so you can get a bigger (more colourful) picture.
Stephen – for a glimpse of the future, take a look at “Textpresso”:http://www.textpresso.org/ – they have semantically parsed some substantial collections of literature on certain model organisms (e.g. everything about _C. elegans_) so you can ask a question and get an answer back.
The parsing is done through a combination of automatic and manual techniques.
Yes, it was a Palinism that caused quite a stir, in part because of context, also because she used it not once but twice, and then compared herself to Shakespeare for doing so, spawning a delightful #Shakespalin trail of tweets.
Thanks for that Frank. It amused me that a tool that is supposed to make information more accessible was described with this somewhat opaque phrase:
Benoit – Ha, ha – I had missed that particular twitterstream…! The good ol’ US of A does have a knack of turning out inarticulate politicians. Was it all downhill after Abe got shot?
Frank, Textpresso seems interesting, but I can’t figure out how to use it…
I have found a few other semantic search tools: FACTA, GoWeb, EBIMed and PubMatrix.
Would people around here be interested in a comparison as a blog post? Suggestions for complicated queries would be welcome!
Am I still on topic or have drifted way too far now?
Great post, excellent comments. Problem for me is doing so much writing for work i can’t be arsed to write for pleasure sometimes. Like now. I have comments and no energy to make them. I have MarsEdit open and a post started, but no energy to finish it.
Sod it. I’m going for a beer.
Thanks for the links Nicolas – I had a glance at each of them but it’s difficult to assess how effective these are unless you have a ‘real world’ query. If you felt up to a blog post to explain the function and advantages of each (Fenner-style), that could be very interesting.
Cheers Ian – how frustrating that it is still not possible to drink with friends on the web. Stupid, stupid internet.
I’ll try and do a post about these. Might take a while though, we’re moving house soon… I’ll aim for Fenner-style but can’t guarantee it will be as good.
_- how frustrating that it is still not possible to drink with friends on the web. Stupid, stupid internet._
Stephen: well there is thing thing called skype… and a web cam… and a microphone…and it’s sort of like being in a pub together if you both have a beer and hang out. Sort of. on a very small scale. if you are desperate?!
(Not? Really? nahh… well, it was worth a try 😉 guess the other options of texting while having beers in different places doesn’t count either. pah. Although, nothing of this really solves the time difference. It’s not 5 o’clock at the same time in the world… 🙂 )
Thanks Åsa but drinking and Skyping isn’t anything like being down the pub with your friends (however much we might want it to be!) Technology has a long way to go.
Can you buy a round over Skype?
Stephen: oh.. don’t I know… (longing for the beer in the pub with some friend who are located across the Atlantic in my home) I simply voiced a wish and a hope 😉
I might sound like a “non-liking technology here” but I sort of hope we never get there. Human to human interaction is so precious that I sort of wish the computers will never learn how to do that ^^ (saying that as a fan of Blade Runner… it hurts but still, I’m hoping it never comes to that)
Frank: I dare say no to that one.. .clearly one of the major draw backs.
Not as far as I know, Frank, more’s the pity.
Åsa – well that’s a whole other and very interesting discussion. Think of the close relationship that many people have with their pets. How clever would a robot have to be for us to start thinking of them as persons?
Mind you, having said that, I’d not be too keen to be beaten up by a Nexus 6 should I ever get on the wrong side of one…
@Stephen, that a piece of machinery is faster/stronger than me I can come to terms with. It’s more the fact they are quickly becoming smarter that bothers me…
What will I do once they can copy-edit? 😉
What will I do once they can copy-edit?
When they’re smart enough to do that Nicolas, we can set them to work on the problem of serving beer over the internet…
Stephen> there is that of course… it’d hurt.
At the time the Nexus are implemented, surely we would have made ourself ‘better’ too though? I always wondered about that glitch [imho] in BR, that the people seem so unaffected/regular like us now although the replicants are all up and running. Ah well, I guess I can mull over it over the weekend if nothing else. and maybe find the book and see if he mentions it in there too 😉
Ah but, Åsa, the superior capabilities of the Nexus 6 are bought at the price of a shorter lifespan. It’s perfectly consistent with humans not being ‘upgraded’ in the same way.
You’re not going to take one of my favourite movies away from me that easily! 😉
Stephen: I had no intention of doing such an evil thing. It’s one of my faves. Top 5 for sure. And I’ve watched it too many times to say anything else 😉
I blame coffee-free day. And yes, of course it is bought at the expense of “lesser life span” _I want more life_ and somewhat distorted emotions/lack of a full set… I still think though, if someone were to contemplate a remake (which I certainly would hope NEVER happens) or an extension of the BR universe that maybe there would be some kind of enhancement made in the humans…. of course, that would open it up to a whole new set of “distorted humans/mishaps when messing with DNA and code” 😉
ah.. come to think of that, I was going to try and see that “inception” movie.
Åsa – I saw ‘Inception’ last weekend. Won’t say any more because it’s hard to say anything without giving stuff away. Recommend that you see it and will be interested to hear what you think…
Or did I just dream that?
ha, I’ll take that recommendation and try and see it very soon. It’s been various reviews in the media so far but I had good hopes…. and you’re not saying “not see it” so… I’ll chance on it 🙂
Go for it Åsa… enjoy!
Lovely post, Stephen. That´s all.
Why thank you Henry, you big, complicated individual, you.