{"id":155,"date":"2010-07-21T01:35:26","date_gmt":"2010-07-21T01:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2010\/07\/21\/reach_for_the_styles\/"},"modified":"2013-04-24T14:36:24","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T14:36:24","slug":"reach_for_the_styles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2010\/07\/21\/reach_for_the_styles\/","title":{"rendered":"Reach for the Styles"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an article by Matthew Reisz in Times Higher Education<\/em> last week about the strained writing style<\/a> of academic publications and it really got my goat.<\/p>\n

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 \u00a0quotes\u00a0\ufeffapprovingly from UEA’s \u00a0Sarah Churchwell, a senior lecturer in American studies:<\/p>\n

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The measure of the intelligence of an article is not in the length of the words, but in the complexity of the argument.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Right on, Cowgirl.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>“, was followed by this bombshell:<\/p>\n

\n

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. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Come again? Perhaps you’d like to step outside Mr Reisz?<\/p>\n

But I don’t actually want to get into an argument about\u00a0Mr Reisz\ufeff’s\u00a0predilections 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> do more to eschew jargon and focus on the narrative structure of our reports from the coalface.\u00a0But 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\u00a0details 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> care over my sentence construction, I enjoy the relaxed style of the blog.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0I know that much of my academic writing is stiff and dry.\ufeff\u00a0I tried once\u00a0to loosen up — in a commentary piece<\/a> where there is traditionally more freedom of expression — but my nerve failed me and before submission I edited the article to constrain its playfulness.<\/p>\n

The difficulty is that careful description of a piece of scientific work requires constructing sentences built from details that, however\u00a0ornate and fascinating\ufeff,\u00a0usually\u00a0\ufeffhave 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> sections for technical and lay summaries of the science in the proposal. But as a science blogger<\/em>, I can also make a more effective effort to be heard outside the academy. Even with stories of the minutiae of amino acids.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo by Rebecca Smith<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This question of audiences came up at the Science Blogging Talkfest<\/a> 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<\/a>,\u00a0Noodlemaz<\/a> and the ever-challenging\u00a0Shane McCracken<\/a> (one of the organisers of I’m a scientist<\/a>). There were many points about engagement<\/em> during the evening but I particularly appreciated\u00a0Ed Yong’s<\/a> telling tales\ufeff\u00a0from \ufeffnon-scientist readers who had been deeply affected by his science writing.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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\u00a0I’m a Scientist<\/a> competition is with me still and I think I need another hit.<\/p>\n

Or several.<\/p>\n

Thousand.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I already have in mind an idea for a post on the story behind our latest paper<\/a> on the enzymology of the 2C protein from foot-and-mouth disease virus. The first line reads:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Let’s see what happens.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Update 22-Jul-2010:<\/strong> There are more (and more varied) reactions to the Science Blogging #talkfest by Alice Sheppard<\/a>, Andy Russell<\/a>, Paula Salgado<\/a>, Vivienne Raper<\/a> and my newly discovered Imperial colleague, Andrew Jaffe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}