Fretful porpentine asked:
The class you’ll be teaching sounds like a great idea. A lot of scientific writing is absolutely terrible. I find that the incidence of turgid, unclear, inaccessible writing is especially high among molecular biologists. Student writing (I’m an extradepartmental TA in the chemistry department, and I teach recitation and lab for one of the intro chem courses) can be pretty awful, too, but it’s often horrible in very different ways. Your course will help the students get better grades in their science classes (I can only give good scores on reports I can understand), and those that go on to be researchers might turn out better prose than many of the scientists out there today.
Here are some things I wish my students knew about writing for me:
- It’s easiest for me to understand you if you write out what you think, rather than answering questions with one word or a small phrase. If I ask you to outline a procedure for something, tell me what you’re going to do step by step. Since you’re a student, I also have to see your reasons for giving me the answer that you do.
For example, if a question asks you, “Why is eating the glassware in the laboratory a bad idea?,” a correct answer might read something like this:
“Eating laboratory glassware is dangerous to your health for two reasons. First, the glassware may be contaminated with poisonous substances. Second, glass is hard and sharp. People who eat glassware in the laboratory could get broken teeth and nasty cuts in their mouths and other digestive organs.”
Do NOT answer with something like this,
“Hard, sharp, pois.”
That doesn’t tell me anything, and I can’t give you points for it, even if you know what you’re talking about.
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Check your spelling. Please. Many very, very different scientific terms (or general words) have similar spellings. If, for example, you start out talking about “silicon” and suddenly switch to “silicone,” I have to wonder what substance you’re trying to tell me about. That isn’t good for either of us. For similar reasons, don’t use abbreviations unless you’ve told me exactly what that abbreviation will stand for.
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Be specific about your errors. Don’t say, “This answer might be off because of human error.” Instead, tell me, “I nibbled on the test tube while I was waiting for the sample to boil. Some of the sample ran out of the cracks in the test tube and was lost. Therefore, the recorded final weight of my sample was less than it should have been.”
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Don’t write something with fancy-schmancy complicated words when you could say it simpler terms. Using big words doesn’t make you sound “more scientific.” There’s no reason to write “masticating and ingesting Pyrex vessels” when you could say “eating glassware.” Be especially careful of using big words when you don’t know what they mean. Don’t write things like “No-one should be caught masticating in the laboratory or anywhere else in public.”
And, of course, I’d like to see them follow the basic rules of good writing. I wish most of them had topic sentences, organized paragraphs, etc.
Here are some of the things I wish many of my fellow grad students and other people in the sciences would change about their writing:
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Don’t string 9 adjectives in front of a noun, make reference to one or two of them in a paragraph, and then suddenly allude to another of the traits in a separate section of your paper. It’s very confusing.
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If you’re going to present me with a line of reasoning, it’s usually best to do so in syllogistic fashion. Write, “It is well known in the literature that if A, then B. The results of our work show that if B, then C. Therefore, if A, then C. Since A is the case–a position supported by the results of Mo, Larry, and Curly (Mo M, Larry Q, and Curly Hair, 2000), then C must be true.” You might be surprised how many authors of scientific papers ignore the fact that a chain of reasoning should be made as easy to follow as possible.
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Personally, I think it’s high time we got rid of the idea that all scientific writing has to be in the passive voice. It adds unneccessary verbage to scientific writing, and it makes the text feel oddly dead or distant. If you think about it for a bit, it’s also somewhat arrogant. We all know that human beings are the ones who do scientific work; using the passive voice makes it sound like you want readers to believe that all the work was done by the hand of God. Because the traditional passive-voice style is so firmly embedded in the culture(s) of science, I will be writing my stuff in that style, too. But the passive voice thing ought to go.
I hope you find this helpful.
–Scribble
It doesn’t help that my little brother, working in the sawmill over the summers, made about as much doing that as I do in an entire year doing research and teaching.