Read through the following article and then write a short reaction essay that reflects on the concepts set forth in the article as well as your own ideas about scientific writing. Please refer to specific points made by the author when you are writing. Aim for insight and depth in your writing. Title: Scientists as Writers (Author: Laura Jane Martin) Scientists study murky ponds, holes in space, and atoms that refuse to touch. Science is inspiring and beautiful. But scientific articles are not. Most scientific articles are so impenetrable that even scientists cringe to read them. Instead of expanding our collective wonder, they intimidate, and we leave it to science journalists and university extension associates to translate these ciphers into But shouldn’t good writing be required of scientists, too? Today scientific articles are constrained by convention and myth. The conventions of scientific writing have two goals: to convey authority, and to demonstrate the author’s objectivity. Conventions that convey authority include a standardized article structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion); booster words (Scientific articles contain more booster words [clearly,obviously] than other research articles, but less hedge words [may, seem, possibly].); and invocations of doom (To justify experiments articles often begin with overblown sentences like “As we all know, all species are dying.”) Conventions that convey objectivity include the erasure of scientists as actors in their own experiments via past passive voice (e.g. “the chemicals were heated” versus “I heated the chemicals”) and the use of nominalizations or zombie nouns, which make increased population density.”). Scientists use these conventions consciously or unconsciously to assert distance between themselves and their subject, to achieve objectivity through prose. But experimental integrity is not the same thing as avoiding the first person – nor does avoiding adjectives protect scientific work from bias. Scientists merely perform authority and objectivity through their conventions, and the result is that experiments seem to unfold tidily and timelessly, making the scientific process appear foreordained – and boring. Strangely enough, today’s conventions emerged in a seventeenth century attempt to make scientific writing clearer. They were first codified by the Royal Society of London in a 1667 booklet opposing the elitism of rhetoricians. Ornaments of speech were, in the Society’s opinion, “in open defiance against Reason”; poetry was “this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue.” Honoring reason and clarity above such trickery, Society members insisted on “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can.” Today the opposite concern – exclusivity – drives scientific writing. A certain suspicion of language’s promiscuity .

1. Read through the following article and then write a short reaction essay that reflects on the
concepts set forth in the article as well as your own ideas about scientific writing. Please refer to
specific points made by the author when you are writing. Aim for insight and depth in your
writing.
Title: Scientists as Writers
(Author: Laura Jane Martin)
Scientists study murky ponds, holes in space, and atoms that refuse to touch. Science is inspiring
and beautiful. But scientific articles are not. Most scientific articles are so impenetrable that even
scientists cringe to read them. Instead of expanding our collective wonder, they intimidate, and
we leave it to science journalists and university extension associates to translate these ciphers
into But shouldn’t good writing be required of scientists, too?
Today scientific articles are constrained by convention and myth.
The conventions of scientific writing have two goals: to convey authority, and to demonstrate the
author’s objectivity. Conventions that convey authority include a standardized article structure
(Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusion); booster words (Scientific articles contain more
booster words [clearly,obviously] than other research articles, but less hedge words [may, seem,
possibly].); and invocations of doom (To justify experiments articles often begin with overblown
sentences like “As we all know, all species are dying.”)
Conventions that convey objectivity include the erasure of scientists as actors in their own
experiments via past passive voice (e.g. “the chemicals were heated” versus “I heated the
chemicals”) and the use of nominalizations or zombie nouns, which make increased population
density.”).
Scientists use these conventions consciously or unconsciously to assert distance between
themselves and their subject, to achieve objectivity through prose. But experimental integrity is
not the same thing as avoiding the first person – nor does avoiding adjectives protect scientific
work from bias. Scientists merely perform authority and objectivity through their conventions,
and the result is that experiments seem to unfold tidily and timelessly, making the scientific
process appear foreordained – and boring.
Strangely enough, today’s conventions emerged in a seventeenth century attempt to make
scientific writing clearer. They were first codified by the Royal Society of London in a 1667
booklet opposing the elitism of rhetoricians. Ornaments of speech were, in the Society’s opinion,
“in open defiance against Reason”; poetry was “this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of
Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue.” Honoring reason and clarity above such trickery, Society
members insisted on “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses;
a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can.”

2. Today the opposite concern – exclusivity – drives scientific writing. A certain suspicion of
language’s promiscuity has been transmitted across generations of scientists. In a striking echo of
the Royal Society, 339 years later, Robert Day and Barbara Gastel, authors of How to Write and
Publish a Scientific Paper, write
"In scientific writing, there is little need for ornamentation. The flowery literary embellishments
– the metaphors, the similes, the idiomatic expressions – are very likely to cause confusion and
should seldom be used in writing research papers. Science is simply too important to be
communicated in anything other than words of certain meaning".
But which words are those?
On top of rigid conventions, scientists must contend with the pervasive myth that scientists can’t
write. We begin differentiating scientists and writers in elementary school. One “likes math” or
“likes English.” Our academic system, from pre-K through graduate school, contrasts science
and literature – objectivism and subjectivism, reductionism and holism. We find it inconceivable
that Vladimir Nabokov’s theories on butterfly evolution could be vindicated. We even take
science’s and art’s objects of
inquiry, nature and culture, to be separate spheres.
Still worse, we’ve naturalized and internalized these divisions in three ways. First, the cerebral
cortex is still, after years of debunking, said to be organized into two hemispheres, the left the
seat of language and logic, the right the seat of creativity and intuition. The notion of a well-
rounded person is excluded by this construction. Second, specialization and collaboration are
considered necessities of the modern world, and so no one scientist author is responsible for her
or his prose. Third, and most broadly, elegant prose is considered unachievable given the
extreme complexity of scientific concepts.
This set of assumptions does have its critics. In 1959 C.P. Snow delivered a lecture, “The Two
Cultures,” in which he lamented the divide between the sciences and the literary arts. Snow, a
physicist and novelist, recognized the difficulty that comes with moving between two
communities “who had almost ceased to communicate at all.” Between them, he wrote, lay “a
gulf of mutual incomprehension.”
The myth of a rigid taxonomy – science as the study of objects, writing as an act of
representation – creates two problems. First is the failure of scientific consensus to reach and
persuade a broad audience: Given the state of scientific writing, it is unsurprising that the
majority of Americans do not believe in evolution or climate change and do not know what
species they are eating at the dinner table.
The second problem is that we’ve radically limited the number of people who speak
the Endangered Species Act, hydrofracking, or deep-sea trawling. When they discover I’m a poet
they only want to know if I like Shakespeare. I’m unconvinced that experts should have a

3. monopoly on scientific questions, or that artists don’t have as many important, insightful, and
true things to say about the natural world. Or that scientists can’t be artists, or artists scientists.
The conventions of scientific writing are rarely challenged, even though they sometimes require
mashing observations into an awkward scaffolding. Even though the generative and positive
aspect of literary genre is that it begs to be tinkered with.
Good writers and good scientists share many attributes. Both care about their representations of
the natural world. Both work constantly to improve their craft. Both care about clarity and about
audience.
Of course some scientific articles are excellently written. But, generally speaking, professional
scientists do not consider themselves writers. Some even brag about hating writing or being poor
writers. But they shouldn’t. Because in fact, story is deeply at work in science, and all scientists,
whether they acknowledge it or not, attend to and represent the natural world.
Recently a handful of scientists have begun to reclaim natural history as a worthwhile
intellectual pursuit. The term “natural history” signals some essence of storytelling. A history
requires characters, setting, time, and an historian. There is no reason to fear this subjectivity.
Subjectivity can be honest. In fact, acknowledging subjectivity might be the only honest way to
write.
An anecdote from a biography of the nineteenth century poet Walt Whitman drives this point
home. “I am well satisfied with my success with titles,” Whitman said near the end of his life,
though some scientist friends objected to the title of his book Leaves of Grass on the grounds
that “there are no leaves of grass; there are spears of grass.” “But,” Whitman recounted, and you
can hear his sigh, “Spears of Grass would not have been the same to me.”
advent of the Internet. Academic journals are facing various crises: declining volunteers for peer
review, waning readership. Perhaps these pressures should encourage a radical rethinking of
scientists’ roles as authors.
Scientists use these conventions consciously or unconsciously to assert distance between
themselves and their subject, to achieve objectivity through prose. But experimental integrity is
not the same thing as avoiding the first person – nor does avoiding adjectives protect scientific
work from bias. Scientists merely perform authority and objectivity through their conventions,
and the result is that experiments seem to unfold tidily and timelessly, making the scientific
process appear foreordained – and boring.
Strangely enough, today’s conventions emerged in a seventeenth century attempt to make
scientific writing clearer. They were first codified by the Royal Society of London in a 1667
booklet opposing the elitism of rhetoricians. Ornaments of speech were, in the Society’s
opinion, “in open defiance against Reason”; poetry was “this vicious abundance of Phrase, this
trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue.” Honoring reason and clarity above such trickery,

4. Society members insisted on “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions;
clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they
can.”
Today the opposite concern – exclusivity – drives scientific writing. A certain suspicion of
language’s promiscuity has been transmitted across generations of scientists. In a striking echo
of the Royal Society, 339 years later, Robert Day and Barbara Gastel, authors of How to Write
and Publish a Scientific Paper, write
"In scientific writing, there is little need for ornamentation. The flowery literary embellishments
– the metaphors, the similes, the idiomatic expressions – are very likely to cause confusion and
should seldom be used in writing research papers. Science is simply too important to be
communicated in anything other than words of certain meaning".
But which words are those?
Solution
A short reaction essay :
Title: Scientists as Writers
Science is inspiring and beautiful. They study murky ponds, holes in space, and atoms that refuse
to touch.But scientific articles are not that much inspiring or intersting. Most of the scientific
articles are so impenetrable that even scientists cringe to read them.This is showing us writing
efficiency of scientists is not going into commons. Todays scientific articles is full of convention
and myth.
The conventions of scientific writing have two goals:
1. to convey authority,(In general if we open any scientific research paper or article we can find
this type mostly which include a standardized article structure (Introduction, Methods, Results,
Conclusion); booster words )and
2. to demonstrate the author’s objectivity. (include the erasure of scientists as actors in their own
experiments via past passive voice (e.g. “the chemicals were heated” versus “I heated the
chemicals”) ).
The articles often begin with overblown sentences like “As we all know, all species are dying.”.
All this appears foreordained and boring to justify their experiments. By using all these
conventions scientists asserting distance between themselves and their subject. All this makes the
scientific process appear foreordained – and boring.
Today’s conventions emerged in a seventeenth century attempt to make scientific writing clearer.
They were first codified by the Royal Society of London in a 1667 booklet opposing the elitism
of rhetoricians. They tried to incorporate native easiness: bringing all things as near the

5. Mathematical plainness as they can.”
But today the opposite concern – exclusivity is driving the scientific writing. The language’s
promiscuity has been transmitted across generations of scientists. 339 years later, in a striking
echo of the Royal Society, Robert Day and Barbara Gastel, authors of How to Write and Publish
a Scientific Paper, write "In scientific writing, there is little need for ornamentation. The flowery
literary embellishments – the metaphors, the similes, the idiomatic expressions – are very likely
to cause confusion and should seldom be used in writing research papers. Science is simply too
important to be communicated in anything other than words of certain meaning".
There is a differentiation from the elementary level between science and literature that promotes
a myth that scientist cannot write. One 'likes science' and another 'likes maths'. Our academic
system contrasts these both, objectivism subjectivism holism and reductionism. We also tend to
separate science's and art's object of inquiry, nature and culture.
We have naturalised and internalised this division in 3 ways.
Excluding the notion of a wholistic person, by separating the logic and language part of the
brain(left) with the seat of creativity n intuition.
Collaboration and specialisation is considered necessary thus no scientist can incorporate his
own prose into his writings.
Just because science is complex, it is considered unachievanle to incorporate elegant prose into
it.
These assumptions have its criticism, C.P. Snow's lecture laments the divide between sciences
and literary arts. He writes that inbetween these two lay a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
Two problems are created by strictly separating science as the study of objects and writing as an
act of representation.
First is the failure of scientific consensus to reach and persuade a broad audience: Given the
state of scientific writing, it is unsurprising that the majority of Americans do not believe in
evolution or climate change and do not know what species they are eating at the dinner table.
Secondly, those who speak for nature are confined and limited. People ask only an ecologist

6. about things of nature and only a poet is asked what he thought about Shakespeare. It limits
scientist from being artists and artists from science.
Good writers and scientist, both care about their representation of the natural world, the clarity
and the audience and work constantly on improving their craft.
Professional scientist should consider writing because their story is deeply at work in science
and all scientist represent the natural world.
Natural history is being taken up by some scientists in the recent year which propels story telling
like what history needs, characters, setting, time and a historian. Acknowledging subjectivity in
this is an honest way to write.
Because of the advent of internet, there is conservatism. Academic journals are thus facing
crises such as waning readership and declining volunteers for peer reviews. These resins should
encourage the radical thinking of scientists to write.