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 .