trinityvixen | (no subject)

It occurs to me there isn't really any exciting news to post about here. For one thing, my boss is still out of the country, and I'm still no closer to having a research paper for her. I don't know if this will get me fired, but I'm feeling rather lazy and apathetic about it. It's a review paper, it shouldn't be that hard, only I don't know a lot of things and every time I wonder if A connects to B because of C and if I can argue that in a paper, I have to go far afield and research something unrelated to my basic premise (for example: I need to know if artherosclerosis and arteries losing elasticity and muscle due to SMC death would lead to heart enlargement; if it does, that's great for me, but I don't really want to go becoming a cariac specialist just to write a paper about a mutation leading to disease).

Gah, I feel so unacademic. Mostly, I think it's the papers. There's this overwhelming amount of research out there, and all research builds on past research. Do I go back to the paper from 1972 that first reviewed the disease for information and write the same introduction as everyone else? Do I cop out and go "the symptoms of blahblahblah (as reviewed in...)"? Mostly, I'm realizing why being a lab tech is okay for me, but being a lab career person isn't. I hate writing papers. I cringe even at the friggin' materials and methods sections. The discussion and introduction, man, don't even get me started.

I think this might be because of my low bullshit tolerance. Let's face it, science writing is 9/10s bs at any given point. It's written to be obscure, to prevent anyone who doesn't work in a specific field from having a fucking clue, unless you luck onto a paper that explains abbreviations and long latin/greek words up front (which, because you can just summarize those things in a table at the start, many papers don't do any more). The needlessly complicated language, sentence construction, punctuation, even, ugh, it makes me want to die, and my inner stickler probably already has. I'm a science person at heart, I know this, but science writing is as far from the principles of science as it is from good English.

Take as an example sentences that show up in the abstract blurbs on PubMed. Often, that one paragraph is two sentences, maybe three. And we're talking 10-15 lines of text. When you start writing in grade school, they teach you about run on sentences and the punctuation that could be used to correct it. In science writing, the authors are too excited about their research to slow down and get a fucking editor half the time, and the expectation becomes that readers of science articles are like readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne works: they are gluttons for the delayed gratification sentence payoff. Do you have to keep in mind at least twenty-thirty words, all of which may double back, negate, outline different pathways branching off from the ones that came before? Will you have to find a dictionary or else have mastered latin constructs in order to read half the sentence? Have you a photographic memory for abbreviations used after explaining what they stand for only once and the ability to remember upwards of thirty of them at any time so a line doesn't look like the sequence from a primer or alphabet soup? Are your answers 'yes,' 'yes,' and 'yes'? Then maybe you can write for science.

It's a shame that English, a subject I liked but always disdained for the airy nature of its arguments and aesthetic grounds to determine merit, should have always advocated a system of writing that is more in tune with the spirit of science in general: keep it short, make it concise, keep your reader's attention. If science writing were as exciting as the novel, we'd have cured cancer by now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I hear you. I felt exactly the same way when I was writing my thesis. Why must I take ten pages to say what I can say in one?

I am a big fan of the short, declarative sentence.

Which is why I rather liked Miss Lisa R's thesis presentation: short, simple, to the point, plus the 733t speak or whatever.

Welcome to my world.
I'm currently writing a 15-page progress report to my boss. This paper complements one of the three presentations I gave last week, which amounts to: "My data sucks except for this one image. And breast cells are a pain in the ass to grow. Where is my cholera toxin?" Most of the effort is making it readable - as in something that will not put myself into a coma while writing it.
I've been told a whole slew of things - that I explain too much, that my background is impressive, to my background is not extensive enough and my experimental design sucks. Who the hell knows. I like to keep my sentences short and simple, and I try to avoid repeating words within the same paragraph. That is extremely hard to do in science.

Your bosses is having you, a lab tech, write a REVIEW? Will your name be on this review? Sheesh, in the two and a half years while I was a lab tech, I was not asked to write a single review and not permitted to go to any conferences. I broke bones all day, submitted the numbers to my boss, and the paper on it STILL isn't out yet. I guess the lab tech experience totally depends on your PI ...

Thank you.

God. This is awful. 15 pages later and it still says the same thing.

But honestly: I hope that when/if I go into science writing I can learn from the errors of delayed gratification, and I promise to try my best to revise the genre so that no more angry LJ entries will come into being about the vices of science writing. My point in going into this field is to try to make science more accessible to the public (and maybe other scientists, too?), not to frustrate them into giving up.

(Says the girl who right now is so frustrated she wants to give up.)

Ah, I love critiques of academic writing, especially when they're filled with curse words. :-)

One of my favorite books in college was called The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, by Russell Jacoby. Jacoby argued that the public intellectuals of the past withdrew into academia in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, where they wrote dense, jargon-laden texts on obscure topics. Abandoning the broader public, they essentially ceded it to the well-funded right-wing think tanks, leaving conservatives in charge of American public discourse. The book may be dated today, but the argument still makes sense to me.

Whoa, okay, for a moment there I thought you were saying we've only got the conservatives writing the textbooks, when in fact that's exactly the opposite of what you're saying. And you'd be right, seeing as most scientists I know are fairly liberal on all fronts because science is exploration. There are ethical concerns, of course, that's why we anonymize most patient-related work, but when it comes down to "do we have to talk to a flesh and blood person we're taking this sample from?" if the answer is no, it's usually full steam ahead.

As to whether academics have abandoned the public discourse, I don't think this is so. Scientists are perfectly willing to engage the government and what not, it's just that the government has unrealistic expectations of what will be presented. They go in completely the opposite direction, which amuses me seeing as governmental processes easily best scientific writing as some of the most dull, officious, and wordy pieces of work ever. However, when a scientist tries to explain details, the government wants a brief. They want yes/no answers, and not in-depth ones at that. "Did you cure cancer yet? No? No money for you then." That's going to far in the opposite direction, but that's a rant for another day.

Well I should clarify myself here: Jacoby is referring mostly to social science and the humanities, although he does talk about (physical, biological) scientific writing a bit. No one expects a physicist to write in colloquial English (although he should write well, and be short and concise, as you point out). But when political scientists, sociologists, economists, etc. write in indecipherable jargon, a valuable connection with the public is lost.

I agree that theoretical scientists (NOT engineers) tend to be liberal. This has long been the case, although the tendency has been strengthened by the Bush administration's meddling in science, and its anti-intellectualism in general.

What do you think of Edward Tufte, by the way? I wonder if you've seen his discussion of the Challenger disaster.

It's a shame that English, a subject I liked but always disdained for the airy nature of its arguments and aesthetic grounds to determine merit, should have always advocated a system of writing that is more in tune with the spirit of science in general: keep it short, make it concise, keep your reader's attention. If science writing were as exciting as the novel, we'd have cured cancer by now.

right on ^____^

I think that should be metaquoted (although am on a quoting rampage so may not be entirely objective lol)

I like to think of myself as a decent scientific writer... I remember being really proud of some of the things I have written. I think the hardest part of the process is writing what you mean clearly, concicely, and precicely.

Does it help to look at "good papers" that you enjoyed reading and see how they do things?

Does it help to realize that you don't usually write the final abstract first? I prefer to start with materials, as that gives me a good review of what I was doing, then write about why it was done, with background... then conclusions, then an abstract that summaraizes what goes on inside the paper.

Adobe Illustrator makes good figures. Those are fun!

Reading the sources of other papers on your topic and trying to get your hands on those papers is sometimes helpful.

I should beat you to death for saying that you disdain English. Do you know how assfuckingly hard it is to write a 20 page paper that you're hoping your professor will like when you've got no hard facts, no good ideas, and no interest in the book you're supposed to be writing about? And be CREATIVE about it and say new and original things??? At least facts give you a place to start the BS.