(no subject)
Dec. 16th, 2004 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenIt 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 09:35 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-16 10:28 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-17 12:59 am (UTC)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.