Science

I’ve made a variety of contributions to the writing of scientific papers. This has mainly been in relation to neuroscience, but my interests are broad and began many years ago with astronomy.

Having also read a large number of papers and books written by scientists, I’ll gladly share some tips that may improve your writing if you’re a scientist slaving through your next publication.

Three things are chiefly responsible for scientists being bad writers.

1. They’re too redundant in their use of language.
2. They disclaim their writing far too much considering scientists know that science is tentative.
3. They use convoluted phrasing under the guise of science, when simpler phrases would do.

These all make papers (and sometimes books) messy and longer than they need to be. As an added side effect, they also make the work harder to follow for amateurs and laymen, which is detrimental to the public support of scientific endeavors. Without compromising the scientific content, fixing these three items alone will improve nearly any publication.

There are other things that can put a dent in the quality of a scientific paper, including some that have more to do with morals than plain writing: chasing grants, overreaching conclusions, inflating the significance of a finding when it really just turned out to be a dud. These would not be solved by better writing, but by funding science more adequately so scientists wouldn’t feel unrelenting pressure to arrive at meaningful outcomes in every study they happen to do.

The thing isn’t always where you look, and that’s true in science also.