Must All Well Written Articles Be Comprehensible to a General Audience?
Hawley Rigsby
Thursday, 24 April 2008 18:57 UTC
I recently engaged a friend, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry, on the topic of good science writing. It turns out he was a good candidate for the debate; he enjoys seeing the extent to which I am capable of rewriting my coworker’s long, obscure, and jargon-filled writing into something in which he is able to find the point even if he misses some detail, yet he has also sympathised with a respected colleague who had complained that the course in science writing offered at his institution was too focused on simplifying concepts, and so over-simplifying complex ideas. Later that day, Richard Lewontin, in an interview on the CBC , discussed the pitfalls of metaphor usage, a frequently used tool used in writing for a broader audience.
So, be it resolved that good writing results in an ease of reading, is it possible for an article to be at the same time well-written and incomprehensible outside of a small sphere of specialists?
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An issue I have with my own writing is difficulties in others understanding it. From the perspective that that writing introduces, the issues are with a specialist and so unique perspective, and so generally anti- or asymmetric, presenting itself for consideration in a social context that is dominatingly symmetric in communication – the focus is on SAMENESS to allow for consensus in meaning, but the original work, to keep its core precision etc is naturally DIFFERENT.
The process of converting difference to sameness for the sake of social acceptance includes the dumbing-down of essentials and so surrendering of core concepts for the sake of ease in communication.
PRECISE expressions of specialist perspectives usually require the understanding of that specialist language to be able to fully comprehend what is being covered; and so to understand Mathematics/Logic does require some familiarity with such ALTHOUGH my own work covers a template of meaning used in all specialisations but at the vague, unconscious, levels to seed meanings. Thus awareness of the template allows for some assumptions to be made as to what is being communicated and so can ease the tension in trying to understand something seemingly incomprehensible!
See such as:
draft – Categories of Mediation
Chris
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Chris, I think if others have difficulty in understanding your writing, you need to write more clearly. After all, the point of writing is to convey your thoughts to other people.
I do not agree with the premise that clear writing is about “converting difference to sameness for the sake of social acceptance”. For example, our journals provide writing guidance for those who, for whatever reason, find it hard to express themselves clearly when describing a highly technical result. But many people write well and idiosyncratically (in their own personal style), and don’t need this advice. That’s all fine, and as it should be.
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I think specialization is kind of modern obscurantism. The things which science is about have meaning only in contexts.
For instance, I am inorganic chemist and my PhD was focused on synthesis of new compounds and study of their coordination sphere. By chance, I found out these compounds are nuclear factor-kappaB inhibitors and anticancer agents. It has been great adventure to read articles about this signaling, to understand new fields from molecular biology to clinical trials (proteasome inhibitors) and back… This would be impossible if the articles would be written incomprehesibly for a chemist.
Truth is not specialized, but it is complex – and science, if it is really interested in truth-seeking, should be complex (reputedly, Ernst Rutherford once said: if you are not able to make clear your science to char, you actually do not understand what your science is about).
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Maxine wrote:
“After all, the point of writing is to convey your thoughts to other people.”
Often not – the point is on making things clearer or more organised for oneself. THEN comes the conversion of such to more ‘symmetric’ form and so moving away from being too ideosyncratic(‘local’ symmetry). Since it ‘all makes sense to me’ this then becomes an issue as to trying to figure out how-come others cannot make sense of it.
The dumbing down focus of symmetry brings out issues with precision in that it can be sacrificed for the sake of ease in communication. If the dumbed-down content is then considered THE content then more issues can emerge later on where it is found one has to ‘brighten-up’ to understand the missing details! ;-)
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If you just want to make things clearer for yourself, then write it where no one else can see it.
If you’re not making sense to other people in papers (or indeed places like this) you are wasting your time, and Maxine’s and Bob’s and Martin’s and Hawley’s and mine…
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Richard’s right, as he so often is. Writing is not simply a matter of setting ideas down on paper. It’s a conversation. Unless you’re writing a private diary, you have to be aware of the interests and capabilities of the audience. If you’re writing a paper for the Journal of the Release of Calcium from Intracellular Stores, you can get away with the jargon employed by specialists in that field. On the other hand, that jargon would be inappropriate for a nonspecialist publication. Either way, you should strive to write clearly, so that the intended audience (whoever it is) will understand it. The problem comes when people write over-specialized papers for journals such as Nature. In such cases authors and editors can be in conflict. The author wants a high-profile venue for a paper which is really just for himself, his peers and his competitors. The editor wants something that a large proportion of his audience will understand and enjoy.
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Between Chris and Richard is also another step, that of “circulating a draft for feedback”. It is enormously useful for a writer trying to convince others of an idea or concept, to try out drafts on people who work on similar disciplines/problems first, before trying it out on a wider readership. This can be done the old-fashioned way (by asking selected people for feedback on a draft) or the 2.0 way, by use of an online preprint server that allows user comments, eg ArXiv, Nature Precedings, and the chemistry one whose name I can’t remember.
The bottom line for me is that when you are writing something for others to read, it is far easier for the audience (including journal editors) to work it all out if you have gone through this process first.
Anyone who believes that they can write something that is comprehensible to themselves in isolation of anyone else’s comments, and then expect the world to understand it, is misguided, in my opinion. Though I don’t think that is what Chris is trying to say — if I have understood correctly, Chris is saying that the process of writing helps the writer to clarify his or her own arguments. This is true, but I believe that the intermediate step (ie exposing the world to your ideas in a graded fashion) is advisable.
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The biggest lesson I learned in a science writing workshop last year was that I should be very clear about the audience (I blogged about this experience here). One obvious mistake would be to write a text that only you yourself can understand. And, as Henry said, the typical reader of the Journal of the Release of Calcium from Intracellular Stores is different from the reader of more general science journals such as Nature, Science or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Which brings me to a related subject. The introduction of many papers starts out with a few general statements before going into the details of the paper. The problem is that these first sentences often contain no real information. In my field (cancer research) this means starting sentences like Many people die of breast cancer_. Does this help in the understanding of the paper? Is a paper about breast cancer more interesting than a paper about Merkel cell cancercancer (a rare cancer of the skin)?
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Good question, Martin. At Nature we (subs) try to master the art of the “implicit definition”, with the intention of (1) not patronising or oversimplifying to one set of readers; and (2) helping out another set without being too pedagogical.
One simple way to do this (there are many) is not to use the verb “is” when introducing a concept – I think “many people die of breast cancer” is too simple-minded to state in a scientific paper, as we all know this, whether or not we are scientists, so the knowledge can be assumed.
But something along the lines of:
“Papaya, a fruit crop cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions, is known for its nutritional benefits and medicinal applications.”
is more elegant and readable than
“Papaya is a fruit crop cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions. It is known for its nutritional benefits and medicinal applications.”
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Linda has looked at first sentences of Nature abstracts in her blog post effective and not so effective introductory sentences of the abstract. Here are some first sentences from papers posted in the Good Paper Journal Club:
- The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, held in Germany from June 9 to July 9, 2006, provided an opportunity to examine the relation between emotional stress and the incidence of cardiovascular events.
- DEET (N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) is the world’s most widely used topical insect repellent, with broad effectiveness against most insects.
- Although the molting cycle is a hallmark of insects and nematodes, neither the endocrine control of molting via size, stage, and nutritional inputs nor the enzymatic mechanism for synthesis and release of the exoskeleton is well understood.
- There have been many attempts to link the anti-inflammatory action of substances like aspirin with their ability to inhibit the activity of endogenous substances.
- Cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying differences in beak morphology likely involve interactions among multiple embryonic populations.
- The cause of extinction of the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach), is still debated.
- Stomatal pores, formed by two surrounding guard cells in the epidermis of plant leaves, allow influx of atmospheric carbon dioxide in exchange for transpirational water loss.
- We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.).
Which one do you like best? My opinion: #1 and #3 work, but they are fairly complicated. #2 and #7 need the second sentence. #5 is too general. #4 and #8 are from classic Nobel Prize-winning papers. My pick: #6.
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