Oscar Wilde once described fox hunters as ‘the Unspeakable in pursuit of the Uneatable’. Over at the Ask-a-Nature-Editor forum we’ve been thinking about the Accessible in pursuit of the Acceptable – the degree to which the standard of written English in a Nature submission influences an editor’s decision to publish, given that many authors do not have English as a first language.
Really, this is not the problem that people think it is. The very best papers I have ever seen at Nature – in terms of style, accessibility, clarity and presentation, as well as substance – have come from people who learned English as a foreign language – that is to say, properly, with all the grammar and syntax and everything. Given that most anglophones grow up in relative ignorance of the power and subtlety of their own linguistic heritage, non-anglophones have a distinct advantage. The very worst papers I have ever seen come from anglophones who think they can write like Shakepeare when their papers come over more like Simpson (Homer Simpson, that is).
But the forum raised a separate (if related) point – that scientists in some disciplines keep their papers inaccessible on purpose, as they are less reports of great discoveries than placeholders in the never-ending battle between competing research groups. The relationships that such authors have with journals is congruent with that between dogs and lamp-posts. The urinous signal is meaningful to other dogs, if not to cats or horses. But it’s the same old lamp-post that gets peed on.
In my view such scientists should confine such social intercourse to their own speciality journals. But they won’t, because the Big Journals attract the Big Citations and therefore the Big Money. Journals, for shame, buy into this conceit, of course. But it does occur to me that to publish a deliberately inaccessible paper in a general-interest journal is disrespectful — not just of the editors, but of scientists in other, perhaps more gentlemanly fields, who take care to submit papers more, shall we say, appropriately?
Such questions of etiquette cut no ice, unfortunately. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, with no place for old-fashioned manners, and if you don’t publish in the Big Journals, you’re toast.
So, who are these people? Without wishing to mention any names, I venture that such authors tend to write papers whose titles refer to the positively negative interaction between one abbreviation and another abbreviation, conditional on the negatively double-negative interaction between a third abbreviation and one or other of the first two abbreviations (oh come on, you know who you are.)
And while you’re still trying to work that out, I shall tell you a little story.
Once upon a time, when the world was young, a callow Nature editor was phoned by a Wily Old Fox Of A Journalist who was writing a story about this very thing – accessibility. “Turn to page 123 of the latest issue of your rag,” asked the journalist, “and tell me if you can make head or tail of the paper displayed thereon – even just the title would do.”
So the Nature editor, eager to please (and flattered to be asked) turned to page 123 and read On the positively negative interaction between one abbreviation and another abbreviation, conditional on the negatively double-negative interaction between a third abbreviation and one or other of the first two abbreviations by Trellis et al.
“No,” he said to the Wily Old Fox Of A Journalist, “it doesn’t mean anything to me either”.
“Bingo!” thinks the WOFOAJ (no, you work it out. It’s an abbreviation, right?) and publishes the story, complete with names, in the next issue of The Daily Beast, finishing with a line which said, in effect, that even Professor Trellis’s own mother would get no joy from the paper concerned.
That’s when Professor Trellis wrote to Nature and demanded that the callow young editor make an apology, which he was forced to do, rather like Boris Johnson did to the Liverpudlians (in both cases they should have stood their ground and made rude noises in Old English).
But the best bit came years later, when the callow editor, now older and marginally wiser, was reminiscing with the WOFOAJ (who had by that time become a good friend) over a bottle of Demestica in their local Greek restaurant. Whereas Nature might have received an outraged letter from Professor Trellis, it turned out that the WOFOAJ had been deluged by a letter from Mrs Trellis, the Professor’s mother, who asked him what, exactly, he had against her son?
Great story, Henry! I’m dying to find out who this Professor, WOFOAJ, and callow editor are. I’ll bug you the next time I’m in London.
I think there’s a real issue here though. Even the most well written papers in Nature are still difficult to read and understand by people not in that field, in my opinion. Is that because science has gotten so specialized these days? I know Nature is for a broader scientific audience, but realistically, how broadly appealing is the individual paper in Nature nowadays? Can we realistically make a molecular biology paper 100 percent accessible to an astronomer?
Just to add, as a journalist who has struggled to get scientists to talk to me sans jargon, I totally agree with you that some scientists need to have a better attitude about making their work accessible to nonspecialists. Some try but struggle. It’s not a big part of a young scientist’s training, at least here in the US.
Haha! Dear old Mrs Trellis of North Wales.
You’re spot on about the writing ability of non-natives, Henry. I’ve seen a lot of CVs written in perfect English (and a lot of crap, too) from people who have had to learn English in addition to their own tongue.
I don’t think the fault of writing unintelligible and jargon-laden papers always lies entirely with the authors, however (whether it be callow youth, jaded postdoc or cynical PI). Most of the time you have multiple authors all trying to stick their oar in, and as the average intelligence of a mob is said to be the IQ of the dumbest divided by the number in the mob, the quality of the writing suffers in disproportion to the number of authors. You have to be a very strong-willed and charismatic communicating author to fight this.
Sometimes the only way to get under a journal’s word limit this side of the next millennium is to abbreviate sans merci and write ghastly sentences. I remind you of Pascal’s famous quote — _Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte_ (“If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter”).
Good writing takes time.
And then we can whine that we’re not trained, there’s too much pressure and whatnot. . . but you’re right, nonetheless. It’s bloody difficult to read a lot of the stuff in my own field, let alone anything in evolutionary biology. Bleh.
I aways remember the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when thinking about the influence of language in science communication… I think we should avoid using a language (as english) very well, trying to become perfect experts. People who speak other languages should make an effort to, instead of writing directly in english, write them in their mother languages first, and then translate them. This should reveal the limitations of english, and should allow the benefits of the other languages to contribute a little more to science in general.
Nowdays we only hear about english being better then other languages, but that’s because we don’t usually have experts in other languages translating texts to their second langauges. It’s usually an expert translating from his second language to his first.
These questions also always remind me of Nabokov . Some say it seems like the fact that english was a second language to him contributed a lot to his style and success. He is a strange case in english fiction, but this is usually the case in scientific literature.
Richard wrote: “Sometimes the only way to get under a journal’s word limit this side of the next millennium is to abbreviate sans merci and write ghastly sentences”. This, my friend, is utter tosh, and often used by authors who seek to blame editors for the fact that they, the authors, can’t write. Authors who use that excuse get very short shrift from me, I can tell you.
That comment escaped my radar. Getting a pile of information in under a word limit is difficult. It takes time and effort.
That’s not an /excuse/ for poor writing, much less a dig at editors. It’s just another problem facing scientists.