Message-ID: <19991209013658.AAC7046@jubilee.ns.sympatico.ca@LOCALNAME> Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 21:30:44 -04 From: Kerry Miller <mailto:kerryo@ns.sympatico.ca> Subject: The Scientist: What's Right? To: mailto:DEVEL-L@LISTSERV.AMERICAN.EDU
http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1999/dec/opin_991206.htmlThe Scientist, Volume 13, #24 What's Right about Scientific Writing Alan G. Gross and Joseph E. Harmon
In recent commentaries in Nature, the New York Times Magazine, and the American Scholar, the scientific article has come under attack because it has allegedly degenerated into a thick "molasses of jargon and academic code."
Furthermore, according to scientist Peter Medawar in a 1964 Saturday Review essay, because the structure of the scientific article seriously misrepresents the way science happens, authors of scientific articles are also mendacious, perpetrators of a fraud. In other words, we have it on good authority that scientific prose is execrable, scientific communication dishonest.
What's wrong with this picture?
It cannot account for the fact that science is a successful enterprise, an enterprise whose success depends crucially on the efficacy and honesty of its communicative practices. Contemporary scientists convey their discoveries in the writing conventions of their time, just as Newton, Franklin, Darwin, Mendeleev, Curie, and Einstein did in their time.
While Nature, the American Scholar, and the New York Times Magazine may be right in the specific examples they criticize, they are wrong in making generalizations like "Pleas for scientists to write readably have failed for at least 300 years."
And because the scientific article is about [*]persuading readers of the importance and trustworthiness[*] of new knowledge claims, not about accurately re-creating the practices that spawned them, Medawar is also wrong.
[...]