How to write about science

In preparation for writing my thesis, I read a book. Writing Science in Plain English, by Anne E. Greene. It was an excellent read! I hope to incorporate many of her tips and tricks to make my writing about science easier to understand.

I wanted to share what she has to say in a brief illustrated manner. In the hope that people will incorporate her guidance also in their writing. I created a cheat sheet which you can download here. This post is not a substitution for reading Writing Science in Plain English yourself! But it should serve as a quick reference while writing. Print it out. Hang it next to your screen. Gift it to a colleague. Pin it on your fridge. Or do none of the above. Take what works for you. Leave what doesn’t.

Here are 11 Tips that will help you write more clearly:

Think about your Audience first

Before writing anything, it is very important that you think about „Who is going to read this? How do I want them to feel?„. Friends? Peers? Your mother? Do you want to convince? Inform? Spark interest? All of this will determine your register and your tone. From informal to formal. Arrogant to submissive. Timid and confident. Energetic or dull. Cynical or optimistic. Just to name a few. Greene explains in her book how this will change the feel of a text.

Put characters as subjects and their actions as strong verbs

As part of the Story Telling strategy it is useful to make characters the subject of a sentence. Make them do things. This will have a huge effect on how easy it is to follow a complex text. This impacted my writing the most! Try to avoid words like „be“ or „has“ and use verbs to indicate what your character does.

Use the active voice

When I was an undergraduate student I learned that you should never use the active voice! „So unprofessional. The scientist should not be part of the science they do!“ This is chaining nowadays. We recognize more and more that you cannot separate the two. No science without scientists. Understanding who did what in a sentence makes it easier for the reader to follow.

Use short words

Short words are better than long ones. Less complex.

Keep terms the same

We were taught in school to avoid repeating words too much. And while this is true when writing fiction, in science this will only cause confusion. Remember that you are writing about science. About pretty complex stuff. If you change around terms that all refer to the same thing, you risk to lose your reader.

Avoid strings of nouns

Connecting words to make even longer ones. Try to avoid this.

Avoid jargon

If you write for a distinct peer group you might think jargon is fine. They all know it anyway. While this is true for people who are in your field for some time, new members will struggle. They will have a hard time entering if all they see are words they have to look up. Quickly an article will be disregarded when it’s too hard to understand. Make your work useful for everyone! Speak in a language for everyone!

Don’t add unnecessary words

No one likes wordy essays. Bunch of words. All mean nothing. Or don’t contribute to the argument. Why use many word when few do trick. Greene discerned nicely what words should be omitted. And you might be surprised how many those actually are… I certainly was!

Place new information at the end of a sentence

When writing, we want to convey an argument. This argument should be easy to follow, therefore, placing new information at the end will help people understand you better. Doing so, places information where people expect to find it. Starting with the familiar and moving to new information.

I still have a hard time doing this. I had trouble doing the exercises in her book. Practice makes perfect, so let’s work on that!

Make things parallel

Humans are made to recognize patterns. Once a pattern is learned, we have it easy to recognize it again. Don’t surprise your readers. Keeps things rhythmic but the same.

Vary!

Rhythm! By varying the lengths of your sentences, you make your text lively. Keeping sentences all the same length, you will sound very monotonous.

On building paragraphs and documents

Greene described furthermore how to set up paragraphs and whole documents. It strings back to: Place information where people expect them to find. By following the natural flow of arguments, we create a document that is easy to navigate. Going from issues, development, to conclusion when writing a paragraph. When constructing a document you have different options. For example, going chronologically, or compare and contrast, or order from least to most important. There are many options. If you want to learn more about this, I suggest once more reading Writing Science in Plain English by Anne E. Greene.

Concluding remarks

As scientists, we are formally trained in finding out new things. Discovery! Working on the edge of what is known! Unfortunately, we are rarely trained in how to communicate those exciting new things effectively. We have to go the extra mile to learn communication! Knowledge that is not heard; is it really knowledge?

Download a visual summary of this post here.

Thank you!