I'm well aware of the pressures to write badly -- bad writers who don't
realize how bad they are tend to make bad editors who want everyone else
to sink to their level. A lot of the conflict is the pressure to
maintain the elite priesthood versus one of the alleged purposes of
science, i.e., to communicate ideas and data. Members of the priesthood
do not usually realize that their efforts generally do more to undermine
science than to promote it.
Look at the often negative treatment given to excellent
scientists/communicators by their scientific colleagues. It's not
unusual for someone who writes a wildly popular (and informative) book,
or hosts a wildly popular (and informative) to get a hostile reaction
from purist colleagues.
Don't get me started about scientists who think it's beneath them to
speak to their public information staff, much less the press as a whole.
Sure, journalists screw up, but they don't screw up all the time and
they would screw up less if they had more cooperation from the source.
Besides, given the source of most of the research funding in many
disciplines, scientists have an obligation to reach out to the people
paying the tab -- i.e., THE PEOPLE.
I offer an anecdote about the discomfort too many in the sciences have
with speaking in terms understandable by the masses. My first book,
"Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science
Revolution," seemed a natural choice for a review in Eos (Transactions
of the American Geophysical Union). The editors declined to review it
because it wasn't "technical enough."
Now, I've been attending scientific meetings off-and-on for three
decades now, and I know what kinds of stories scientists tell each other
about themselves and their colleagues once they've knocked a few back.
I have to say I found the editors' reasoning rather at variance with the
facts.
Later,
Dave
On 1/18/2010 4:42 AM, William Silvert wrote:
Perhaps then David has managed to escape some of the pressures put on
scientists to write badly. On several occasions I have been accused of
writing scientific papers in a journalistic style and told that this is
not acceptable. Although my reply is usually along the lines of, "Aren't
journalists the people who are forced to take courses on how to write?",
this never seems to sink in. On one occasion my lab director even
sniffed that a paper I had written read like something that might appear
in Scientific American. I was flattered but forced to change it.
My favourite example was the time I wrote a paper in which I argued that
we have to teach the public that there is more to biodiversity than cute
harp seals and fuzzy pandas, and the reviewer complained that if I knew
how to write a scientific paper I would know that words like "cute" and
"fuzzy" are unacceptable, and I should have referred to "charismatic
megafauna". I even had a T-shirt made up with the message "I brake for
charismatic megafauna". Fortunately a few papers I wrote on applications
of fuzzy set theory to ecology made it into print.
I once wrote a paper presenting a general theory of managing
multi-species fisheries, and was informed (see, passive voice!) that the
journal required that the Latin names of the species had to be included.
Given the generality of the theory, I provided the names Squid pro quo
and Dolus fictus, but was eventually forced to use the generic names
"species A" and "species B".
Bill Silvert
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