Sounding scientific, and other bad habits

Scientific formality

The resistance continues. In a thread titled "Against the Active Voice," one of my 28,000 classmates wrote:

I think that in Lecture 1.3 some nice passages from the articles where the passive structures have been transformed sound too simplified for the written text. They do not sound scientific, I mean, after paraphrasing they are meant not for specialists but for ordinary people who know nothing about the subject. 

"They do not sound scientific."

In my experience as a writing teacher, the worst thing that can happen to a poem is the author trying to sound poetic, or worse, poetickal. A poem can aspire to be true, or beautiful, or entertaining, or moving. Merely sounding poetic is too low an ambition. 

Formality does not disappear all at once; today's academic robes, for example, are nearly medieval. In America we don't wear them often, except at convocation and commencement, but when my father was a professor in Australia, there were many occasions to wear the regalia, including weekly dinners. Today's scientists no longer wear frock coats and tails in the lab. Why would they want to write as if they did?

Science should be popularized

My MOOC Blog, Day 6. So why am I studing science writing anyway? I'm not a scientist, nor a science journalist; I'm barely a journalist at all, despite occasional articles in newspapers. No, I am simply more interested in science and math than the average English major. And I read about science.

Writers who "popularize" science for the rest of us--Lucretius, George Gamow, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Gina Kolata, Rebecca Skloot--are sometimes looked down upon, but I look up to them all. Science is too important to be left to the scientists. If more writers were explaining climate change and global warming right now, there might be fewer politicians talking nonsense about it.

In 1962, when it was still being said that only a dozen people in the world understood Einstein's theory of relativity, Martin Gardner (1914-2010) brought out a book, Relativity for the Million, that a 10-year-old could read, so I did. My favorite part was about how the Michelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of the ether wind. 

I also devoured Gardner's books of mathematical games and puzzles, drawn from his Scientific American columns, and The Annotated Alice edition of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which contains hundreds of what may be the most enjoyable footnotes ever written.*

I've been thinking about other books I read as a child. I had absolute permission from my parents to read any book I found, as if they could have stopped me. I seem to have opened up every book in the house, although if it was boring or too far over my head I would put it back down after a few pages. In adult life since I have often started a book and instantly realized that I'd already read the first couple of pages decades before.**

But here's the thing I really wanted to say. Martin Gardner was one of my favorite writers, and he was quite prolific, with dozens of books to his credit. Why have I read only a few? Why haven't I collected them all?

Some readers and many book collectors just "Gotta catch 'em all." Gardner's list would be both achievable and affordable, especially if I opted for "reading copies" instead of first editions in mint condition. I know of a collector who did that for Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, finding every possible edition and translations in every language from 1776 onward.

But that's not how I read or buy. I find a book I like and read it again and again. I have read the entire oeuvre of very few writers I care about, and only if their corpus is relatively small and important. James Joyce? I've read all five books. JK Rowling? Ten out of 11. Isaac Asimov? If anybody in the entire world has read every one of his more than 500 books, I'd like to meet him.*** Or her.**** 

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* I have decided that all of my footnotes ought to be extremely entertaining. Sorry about this one..

** There is some dispute about whether there is any such thing as a photographic memory. I read that somewhere. 

***  If you are that person, I will buy you lunch and hear your explanation for this bizarre act of fandom.

**** You also get lunch, but will have even more to explain.

(This essay is re-posted with some revisions from my other blog, Waiting For Hungry.)

Why are scientists nervous about plain speaking?

On the SciWri discussion board, several of my classmates have posted objections to our teacher's simplification and dejargonization of example texts.  One student did not approve of "cancer" replacing "malignant transformation." Another disliked "newborns" for "neonates."

All specialized training teaches new vocabulary, and part of the initiation into any profession includes adopting that new language, and if you don't, you won't be fully accepted into the tribe.  Problem is, you won't always be writing for people who share your private dialect. Even if they are also scientists, they might hail from a different specialty that calls things by different names, or even from exactly your own specialty but from a different era, before the latest, hippest lingo was current.

Or they might not be native speakers of English, and are struggling with the material, made worse by specialized jargon. (Unless they are Dutch and speak far better English than you do.)

You know how cops talk in court?  How they "exit the patrol vehicle" instead of getting out of the car? (See Val Van Brocklin's tell-all article "Cops Talk Funny," at http://www.officer.com/article/10249040/cops-talk-funny. ) The thing is, I'm certain that cops don't talk that stilted way in the locker room, to other cops. They "code-switch" to plain English when they want to tell the real truth.

Imagine if we could all code-switch to plain English and never switch back.

Strunk & Who? or would that be Strunk & Whom?

There is no required textbook for the course, only a list of recommended readings, mostly style guides like Zinsser and Strunk & White. But there's another Strunk you might want to consider: Strunk & Pritchard.

Stanford Pritchard lives here in Middlebury. He's a jazz musician, a novelist, and generally a man of letters. Stan discovered that the original Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., published in 1918, had gone out of copyright. So he did exactly what E.B. White did in 1959: he entered into a posthumous collaboration with Strunk,updating the older book. Strunk & Pritchard is a steal at $2.99 for Kindle or $9.95 in paperback. You can buy your copy at the Vermont Book Shop, or at Amazon.

My MOOC Blog, Day 3: Editing Oscar's New Legs

I'm sprinting through the course. It's only Day 3, but I've already watched all the modules for Weeks 1 and 2, taken all the pertinent quizzes, and finished the homework. I'll probably be slowing down, though, because by the end of the Week 2 material, the problems were getting harder. Here's a passage we were asked to make shorter and clearer.

"The lower external joint moments at the knee and hip joints, the lower mechanical work at the knee joint during stance, the lower energy loss in the prosthetic ankle joint, and the lower total body mechanical work in each ground contact leads to the assumption that running with dedicated prostheses allows the double transtibial amputee sprinter to run at the same level of performance as able-bodied controls, albeit, at lower metabolic costs."

That's a 72-word sentence. It's not only opaque, it's built upside down. The point, buried at the end, is that a person with both legs amputated below the knee, like Oscar Pistorius, can with the right prostheses sprint as fast as a person with two intact legs, and in fact, can do it using less energy. How do they do that? With all the advantages created by their new blades, painstakingly enumerated in the first half of the sentence, to a reader who doesn't yet know why he's being told all this stuff.

My version, in only 49 words, was this: "Even after double amputations below the knee, with the right prostheses, a sprinter can run as fast as an able-bodied runner, and use less energy doing so, because these prostheses offer lower moments at knee and hip joints, less mechanical knee work, and less energy consumed by ground contact."

The course, after showing me a model answer but assuring me that I did not have to have matched it exactly, asked if I thought my version had improved upon the original. I said it had.

Two ways this is different from my first time through college: I’m doing all my homework, turning it in early, and then getting to grade my own quizzes. It’s a thrill.

My MOOC Blog, Day 2

MY MOOC BLOG, Day 2. In the library parking lot yesterday I ran into Bryan Alexander and because I know he is interested in such things, I told him I had signed up for a MOOC. He was with his son, who excitedly said that it was his dad who invented the term MOOC! Bryan confirmed that he was indeed one of the devisers of the acronym; Wikipedia identifies the other as Dave Cormier. 

(In case you didn’t know, I should add that MOOC is pronounced MOOK, and not, for example, MOO-CEE. You might think this because ROTC is ROT-CEE, and GUI, the acronym for Graphical User Interface, is universally “GOOEY.”)

Hail to all namers! Giving new things their first memorable names is an important act. I recall the exact moment, probably in 1980, when I first noticed the word “hypertext.” It appeared on a sign posted next to a glowing blue computer screen in the downstairs hallway of the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.  On the screen was text with certain words marked as clickable, although we didn’t have that word yet, because this was all in the dark pre-mouse days. Maybe you used the arrow keys? I clicked around on a few words, which were linked to other pages. After a few minutes I decided that hypertext was theoretically a good idea but wasn’t going to amount to anything.

What can I say? I’m a notorious late adopter in all areas of technology, as I have publicly confessed at http://goo.gl/WO417Z.  

My MOOC Blog, Day 1

I'm taking Stanford University's Writing in the Sciences course, taught by Kristin Sainani. MOOC means Massive Open Online Course. "Massive" in this case equals 22,000 students, and this is a writing class. Can Prof. Sainani grade that many essays? Of course not; when it comes to that part of the course, we will be commenting on each other's writing. I must hope that my classmates are sincere seekers of wisdom, not Internet trolls.

As for "Open," that should mean that anyone can take part, but we're already hearing from students in Pakistan whose access to YouTube is blocked by the government and will need to find another way to view the videos.

So I watched the mini-lectures, a set of short videos, very well done, very straightforward. Sainani says that even when writing scientific papers, we may use plain and direct English. The discussion board immediately erupted. Won't simple style fail to impress editors? The question must come from somebody who has never met an editor. The ones I know sing hosannas of joy when they receive manuscripts that are already clear and readable, and which they will not need to spend hours untangling.

Stay tuned as I undergo my 8-week education in science writing. Maybe after that, Gina Kolata will finally approve my friend request.