The scientific style of writing is quite distinct from any other style. One can easily follow the rules about voice and verb tenses, but these are only the most easily definable aspects of this style. The other aspects of the scientific style that make it so unique are less easy to define, but are arguably more important since they deal with the clarity and coherence of the writing, rather than the simple nuts-and-bolts of grammar that any good copy editor can fix. After all, if we’re trying to communicate something, we want to make sure that we will be understood by our reader.
Objectivity
It can be difficult to detach yourself from your work, especially if you have been steeped in it for a long time, and have poured your heart and soul into it. However, it’s important to do so, since articles that are unreasonably positive or make wildly unsupported claims, while ignoring the contributions of others in the field, are often not well regarded by reviewers. So, what does it mean to write with objectivity in a scientific context?
- Make sure the results you present in your paper support any claims of fact, or any conclusions you make.
- Details from work done by others must be properly cited and referenced.
- You must examine your own work as critically as you would any other source – don’t leave out inconvenient results.
- Your introduction should be a fair overview of the current state of research in the field – don’t leave out important works that contradict your results, and don’t only cite your own/your advisor’s previous works.
- If giving your opinion on something, write in terms of what you (the authors) think and not what you feel.
- Make sure that every claim of fact is substantiated.
Formality
Scientific writing is sometimes best known for being incredibly dry, starched and formal. This is not to say that we should all don our top hats and monocles when we write (although if that’s your style, hey – you do you!). Rather, it’s more to say that the style of writing takes into account that the majority of participants are not native English speakers, and thus use of casual or colloquial language can alienate a large portion of your readership. It is certainly possible to incorporate humour (much easier in a thesis where you have more leeway), so long as you respect the linguistic conventions while you do so. Using overly-casual language may lead the journal editor and reviewers to not take your work seriously, and you definitely don’t want to upset the reviewers unnecessarily. Don’t include pop culture references or actual jokes at all, since they translate very poorly in general.
Idioms and sayings should be avoided at all times. If you’re a native English speaker, keep in mind that the sayings (and especially the archaic language we often use in speech without realising) cause easily-avoidable confusion for non-native Speakers. If you’re a non-native English speaker, translating your own familiar sayings directly into English can have unintentionally hilarious results.
Since I’m currently learning Portuguese, Fig. 1 shows a common Portuguese phrase that means “there’s something suspicious going on”. Translated directly into English, the phrase itself doesn’t make sense even though the meaning implied by the phrase is well understood and has an equivalent in almost any language you like. If we take one of the English equivalents “It’s a bit fishy”, we could translate this into Portuguese as “cheiro mal”, but this means “it smells bad” – there being no direct translation to describe the specific smell of fish that’s past its best. So, there may be specific equivalents for what you want to say in your target language, but direct translations usually won’t be understood by the audience. Especially if they are also not native English speakers.
When proofreading, I can usually guess the native linguistic group of the author(s) and who wrote each part by which little sayings are sprinkled into the text. Often, when non-native English speakers use English idioms and sayings it’s because they want to make their writing sound “more English”. Although it usually has the desired effect, I would still caution against using them, for the same reason as above – they may not translate well for your readers. You want to make sure that your writing is accessible to the widest possible audience. Which leads us to….
Be accessible
There have been complaints in recent years about a growing inaccessibility crisis in science. The complaints levelled at journals locking papers behind paywalls and charging exorbitant fees for Open Access are not wrong, but this is an institutional-level problem. There is another type of inaccessibility that is very much under the author’s control.
Jargon.
Sometimes, in a quest to keep a paper short, authors can be tempted to avoid explaining jargon terms because they assume that their readers are all experts in the field who don’t need the terms explained. However, when this is compounded by multiple authors, you can end up with a chain of papers, each referencing the previous and all using jargon. None of them really explain it because, well, “everyone just knows what that means”. Then scientists get frustrated when science is misrepresented in the media. Journalists reporting on science are usually not scientists, or at best may have done a bachelor’s degree in an unrelated science subject, and might not realise that a term commonly used in your narrow, specific research field has a meaning different from the general usage.
To avoid this, from the start of your Ph.D. keep a list of all the terms you encounter that you don’t know the meanings of, or you discover have specific meanings in your field. These words are jargon. If you find a paper in a chain that actually gives you the explanation of the term, keep a note of the reference in your list. When you come to write your thesis, you will need to explain all of them (or quote and reference the originating paper), and it’s good practice to define them in your papers and articles as well.
Another good practice is to get accustomed to expanding acronyms. It’s usually expected that an acronym should be expanded on its first appearance in a manuscript, but you may not be aware that if you use any acronyms in the abstract, you should additionally expand them there. The reason for this is that if a reader has a stack of twenty papers to read, they may only skim the abstracts and conclusions. They may not read the introduction at all if your paper appears only marginally relevant to them so expand acronyms in both places, if you used them.
Get to the point
Academics are under huge pressure to output papers (like geese laying golden eggs for the Journal Industrial Complex). This means that it’s becoming harder and harder to keep up to date with the sheer number of papers published in a field, let alone being a Ph.D. student trying to get caught up with the literature. So, while in general prose we can get away with being a bit vague and woolly (it’s much easier on the eyes to read a sentence that isn’t full of numbers), in the sciences we want to get to the point as quickly as possible. This means a large part of good scientific writing is making life as easy as possible for your reader and not wasting their time with detail-free, flowery language. A scientific paper can be enjoyable to read if the author doesn’t hide the point they’re making inside long, rambling paragraphs. Be concise – get your message across in the shortest way possible.
Be precise and specific
Always try to avoid being vague. For example, I was often told off as a student for my over-use of the word “very”, which is essentially meaningless. If I described something as “very massive”, I would always be asked “how massive?”, because this is what the average reader wonders. Tell the reader exactly how massive The Thing is. If you are comparing the velocities of two Things, don’t just tell the reader which one is the faster (X is faster than Y), tell them the order of magnitude difference (X is 6 times faster than Y). These sorts of details are of more interest to the scientific reader than meaningless fluff words that seem to say a lot, but don’t really. There is a whole family of these words for which you can do a global search in your document, such as “really”, “somewhat”, “large/small”, “quite”, and so on. See what similar words you can find in your writing, and replace them with something quantitative!
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