Writing Science in Plain English by Anne E. Greene (review)

What fun! Writing Science in Plain English is entertaining, informative, and thought provoking; in short, it is an able introduction to academic writing. Although aimed at the sciences, the target audience is almost as broad as all academia—Greene certainly includes the social sciences in her definition. The real originality of this book is in its demonstrations of how scientific prose is improved by critical self-editing. Greene develops many bad pieces of text into good, encouraging the readers to take a red pen to their own writing. This approach is well reinforced by relevant exercises for which model answers are included in an appendix. Otherwise, Greene’s book follows a well-trodden path, but she lets us look over her shoulder as she follows her map.

Greene is not slow to go for the jugular of the weak science writer, claiming that most scientific literature is ‘poorly written’ (1). This remark is tame compared with some of the quoted comments: ‘Scientific writing is “unnecessarily dry, difficult to read, obscure, and ambiguous”’ (1) and “‘obscure, convoluted, jargonistic, or impenetrable”’ (2). Well, of course it is. This is how scientists write—their writing conveys little intelligence to few readers. My personal view is that however bullish a fellow scientist may be in a discussion or an oral presentation, once they turn on the word processor, the bull becomes a mouse. I think that scientists have it drummed into them that scientific literature is boring to read, so they write boring prose because this is what is expected of them. There is little aspiration to be better than the norm, as the norm will always get published somewhere or other. So, why bother to write differently from the rest of the crowd? This idea parallels Billig’s discussion of academic writing in the social sciences:¹ we all write the same way to fit in.

Does Greene have a solution? Well, maybe if the bad writers (who presumably believe that their scribble is at least OK) can be persuaded to read Writing Science and act upon it. It is easy to be cynical, but it would be a lot easier if the cure were something that could be added to the water supply. Having read other worthwhile guides like Greene’s, I have never seen copies of any of them on the desks or shelves of those colleagues who might benefit from them. Is it like religion—only the true believers hear the message?

Greene’s solution is a list derived from a book that I have yet to read, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams.² Greene’s list is logical, but perhaps not easy for a scientist to digest: ‘Readers look for a story about characters and actions; for strong verbs close to their subjects; for old information at the beginnings of sentences and new information at the ends; and for specific kinds of information in predictable places in paragraphs and documents’ (3). Greene is thus not considering what scientists write, but how to improve something that is usually difficult to understand. Greene is probably correct in identifying the same problem across most disciplines, but, if so, surely by limiting the book to science in the title she is missing out on a potentially wider audience.

Of course, planning is the key—what are you writing and who do you expect to read it? I think most scientists are better at answering the what than the who; I may be the other way around. The what is a moveable feast in many cases. I have written papers that transformed into something subtly different from what was intended. Nobody has ever commented on this to me, so either I am the only one who does this or we all do it without even noticing.

Greene advocates that we concentrate on audience, tone, and register when writing. There are those who can only write...