Would Chuck Terhark like a job writing science abstracts?

Thank you so much for posting this. I'm working on a paper for a shall-remain-nameless journal. The journal's rules make it very difficult to write interesting, understandable papers. I'll produce a paper that conforms to its standards - after all, we need publication here - but I fail to understand why science writing must be dull and, in this case, poorly structured.

It makes science writing so much harder to read!

And what did Dr. Norton think of Terhark's write-up?

[I think it's pretty good too]

I don't know -- somebody should go to her talk and ask her! (Unfortunately, I can't make it -- I'm going to be locked up in lab until 5pm that day, and it's 3 hours away. Can somebody please invent a teleporter?)

when I was child, when it rained, I would go about and pick snails that were 'stuck together' and pull them apart.
I don't think I ever came across a pair where either member did not have both male and female parts engaged. So I'm modestly surprised to learn they sometimes play only one role.

The pervasive use of the passive voice in scientific writing makes my brain hurt. My advisor and I used to argue about this all the time, with him "passivating" everything I wrote and me trying to sneak back in with real writing.

It still tries to sneak back into the fiction that is written.

Snails which are simultaneous hermaphrodites have an awesome range of options in mating. One of their sexual choices I can see translating best into a popular talk are the slugs that after mating turn around and bite off their partners penis. It doesn't happen every time and the evolutionary advantages derived from this behavior and when exactly it occurs are the subject of hot debate. Great post you got a malacologist excited.

Last week I attended a meeting on evolutionary change in human altered environments and a focus of the meeting was translating science to a more general audience specifically to policy makers so that evolutionary biology science (and science in general) informs policy. As a group we weren't very sucessful at this but it was a good start.

I wonder why scientists are still, as a group, so leery of writing for a popular audience. Doesn't the training process select for an ability to communicate clearly? I don't want to think that most scientists can't popularize well, but why the resistance? I recently finished reading The Demon-Haunted World, and a considerable section of the book is devoted to the failure of science to popularize itself effectively in the United States, and an exhortation to working scientists (who, come to think of it, aren't really the primary audience for the book) to make some effort to communicate with the public.

So, if Sagan couldn't do it, who can? Why the persistent failure? Is it the public's fault? The scientists'? The media for failing to publish anything half as good as COSMOS in the last twenty years? (I really do think The Ancestor's Tale would make an excellent miniseries; it has a strong unifying narrative, and plenty of interesting anecdotal episodes.)

A few words of praise: I hadn't taken biology since freshman year of high school. This blog (and The Ancestor's Tale) sparked an interest, and I've been learning about evolutionary biology ever since. My father's a surgeon, but was initially a biologist. He hadn't studied it since the early seventies, and was fascinated when I mentioned Hox genes--it was something that had been utterly mysterious when he'd been learning about development. I forwarded him the articles you'd written about Hox genes, and he was enlightened. So, for two people at least, you've filled an important need I never knew I had. Thanks.

I grew up on the science writing of Asimov. He was a genius at making science an interesting 'human' enterprise while not sacrificing clarity. I bet he hooked more people on science than anyone, ever.

I also thought Clarke, Sagan, Gould, and Ley were great in their own way too.

Is there anyone out there currently writing great science for laymen?

Thorby

Just a quick addendum to the discussion of why scientific writing is so dry, which I think is important enough to deserve a mention: precision! Scientists have to be very careful about the claims they're making, and a loose description of their results can easily imply interpretations not supported by the data. We may be enthused about possibilities for our results, but we (unlike purveyors of woo) have to respect the truth and not take things further than we can support.

I'm a mathematician, and of course our jargon is so dense it's regularly satirized, but it's necessary to describe a true statement; waving your hands and saying "partitions count representations" is nice, but you can't prove anything about that until you've defined your terms.

Like the other elements of scientific style mentioned, I find this need for total precision slipping into my own writing in other fields. The result isn't so much dry as ploddingly paced and overly detailed, its recitation of possible cases exhausting in its exhaustiveness.

Yes -- the scientific style is well-honed and efficient, and I think we'd all be very upset if PubMed filled up with enthusiastic abstracts loaded with adjectives and pop-culture references. The current style is good for communicating precisely and with brevity to our peers, and I would hope we don't change it.

I'm just saying that when we aren't talking to our peers, we need to be aware of a necessary change in style. What works for fellow experts in our disciplines is a complete turn-off to someone on the outside.

You do a great job of science writing PZ. And as a daily reader of Pharyngula, I think part of the reason is that you craft the science into a story, usually with some kind of connection to the hot buttons you praise in the above comparison.

Most people aren't scientists and sad to say, they're not that interested in pure facts (Why, I have no idea, but there it is). But almost everyone loves a good story. We learn as children from stories, we are entertained by movies that tell good stories. You're a teacher, so you probably take your story telling style for granted and assume after years of tweaking it that it's easy. But I don't think it is easy, it takes work and experience, and you have to take a chance and maybe publicly fall flat on your ass in the learning process. I really wonder, scientists obviously have more to lose if they fall flat when creating a science story than I do as science blogging hobbyist. When I screw up, a bunch of people might read it, but there's no professional rep on the line for me. Do you think this concern is prohibitive among your peers, maybe because they're accustomed to the rigor of peer review where their best friends rip them to shreds?

Hear, hear. Great post. Great example.

Some journals like PLoS Biology, Science, and Nature have little informal articles that describe the research of the papers in an engaging manner. For example, this summary from PLoS Biology (open access; no subscription needed). Maybe not as sexy as the snail mating example, but still understandable to people who don't study pollination who probably would skip the actual paper.

I wonder if the cost to your reputation if you fall flat is the problem or just the fact that there often is not any reward for public outreach of this form? If science outreach and education is not part of tenure and promotion review considerations then for many scientists there is a negative pressure on this kind of activity. It could be considered a distraction from your actual work and would have to be done in (non-existent) spare time.

It is also worth consideration of whether your research has implications beyond your immediate scientific field. Your institution may prefer you are not out informing the public of your results for reasons of local politics.

That's something I also mentioned in the Thursday discussion: there is virtually no professional reward for public outreach. I think that's changing -- I've gotten some positive feedback from my peers -- but it's still a simple fact of life that talking to a few hundred laypeople about the importance of a whole scientific discipline has almost no weight in a CV compared to speaking to a handful of your peers at a poster session. It's right that there is a lot of resistance to changing that -- I would hesitate to recommend any changes to tenure and promotion policy along those lines myself -- but there ought to be mechanisms in place to value popularization in addition to (definitely not in place of) traditional scholarship.

Do snails have sex? Yes, whether their shells coil clockwise or counterclockwise, they can screw around.

There was the Math department visitor's lecture, where the visitor, a day or two beforehand, phoned in the title of the talk to the department secretary: "Convex Sets." An announcement of the talk was posted on the usual hallway bulletin boards.

The visitor was astounded to find a lecture hall overflowing with audience.

The talk notice had been posted with what the secretary thought she'd heard: "Convicts and Sex."

"there is virtually no professional reward for public outreach."

So which rich benefactor, ideally one who is otherwise facing the ravages of history, should we pester to create the "public outreach" version of the Nobel? Does the Gates foundation have enough left over to create such a prize? Is there already a "Carl Sagan" award that needs to get a boost in award level and publicity?

Kathryn wrote

I wonder if the cost to your reputation if you fall flat is the problem or just the fact that there often is not any reward for public outreach of this form? If science outreach and education is not part of tenure and promotion review considerations then for many scientists there is a negative pressure on this kind of activity.

That's a very important consideration. When I was up for promotion to full professor I had the great good fortune of having a Provost (Academic Vice President) who appreciated the importance of science popularization. I'd written a series of essays for the old Committees of Correspondence on Science Education, and he not only permitted them to be considered as a positive element in the evaluation, he specifically alluded to them when my promotion was announced.

But that's rare. I note that all of the examples cited above -- people like Sagan, Gould, and Dawkins -- were pretty well established before they began publishing their popularizations. The security of seniority is an important variable here.

Sagan was hurt by his popularizations. He was blackballed from National Academy of Sciences voting by scientists expressing sour grapes over his Cosmos TV series, bestselling books, and Johnny Carson appearances, while they each had a handful of readers of dry acadenic papers.

Isaac Asimov told some stories about how his growing popularity hurt him at Boston U. Medical School when he was a professor.

Actually, that wasn't at all bad as far as science writing goes. It had "We found" and "Blah should determine X" and so on. I do wonder, sometimes, why scientists can't translate "We found a positive relationship between body size and total number of eggs produced, as well as body size and number of eggs per egg mass." into "We found that the larger the snail, the more eggs it produced and the more eggs were in each egg mass." They have stopped at formal, slightly mathematical language. They could take one more step into standard English, retaining only technical terms where needed, without losing precision. In our minds, I think we translate "a positive relationship" into "bigger snail... more eggs." At least I do.

I have read Einstein's Relativity; and it is perfectly plain and readable. But writing plainly is hard work. Stock phrases spring to mind too easily. Remember how people automatically switch into stuffy "memo language" when they want to write a short notice. I estimate that it would take one or two more revision cycles, until people got used to it, to satisfy everyone that the wording remained accurate.

However, I think it would be worth it. The less brain power we use deciphering language, the more we have left for thinking about what it means. Clear language can make reviewing faster and help everyone to see mistakes, omissions, or fuzzy thinking. That is a benefit to researchers in the field; benefits to outsiders are side effects.

The same problem affects history, and physics, and chemistry, and geography.

And life. No one wants to hear somebody else's troubles, everybody watches some kind of soap opera,which is just somebody else's troubles.

The ability to take everyday subjects -- say, teen interest in the opposite sex -- and make them very interesting is why some writers can command big bucks (think Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet).

We should celebrate good writers more. How many of us sent Carl Zimmer a Valentine?

Mona Albano hits the nail on the head. We can't place all the blame for bad writing on journal formats and editors. If we don't train young scientists to write, and value, vigorous prose, we shouldn't be surprised if science writing is often clunky. As in any creative endeavor, quality=content*design.

I was at the same conference Kathryn mentions above on Evolutionary change in human-altered environments, and agree with her observations. Most of the talks and the conference as a whole were quite fascinating, not to mention rather alarming when contemplating the mismatch between rates of evolutionary change and rates of (human-driven) environmental change, and the implications thereof for biodiversity. Most of the speakers, therefore, made a strong case for explicitly incorporating evolutionary process into the framework of conservation biology and policy. I'm working on an essay summarizing my experience at the conference and hope to share it with others soon, because I think some of the messages are very important.

But getting back to the topic of this discussion about communicating science, the organizers (Tom Smith and colleagues from the Center for Tropical Research @ UCLA) had done a good job of orienting the conference towards addressing actual policy, by inviting some policy makers to speak, and devoting the entire last afternoon to a panel discussion on policy implications, which was great. All the scientific speakers were also asked to address policy implications of their research - and this was where most talks were weakest, even though the science was excellent, and well articulated (for the most part). Note that the policy audience was definitely not the lay public - these were people working in govt. and NGO policy positions, often with good scientific training themselves. Yet, it seemed to me, many of the scientists were struggling to communicate with them - especially when put on the spot, for example, by some sharp questions during the panel discussion by Mary Nichols (the moderator of the panel, and director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment) who was channeling the Governator as an example of a politician who would need to execute policy.

If we have trouble translating and distilling our ideas and discoveries to a highly educated, motivated, and sympathetic audience, how are we going to communicate with lay people who are often turned off of science by other elements in the media (not to mention those who are more-or-less actively hostile to science)? We do indeed have our work cut out to turn the rising tide of scientific ignorance in this country - and some of the emerging patterns in the ecological arena make this even more urgent. But there again lies an added challenge - how to make the science engaging and compelling without sounding too alarmist about the implications - because that puts people off too!

This is one of the reasons I appreciate what you do, PZ, and recommend your blog to my students and others all the time. And you have also inspired me to incorporate this medium of communication into my teaching: I have started a group blog for one of my graduate classes (Reconciliation Ecology) to encourage the students to learn and practice communicating science to a general audience. If we want better science writing in the public arena, not only do we have to encourage ourselves (scientists) to do more of it, we must, as educators, also help create the next generation of science writers.

So I'm modestly surprised to learn they sometimes play only one role.

I'd have been more suprised if all umpteen thousand species of snails had turned out to have the same mating behavior...

It's a very formal style in which the passive voice is encouraged, [rest of long sentence in the passive]

At least the times seem to be largely over when people called themselves "the present author" instead of "I".

Speaking of the mating habits of pulmonate gastropods, when I first read Libby Hyman's description of what European slugs do together, in her Mollusca I, I got so hot and bothered that I almost had to go take a cold shower. Now that is science writing!

PZ, even as a non-scientist trying to engage my peers in discussions of some of the fascinating stuff that I find here, at Talk.Origins, and even at the Panda's Thumb, I get responses that indicate people would really rather be talking about something else. But, at least I am piqued enough to want to go back to school and major in biology and a large part of it has to do with what you write here.

And I have been able to get some very stubborn people to understand that Evolution is not Darwin vs God using what you have written. (Your writings on atheism are pretty good, too.)

If there was a meaningful way that I could express my appreciation, I would gladly do it; but not having the money of Charles Simonyi, I am not sure what else I can do. Keep slogging, though, it is well worth it to me at least.

This is a fascinating discussion, and I'm very impressed by the great ideas floating out of the comments. Right now, I've got to mark a bunch of essays, so I don't have time to really think my opinions on this through.

I've posted my brief reactions to this comment thread on my own blog, and I'd be highly delighted if anyone here could drop by and provide some input. Now I'm just begging for blog traffic, so I'll go now.

PZ, even as a non-scientist trying to engage my peers in discussions of some of the fascinating stuff that I find here, at Talk.Origins, and even at the Panda's Thumb, I get responses that indicate people would really rather be talking about something else.

I know. I mean, everyone likes dinosaurs, right? But I can be at lunch and be like, "Hey, I read about this raptor that flew like a biplane!" and everyone's just like... "'Kay."

I thought it was awesome...

I worked for scientists, medicos, for 15 years at a well known university. I did not have a scientific background as I was released into the wild at a rather young age to make my way and missed the opportunity for formal higher education. Translation: got the boot at 16 in Grade 13, our last year of high school then.

I did read a lot of journals, edited and also wrote parts of manuscripts and grants as a factotum at the uni and really enjoyed it.

I vastly prefer the actual abstract to the newspaper article because I find it more interesting but I have no illusions about being in the minority among the untrained.

I'm involved in researching and fighting lies right now, so my 'training' has come in handy. I was lucky in that I had some of the best known people in their fields handy for brain-picking and explanations - they were nice that way. I learned about critical appraisal, confidence intervals, checking references, how to read figures and tables critically, and so on and so forth.

Anything that helps to get people interested in learning rather than just repeating can only be good. Whatever will work to spark their interest should be run.

Even comic books. Even those funny little religious comic books I used to collect, except make them about science and reason. Leave them all over the place for people to find. Hmmmm...

"I know. I mean, everyone likes dinosaurs, right? But I can be at lunch and be like, "Hey, I read about this raptor that flew like a biplane!" and everyone's just like... "'Kay."

"I thought it was awesome..."

I get the sense that you are mocking me, Chinchillazilla. Well, just wait until I get rich. There will be no Chair for you.

It can help to hire an editor. Some people specialize in science editing or technical editing, but just getting someone who can point out where we're ambiguous, inconsistent, or convoluted can help. It could be part of peer reviews; I mean, writers use peer editing, which means we read each others' stuff for rough patches that need to be reworked--everything from assumptions about what people know to typographical errors.

Selma, the comic books are a charming idea; Larry Gonick is very successful, after all.

It could be part of peer reviews; I mean, writers use peer editing, which means we read each others' stuff for rough patches that need to be reworked--everything from assumptions about what people know to typographical errors.

Anyone feel like founding and editing the Journal of Public Dissemination of Science? If we're going to do peer-review, we might as well do it right.

While we're at it:
The Journal of the Pharyngulan Society
Studies in Pharynguloidisms
Fire-Breathing Atheist Policy Quarterly

and for pure silliness:
Proceedings of the Society of Rabid, Evil Atheists (Series C, Baby-cooking and Kitten-roasting)

Selma and clew: Absolutely. Chick tracts are very good at communicating a simple idea. What kinds of scientific ideas are amenable to this kind of presentation? Perhaps an explanation of the scientific method? Why there's no Atlantis (an explanation of seafloor spreading patterns)?

A potential problem is audience. If you write a tract about how the human chromosome 2 looks very similar to a pair of smaller chromosomes from other great apes, tacked together, you'll fly right over the heads of the "what's a chromosome?" crowd.

Perhaps a telling-a-story method might work. There's plenty of good science stories; maybe the discovery that H. pylori causes stomach ulcers, or... well, something clever; I don't know what.

You might start with Galileo, then move along through history. Little comic plays.

Can we still have the big guy in the chair with no head who 'checks the book' for the protagonist's name to see if he's passed?

Maybe a sinner who supports mythology and then, through the guidance of a mysterious figure in a hooded lab coat, sees the light for what it really is (refracted particles)? Repents, etc, takes a few courses, compares nonsense with proven fact and finally - passes his exams and joins the good guys?

Too corny, I guess...but lots of plot possibilities.

But, see, saying "a positive relationship between body size and total number of eggs produced, as well as body size and number of eggs per egg mass" is NOT the same statement as "the larger the snail, the more eggs it produced and the more eggs were in each egg mass." The authors are reporting a correlation, not a hard-and-fast rule; there were undoubtably some large snails with small clutches, etc.; the former statement is, therefore more precise.

Similarly there is a good reason for using passive voice; it puts the emphasis of the sentence on what was done (which is the point) instead of making the sentence's subject (in the grammatical sense) who did it.

Writing well for a general audience is a skill that can only be trained to a point. You've got to have some natural talent, and a good ear for the way that people actually talk.

People who specialize into a science are generally people who are talented at the style of thought that prevails there, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise that they tend not to be the people who are most talented with language. The people who are most talented with language tend to enter fields that are focused around [gasp] language.

In a way, expecting scientists and engineers to be able to write charmingly for the layman is like expecting them to be able to put together a football team. Some of them could undoubtedly perform well in a beer-league, but most of them would understandably fall flat on their faces.

For the majority who can't talk with clarity in layspeak, the only obvious solution is to collaborate with a writer who can be made to understand the science. I'm not expecting to see a journal abstract start with something like, "wassup, peeps! you're gonna love this."

PZ Myers: One approach that is being taken (re: outreach) in some philosophy programs is the willingness of some PhD programs to allow students to elect "teaching philosophy" as one of their subject specialities or competencies. Perhaps this might be part of the way to go.

I would happily take a course about teaching or popularizing my work during my PhD in evolutionary genetics. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be offered this year.

Was anyone else reminded of the Monty Python sketch about the sex life of molluscs?

So I'm modestly surprised to learn they sometimes play only one role.

I'd have been more suprised if all umpteen thousand species of snails had turned out to have the same mating behavior...

It's a very formal style in which the passive voice is encouraged, [rest of long sentence in the passive]

At least the times seem to be largely over when people called themselves "the present author" instead of "I".