Scientific Writing: Why Scientific Writing Sucks

Biological Writing refers to the writing style and the procedures that are widely used among scientists to present their work to the public. Unlike normal writing, Biological writing tends to be based on collected information (data) and summarized into graphical displays to condense and portray the data in a visual way. Biological writing often employs characteristics that differentiate scientific writing from other types of academic writing. It presents data, graphics and scientific explanations of why things work some way or the other. Unfortunately, many scientists are overwhelmed by all of the work required to write a single paper and, thus, fail miserably to express what they originally planned. All of the intermediary work needed to simplify a paper and putting it together is where scientists fail and that is why scientific writing sucks.

I consider myself to be a proficient writer, I was often involved in the most rigorous writing classes available and my works were highly regarded, or as highly regarded as an undergraduates’ works can be. English Professors tried to convince me to switch majors. They were very satisfied with my work when in fact I was only doing the bare minimum to earn their regards. I worked a lot during Highs School to acquire the writing abilities I possess today but ever since graduation of High School, I have only written when necessary (for class assignments) and I have always been in a different level than most other people around me. I thought, back then, “I can probably write my name on a white sheet of paper and get an A.” When I registered for Biological writing I was expecting an easy A.

However, now that I am currently enrolled in the class, I have learned there is a lot that goes into a scientific paper. Before I can write a paper, I must collect, interpret and summarize the data. In addition, I have to find ways to portray the data for non-scientists. What a difficult task that is. Scientific writing incorporates writing with a lot of different tools. Until now I was not computer literate enough to graph something on Excel. Now I can use many tools that have been lying down for a long time that I did not even know I could use. Even though I hate Excel for all it has put me through, I am semi-proficient and can mess around with it a little. Scientific writing requires ways to condense data and create graphics to represent it. A mistake in the intermediary steps could change the interpretation of the results. For example, if I accidentally graph the wrong values on Excel, my graph would represent something entirely different than what I intended. This step proved quite difficult to me. I spent hours trying to figure out how to graph something, what values to use, how to add error bars and in the end I did not do as hot as I was hoping.

In addition, scientific writing requires a very time consuming research period to collect data. I am glad we used someone else’s data because, otherwise, the project could have been even worse. There are a lot of things going into research. You need to get a representative sample, collect the sample, study the sample before you can even begin to write. A lot of researchers take months or even years to collect a good set of data. Yeah, like I have nothing better to do than see how a shrimp feeds or whatever that I am expected to look for. Seriously! I can’t emphasize how patient people need to be to be able to do research. That is why very few people can nail research although it always helps to do research on something you actually like or are interested on. I guess I will be conducting some research on why chicks dig me a lot ;). Thus, the data collection step adds to the burdens of writing a scientific paper.

Finally, the other reason why scientific writing is so hard is because scientists do not know how to communicate. They think that bigger is better and they try to persuade people to believe what they claim by using big scientific words that a lot of people can’t understand. English teachers would always say to me, “ the reason we learn vocabulary is to learn a set of words (jargon) that will later be used among professional communities to communicate to a deeper level with less words” or something like that. Now that I am taking Biological Writing and I have learned BIG WORDS like “facilitate, modulate, morphology, utilize, interaction, impact(verb), Et al.” I am told I can’t use them. WTF? Years of learning vocabulary and taking vocabulary quizzes are all meaningless now. The only thing that gives sense to a big part of my education life is gone. I guess I will just deal with it and wander endlessly in agony. At least I try to quit my bad habits of writing long and fancy but a lot of other people just “embrace the suck” and keep on writing ugly scientific papers that not a lot of people can read. What is the point of all the work if no one else can read it? Scientific Jargon destroys the “context” of the papers, oooops I said  a BIG WORD. Yet, the same words are said many times by many scientists and they tend to stick around which makes scientific writing suck.

Therefore, Scientific writing sucks because of three main things: 1) Collecting data is hard and mistakes can be made during the collection of data, 2) Graphics illustrating the scientific principles are inaccurate or misleading and, finally, 3) Because scientists use jargon and fancy writing that not a lot of people can understand rather than simplifying it for the public.