

The Science of Scientific Writing (1990) - wamatt
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-scientific-writing

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luos
There is a class on coursera going about scientific writing if anyone
interested:

<https://class.coursera.org/sciwrite-2012-001/class/index>

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elteto
Non-paginated, printer friendly version here [1]

[1]
[http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.877,y.0,no.,conte...](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.877,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx)

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Eliezer
It might be that my standards are too high - I'm accustomed to reading how-to-
write books written by the likes of Orson Scott Card - but I'm a bit worried
that the article itself isn't as well-written as it should be. Maybe you need
unnecessarily pollysyllabic linguistics for scientists to pay attention to you
at all, but it's still a bit worrisome when it comes to my deciding how much
to trust the advice.

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davidvaughan
I regret to announce that I share your sentiments with regard to the
circumloquacious fashion of the writing in that article.

I think we've made progress since it was written. Eye-tracking shows how we
read and which words or letter combinations trip us up.

By the way, wouldn't that table naturally have time in the left hand column,
considering it's probably an independent variable, while temperature is
dependent?

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scott_s
As to your final point, the authors were trying to suss out _why_ we want the
independent variable first. Their answer: it provides the context to
understand the significance of the dependent variable.

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Xcelerate
I went on a little bit of a mini-rant a while ago
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4680626>), which, while not so
eloquently worded, attempted to share my frustrations about scientific writing
that this article makes much clearer.

I think it's easy for technical people to write something and think "well,
this is clear to me", so they don't put much additional thought into thinking
about how their writing will come across to others. Someone that writes
journals or articles for a living realizes how important clear communication
of ideas is, and it would be nice to see this carry over into more technical
domains.

~~~
keithpeter
The original article suggests ways of writing that will aid reading, and they
give _reasons_ why the texts they quote are poorly expressed. The article is
_useful_ because of that.

Observation: In the child comments in the post you link to is a comment from
xanmas. This user points out the space constraints on much academic
publishing. I remember papers in experimental physics where the list of
authors took up more space than the text of the paper - however some re-
writing always helps.

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curiousdannii
A reasonable article, however they do not use the term "subject" correctly.
The subject of their example is not just "the smallest", but all of the
following modifiers (adjectives and relative clauses). From "the smallest" to
"subunit 6 gene" is all one noun phrase, albeit a complex one.

The appropriate advice is therefore to have short subject phrases.

