The Exchange, March 2010
the Exchange
In this issue:
by Bob Johnson (wordfixer@yahoo.com)
Previously published in Science Editor 28(4):134-135.
July/August 2005.
“Murder your darlings. “—Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
A sundial in the corner of a garden not far from here bears
this epigram on its base: “The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves
on: Nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor
all your tears wash out a word of it.”
Despite the antique usage, for me those 34 words of Omar Khayyam
distill the brevity of life, the finality of death, and the regret over roads
untaken—and mistaken—in a way longer writings do not. They succeed as an example
of the power of language to capture an idea succinctly.
Editors are paid to
render writing more efficient—to “boil that cabbage down”, in the words of
the old fiddle tune. But how do we do this without writing “stick-English”
(think of the stick-figures in art class) or resorting to a metronomic “procession
of neat monosyllables”, as Amy Einsohn expresses it in The Copyeditor’s Handbook?
How do we compress our authors’ ideas into their irreducible but still graceful
components?
Here are a few suggestions for walking the line between paucity
and gratuitousness.
Prune pointless adjectives
Consider: A tall skyscraper (do you ever see a short one?);
my personal opinion (do you ever have an impersonal one?); in close proximity
(is proximity ever remote?). Not every oak has to be gnarled or every problem
thorny. And what is a guarantee if not absolute?
Strike empty adverbs
Where possible, delete vacuous modifiers and what Sir Ernest
Gowers (in Plain Words: Their ABC calls “adverbial dressing gowns”)—in such
couplets as completely unique, wholly unjustifiable, thoroughly mistaken, woefully
inadequate. Have the courage to leave a word unmodified. If a word is too
weak to stand alone, scour your vocabulary for a stronger one before resorting
to a modifier.
Switch to the active voice
In some documents, you can save a lot of space simply by
switching passive-voice constructions to active. Not only do passive-voice
constructions enfeeble the writing, they require more words. No building company
ever posted a sign in front of a house under construction that said “Pride
in our work is taken by us.” No suitor ever dropped to his knee before his
beloved and proclaimed “You are loved by me.” “We take pride in our work” requires
only six words, and “I love you” only three.
Nuke circumlocution
Circumlocution is omnipresent in today’s academic writing.
It constitutes a form of backdoor passive voice. “These data are indicative
of perturbations to the genome that are deserving of further study.” No. “These
data indicate perturbations to the genome that deserve further study.”
Cull hedge words and intensifiers
In Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and
Grace, Joseph M. Williams
indicts the following “hedge words and intensifiers”, saying that they make
writing appear “not just redundant, but mealy-mouthed”: usually, often, sometimes,
almost, virtually, possibly, perhaps, apparently, somewhat, most, many, some,
may, might, can, could, seem, appear, suggest, indicate, very, pretty, quite,
rather, clearly, obviously, undoubtedly, certainly, of course, indeed, central,
crucial, basic, major, principal, essential, show, prove, and establish.
In
fact, I recommend the entirety of Williams’s chapter (titled “Concision”) as
an admirable summary of the principles of linguistic liposuction. An excellent
list of unneeded words and phrases appears in the Council of Science Editors’
own Scientific Style and Format, sixth edition (pp. 123-6).
Try a bulleted list
Where formatting and style permit, a bulleted
list can eliminate repeated introductory words or phrases. Compare:
“Nellie has high blood pressure. She also has cataracts and
glaucoma. In addition, she suffers from pain in her left hip, left knee, and
left foot.”
With:
"Nellie has:
- High blood pressure.
- Cataracts and glaucoma.
- Pain in her left hip, knee, and foot."
Think like a headline writer
Newspaper editors agonize over
their front pages, where every millimeter is precious. Although inelegant,
“Solons Eye Agenda” captures the idea with fewer characters than “Senators
Consider Schedule”. This breezy approach is inappropriate for elevated prose,
but you get the idea. When you have finished your editing and it appears grammatically
correct, reread it with the idea of using shorter, simpler words and fewer
adjectives and adverbs. Reread, rethink, trim, compress.
Chuckle of the Month
Palo Alto Daily News headline: “Law Aims to Curb Hot Dogs”.
The story is not about improving human nutrition, but about mandating adequate
summertime ventilation for canines in unattended vehicles.
Bob Johnson (wordfixer@yahoo.com) writes the “Word Hawk”
column for Science Editor, the bimonthly publication of the Council
of Science Editors (CSE). Following university training as a biologist, Mr.
Johnson discovered a love for writing and editing, holding senior positions
at Annual Reviews, Frost & Sullivan,
SRI International, and Applied Biosystems. He is a member of the Board of Editors
in the Life Sciences (BELS). He also has a degree in French. In 2000, Mr. Johnson
was language arts editor for the statewide California High-School Exit Examination
(CAHSEE). He was a reviewer of the AMA Manual of Style, 10th Edition (2007),
and the CSE’s Scientific Style and Format, Seventh Edition (2006).
Currently self-employed, his recent work includes editing two books: Is
It You, Me, or Adult A.D.D.? (Pera 2008) and the two-volume Encyclopedia
of Love in World Religions (Greenberg 2007).
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By Geoff Hart (ghart@videotron.ca)
Imagine my surprise when I started preparations for this issue
and discovered I’d completed 10 uninterrupted years as its editor. Wow! Where
did the time go? On the whole, it’s been a satisfying 10 years, and the work
I’ve put in as editor has been a pleasure. I suppose that must be obvious,
otherwise I wouldn’t still be here. Rather than my usual exploration of a specific
aspect of science or scientific communication, I thought it might be interesting
to look back at my 40 editorials to see what kinds of topics I’ve covered over
the years. In no particular order, here are some of the sermons I’ve preached:
Numbers are just the start
Scientists love numbers, but numbers alone are rarely sufficient.
Particularly when we’re trying to reach a general audience, the message won’t
get through if we forget that facts, and particularly raw statistics, don’t
speak for themselves. We must seek ways to make the numbers meaningful to our
audience. This is most apparent when we talk about statistical significance:
mathematical significance is all very well, but numbers also have to be practically
significant (i.e., important). Outliers (things that appear to be statistical
anomalies) often seem to be sufficiently rare that they lack practical significance,
but sometimes they represent a crucial audience we must reach with our message.
Aiming to meet majority needs doesn’t free us of the obligation to consider
whether these outliers are also important.
Practical significance can take different and surprising forms.
For example, we must make an effort to understand the limits of our knowledge’s
scope and applicability for any given audience. Sometimes an idea can only
be carried so far, particularly in the case of metaphors; they’re a powerful
tool for simplifying and communicating more effectively, but they have clear
limits that we must recognize and communicate to our audience.
The social context
Science is a powerful way to analyze our world, and offers
a system of checks and balances and peer review that balance the need for conservatism
(preserving and protecting what works) with the need for change (when new facts
tell us the old understanding is inadequate). No other system of discovery
and discourse offers an equally powerful tool for validating and expanding
our knowledge. However, the scientific method is not universally persuasive
because not everyone is rational, and even the most rational among us has emotions,
prejudices, and preconceptions that interfere with their ability to think.
Particularly when we must communicate outside the scientific community, we
must remember that the tools of rhetoric (persuasion) can be more important
than simple logic.
We must particularly beware the temptation to shut our eyes
to other ways of seeing the world. Sometimes what we see as useful conservatism
becomes atherosclerotic dogma, and a fresh perspective proves the only way
to liberate us from that dogma. Recognizing our own passions and enthusiasms,
and acknowledging that others have different passions and enthusiasms, lets
us find ways to share with others in a way that inspires them to hear and appreciate
and respond emotionally to our message. We must find ways to make even the
dubious and skeptical (perhaps the majority of modern society) understand why
science is interesting and important, and we can’t do it with facts alone.
Science attempts to be ethically neutral, but because it always
exists within a human context, both science and our efforts to communicate
it have ethical implications. We must always consider how this affects our
communication, and take the necessary steps to communicate in an ethical manner.
For example, we must consider the social implications of our message, which
may lie one or more steps beyond the context we think we’re communicating within.
For example, obesity is clearly a health risk, but in over-selling that message,
have we inadvertently encouraged or contributed to the modern cult of female
anorexia? Evangelism of what we consider important is clearly one of our
roles, but we must remember there are consequences whenever we preach.
Words are flawed tools
We must remain aware of the differences among denotation (the
dictionary definition), connotation (how that definition has evolved over time),
and jargon (the idiosyncratic meaning of a word within a given discourse community).
As in the recent case of Pluto losing its status as a planet, a change in
terminology that makes good sense within a particular community (in this
case, planetary scientists) may make no sense to the wider public. In some
cases, it’s doubtful whether we should really try to explain; in others,
trying can be very important indeed.
Given that meanings vary, and that some words and phrases
are more precise than others, it behooves us to do more than just write clearly:
we must also seek ways to error-proof our communication. This relies on a deep
understanding of the numerical and other issues I’ve described earlier in this
editorial. A particular challenge arises when the high-powered jargon our scientist
colleagues use is inappropriate for non-scientist audiences. The solution
is to simplify, but this leads to two problems. First, oversimplification
can mislead by obscuring the true complexity behind an issue. Second, the
repeated need to simplify can mislead us into assuming that our audience
is somehow less intelligent than our scientists—or worse yet, that they are
less intelligent than we are. Even when we really must simplify, we must resist
the urge to “dumb it down” (a phrase I’ve heard many scientists use). Our audience
deserve respect; moreover, some audience members are considerably smarter than
we are.
We humans are also flawed
A sad thing about the human brain is that we seem to learn
best from errors. Some errors provide powerful insights into ways to do things
better, but sometimes they’re just the dreaded and humiliating “learning opportunity”.
We must remain aware of the risk of error, but rather than fearing it, we
should take advantage of its ability to teach us how to do better next time.
Errors are also important in the work of our scientist colleagues, since
science is often dangerous to scientists—but it is also dangerous to those
who use the results of research and often to unanticipated audiences. Risk
analysis and crisis communication are important but often neglected aspects
of our work. My review of an important recent book on risk and crisis communication
should appear in the May 2010 issue of Technical Communication, and will
eventually make its way into this newsletter.
Examining our assumptions—sometimes with help from others
less blind to them than we are—is a powerful tool for reducing miscommunication.
Our personal view of the world and of any communication situation is inevitably
biased, flawed, and vulnerable to our unexamined preconceptions. In this context,
our choice of words can have a surprisingly powerful influence on how we
think about a situation. For example, scientists tend to think in binary
terms, expressing situations as “either... or...”, and we can fall into this
trap too when we try to simplify complex situations for an inexpert audience.
Reality is far more complex and interesting, with many shades of grey. Though
binary dichotomies are useful ways to simplify, we must not let them blind
us to the true complexity or its consequences, particularly when we try to
quantify the unquantifiable; science emphasizes numbers, but many things
(such as emotion or pain) are not easily quantified.
All of this relates to a theme I’ve touched on repeatedly:
the notion that other perspectives are essential. However, they are not always
to be welcomed. Sometimes the ill-informed, or those with an anti-science agenda,
must be met in open verbal combat to prevent dangerous misconceptions from
taking hold.
New ways to communicate
Even traditional magazines such as Scientific
American (more
than 150 years old at this point) are dabbling with new approaches such as
interactivity, and have begun moving their communication online to improve
dialogue with their readers. Our SIG has an e-mail discussion group (see the
last page of the newsletter for details), but we rarely see any messages. How
could we change that? Creativity is an important part of who we are and what
we do for a living, so I urge you to apply that creativity to finding ways
to make our online presence work better for you. Rick Sapir of STC’s
Technical Editing SIG has done some impressive
things with their Web site by implementing a range of Web 2.0 technologies.
If these interest you, write in to suggest how we could use them—or better
still, volunteer to implement them for us.
One peril of such technologies is that online information
becomes transient. How can we preserve important information that flits past
via tweets, e-mail messages, temporary blogs, and the like? Possibly we need
to ask the professional archivists to help us find ways to capture and preserve
this short-lived knowledge.
Financial pressures forced us to move our newsletter online
back in early 2003, and on the whole, the transition went smoothly—except for
the many SIG members who think we’ve stopped publishing because they never
got the message. That’s both a warning (we should never assume communication
has occurred) and a call to action: if you know someone who could benefit from
reading this newsletter, please share it with them.
Where possible, I’ve tried to attend STC’s annual conference
and bring back interesting tidbits. Though our newsletter is important, you
learn so much more from being present in person and having a chance to talk
things through. (That’s not a new way to communicate, but rather an old one
we’ve forgotten and that deserves to be renewed.) One joy I’ve experienced
many times over the years is listening to someone speak passionately about
something that might not, at first glance, seem to have much application to
my work. But I’ve stopped counting how many times an obscure fact, approach,
or reference mentioned in a talk improved my own work. I’ve always appreciated
how STC’s different perspective on communication improves my scientific communication.
In turn, I try to apply some of science’s perspectives to the challenges
faced by other STC members.
Some things remain the same
That’s a whirlwind tour of a 10 years of musing at much greater
length. If these themes intrigue you, visit
our newsletter archive and read
the full articles from which I extracted these nuggets.
One constant for most of my editorial career has been the
inclusion of a range of quotes in the newsletter, not all of which related
clearly to a given issue’s articles. Some disdain quotes as a shallow form
of pedantry, but I’ve always considered a really good quotation to be one that
encapsulates something important in a few pithy words or phrases. By including
quotes, I’m not secretly trying to show my erudition. Rather, it’s because
the quote revealed something to me or spoke to one of my deep beliefs, and
I wanted to share it with you in the hope that it would spark an insight, make
you smile, or otherwise make you pause a moment and ponder.
Another thing hasn’t changed much since I began this work,
but this one’s less pleasant: it remains an ongoing challenge to find articles—I
even wrote an editorial to complain about this back in 2002. Here’s hoping
that with a new decade, some of you will be inspired to contribute. It doesn’t
have to be much: long, short, or in between, it’s all fine with me. So long
as it’s something you’re passionate about and you make an effort to communicate
that passion, I’m confident our readers will enjoy it too. It’s been an interesting
10 years. Here’s hoping the next 10 will be equally enriching.
Top of page
Landrum, R.E. 2008. Undergraduate Writing in Psychology: Learning
to Tell the Scientific Story. American Psychological Association, Washington,
DC. [ISBN 978-1-4338-0332-1. 192 p., including references and index. $29.95
USD (softcover).]
By Jackie Damrau (jdamrau3@airmail.net)
Previously published in: Technical Communication 56(1):72-73,
February 2009.
Psychologists must write technical content for medical journals
and their colleagues as well as in common language for nonmedical audiences,
like their patients. Undergraduate Writing in Psychology is a course textbook
that instructs psychology students on the importance of writing their scientific
content according to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) own definitive
style guide and standards. Many universities require graduate students to write
their research papers using the APA style; mine did.
R. Eric Landrum parallels scientific writing with screenwriting
or telling a good story: character relies on the behavioral variables or phenomena
of interest; backstory tells what is and is not known; plot describes the past,
present, and future; setting describes the environment and its variables; and
details report the results for others to replicate. Storytelling has the same
elements, although they may be more entertaining. Landrum says, “Good science
involves communication of new knowledge, and poorly written research papers
and articles . . . fail to communicate clearly” (p. 106).
Scientists write in categorical forms that include expressive,
exploratory, informative, scientific, literary, or persuasive. Their writing
relies on including evidence and testing the validity of evidence. Opinions
should not enter their writing. Landrum cites three evaluative areas for writing
to a scientific audience: authorship and expertise, currency and timeliness,
and accuracy and corroboration. Like technical communication, scientific writing
requires vocabulary appropriate for the reader, level of formality, relevant
details, and avoidance of abbreviations. This last one is interesting because
the rule Landrum shares is that you should use a term at least four times if
you’re going to abbreviate it.
Landrum covers the standard method of writing that can be
adapted to writing online, where you select a topic, create an outline, collect
your reference sources, collect your direct quotes and sources, group and arrange
the outline and direct quotes, write the rough draft, and validate that you
have cited all your reference sources appropriately. Directly quote when you
find “expert declaration (a quote from an authority figure), direct support,
effective language (the elegance and clarity of the author’s words), historical
flavor, specific example, controversial statement, or material for analysis”
(p. 48).
Undergraduate Writing in Psychology is a great resource
for seeing what other professionals are required to comply with as their standards.
It helps you understand why trade journals have varying formats for their specific
fields of interest. Landrum provides examples of the very technical and shows
how it can be written clearly, concisely, and understandably. He says, “Good
scientists are good communicators. . . . Objectivity is the hallmark of scientific
writing, so the tone reflects distance from the topic, and the linear order
of presentation reflects a thinking process that values measurable hypotheses
and results above opinion” (p. 55).
Jackie Damrau (jdamrau3@airmail.net)
has over 20 years of technical communication experience. She is a fellow and
member of the STC Lone Star community and the Instructional Design & Learning
SIG, manager of the Nominating Committee, and member of the Competitions Task
Force. She enjoys reading philosophy and psychology besides spending time with
her grandson.
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by Donald R. Riccomini (driccomini@scu.edu)
Swarts, J. 2008. Together with Technology: Writing Review, Enculturation,
and Technological Mediation. Baywood Publishing Company, Amityville, NY. [ISBN
978-0-89503-362-8. 178 p., including index. $44.95 USD.]
Previously published in Technical Communication 56(1):81-82, February
2009.
Together with Technology argues that technology can increase the
quality of writing review within organizations by replacing the traditional
model of hardcopy assessment with “textual replay”. Like instant replay on
television, textual replay allows the reviewer and the writer to revisit the
composing process itself and not just the semi-finished draft. This helps the
reviewer understand the writer’s process in creating the draft, as well as
the draft itself, and provides two major benefits: the reviewer can help the
writer understand the rhetorical reasons for the organization’s writing requirements,
and the writer can influence those requirements with insights that would
otherwise be obscured by the fixed review method.
Swarts reports on studies he conducted comparing the classical artifact-based
method of review against the practice-based approach. He divided organizations
into two groups: practice-oriented, where writing is the primary output or
product (newspaper, media relations), and artifact-oriented (donor relations,
engineering agency), where writing is secondary. He then installed Camtasia
software on subjects’ PCs to capture screenshots of the draft text at short
intervals; at the end of the process, the sequence could be reviewed, stopped,
rewound, and paused, providing opportunity for collaborative assessment by
the reviewer and the writer of the writing process as well as the product.
Swarts discovered that in both practice-oriented and artifact-oriented organizations,
textual replay increases writer participation, encourages the reviewer
to facilitate rather than direct changes, and results in interactive, mutually
instructive discussion between writer and reviewer. The reviewer can participate
in the earliest stages of development, and the writer can more clearly
understand what the organization requirements are, and why. Each party can
therefore contribute to the creation of a higher-quality final product. Much
of Swarts’s book provides evidence in support of this argument: screenshots
of textual replay, explanations of statistical methods, and graphs illustrating
the contrast between textual revision and textual replay. Throughout, Swarts
also makes the point that writing review demonstrates the need for organizations
to involve individuals more dynamically in the development of their “cognitive
architecture”, and conversely for individuals to become enculturated more
efficiently into the organizational values embodied in that architecture.
Although promising, textual replay has its problems. The software can capture
and replay textual development but prevents direct editing. Writer and reviewer
must switch between the replay text in one medium and draft text in another,
a cumbersome and time-consuming process. The video files are too large for
efficient network transport, reducing their usability. And replay can lock
writer and reviewer into a purely process perspective, undercutting the value
of also considering the text as an artifact. Of these, Swarts says, the “most
pressing problem” is that “textual replay is not an editable medium” (p.
147). Improvements in technology suggested by Swarts can theoretically overcome
these issues.
Swarts provides persuasive evidence to support his thesis, but the book isn’t
easy to read. The style is repetitive, the vocabulary excessively abstract,
the tone dry, and the argument at times overly complex for the content.
Organization could be improved by putting the issue very simply and concisely
in the introductory chapter, then describing how the software works, and finally
getting into the analytical discussion. This would ground the somewhat theoretical
and jargonish discussion in a concrete referent easier for the untutored reader
to follow. As presently organized, the text assumes a fairly specialized
audience who are already conversant with the problems and the jargon, a
characteristic probably reflecting the book’s origin in Swarts’s dissertation
(cited in the bibliography). Some reorganization and simplification would have
enabled Swarts to retain the academic focus of the text while extending its
appeal. The document design is fairly basic but useful, the glossary helpful,
and the index thorough. The book is also noticeably and unfortunately marred
by at least 11 copyediting mistakes.
Although the book would have more appeal if it were shorter and the style
simpler, overall Together with Technology does successfully argue
that textual replay improves the quality of mediated texts in both artifact-
and practice-oriented organizations. Swarts’s account has motivated me, as
an instructor, to investigate the Camtasia software and to consider its pedagogical
possibilities. It would be interesting to see a how-to guide aimed at teachers
of technical writing as a sequel to Swarts’s book. Bottom line: recommended
for readers, academic or professional, willing to endure stylistic awkwardness
and repetitiveness to find a more systematic way to discuss process in writing
and interested in applying this method in their own environments.
Donald R. Riccomini (driccomini@scu.edu)
is a member of STC and a lecturer in English at Santa Clara University,
where he specializes in teaching engineering and technical communications.
He previously spent 23 years in high technology as a technical
writer, engineer, and manager in semiconductors, instrumentation, and server
development.
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Fun on the Web
Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945
Although this is possibly the single most parodied film clip on the Web,
it’s still funny in this new context, particularly if you work with journal
peer reviews. Caution: Strong
language.
Zero-g without space travel
Can’t afford the $20 million required to buy a tour of the International
Space Station? For just over
$5000, you can try zero g here on Earth. Caution for the faint of stomach:
There’s a reason why the astronaut trainees refer to these flights as “the
vomet comet”.
MRI scanner surprises
Scientists often find surprises, and this
example is one of the better ones.
My pet hypothesis is that what the scientists were actually seeing is normal
neural activity in the visual cortex, which continues for some time after death.
Any thoughts from neurologists in the audience?
A response to relativism
Tim Minchin reports an experience that many of us have shared, namely trying
to maintain a polite veneer in the face of irrationality. Caution:
potentially offensive language. (I found nothing offensive, but some people
with humorless bosses may try watching this at work.)
Who says science isn’t funny?
There are a great many funny science jokes out there. Here’s one collection
of assorted physics and science jokes.
Top of page
“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”—John
Kenneth Galbraith
—
“Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they
are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless
it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.”—Al Franken
—
“Westheimer’s discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can save a
couple of hours in the library.”—Frank H. Westheimer, chemistry professor
—
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a
narrow field.”—Niels Bohr
—
“My hopes, and those of any scientist, are only worth considering as potential
biases that can block our understanding of nature’s factuality.”—Stephen
Jay Gould, The reversal of Hallucigenia
—
“True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful
things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these
rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.”—Charles
Sanders Peirce
—
“Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft and the only one
that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.”—Wernher von Braun, rocket
engineer (1912-1977)
—
“The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular
and the eternal in the transitory.”—Alfred North Whitehead
—
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins
to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer (1859-1930)
—
“What we call ‘language’ is, in fact, a formal collective of imprecise verbal
signals that serve as oblique coefficients of intuitive states wedded to analytical
and discursive figurations of thought, and secondarily referential to perceived
experience. This is why communication is so difficult.”—Sandra Boynton, Don’t
let the turkeys get you down
—
“Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that
I am.)”—Ambrose Bierce
—
“In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”—Johann
von Neumann
Top of page
The Exchange is published four times per year on behalf of the
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Communication (www.stcsig.org/sc/).
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Top of page
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