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Poisoning the Minds of our Youth

Still going through all the boxes of stuff from childhood. Right now I'm going through college notes, homework, papers, and tests.

I have no idea why I saved this stuff. Maybe I was thinking that if I became a professor at a teaching college, I could reuse some of the homework and exam questions? But ten years later, these papers were all clearly written by Someone Else. Even if for some reason I wanted to throw my career away and jump back into science, I'd have to start all over anyway. Educational value of these N cubic feet of paper? Basically zero.

Still, there some gems in there. One of my favorites is actually an appendix from our frosh lab manuals, A Guide To Technical Report Writing:

One of the most common criticisms of technical reports is that they are not written in a sufficiently brief and concise form. To write succinctly is often difficult. Writing in a rather loose and informal style is much easier, but it simply cannot be tolerated in scientific writing today for some very good reasons. The editor of the Astrophysical Journal wrote the following paragraph:

The present accelerated growth of this Journal in common with the other scientific journals, makes it imperative that authors (in their own interest) exercise utmost restraint and economy in the writing of their papers and in the selection and presentation of material in the form of tables, line drawings, and halftones. In spite of the obvious need for such restraint, the Editor regrets that authors continue to write in the relaxed style common a century ago; moreover, the temptation to reproduce large masses of IBM printouts and tracings from automatic recording equipment appears too great for most authors to resist. The Astrophysical Journal will enforce stricter standards in the future with respect to these matters.

The present change for publication in the leading physics journals is over $70 per page. Thus, it is important that you learn to write your reports in such a way that unnecessary words are eliminated and data is reduced to a minimum. This generally calls for some rewriting.

You don't say!

Well, one thing is clear: no honest-to-goodness bad writer could possibly string together so many unnecessary passive phrases, nominalizations, repetitive words, and other stylistic blunders -- so what is this piece really all about? My theory is that it's actually a meta-commentary about scientific prose. Like Alan Sokal in the famous Sokal Hoax, the author is trying to raise the community's awareness of the problem by mocking it at a fundamental level. The piece even goes so far as to advise students to learn the principles of good writing by "read[ing] reports and articles appearing in various engineering and scientific journals, such as The Physical Review." Such acute, insider wit can only come from someone who has been seething inwardly about this issue for years. (The prim little tone of admonishment is just the icing on the cake.)

Unfortunately, unlike the Sokal affair, nobody ever came forward to admit that A Guide To Technical Report Writing was a joke. Thus, a hapless freshman physics major skimming through their lab notebook might actually have believed that it constituted real advice! So while I appreciate our nameless author's cri de coeur about the state of scientific writing, I'm not sure it was worth the risk of confusing the students.

Then again, the odds that the students actually read that part of the lab notebook are slim to none. I know I didn't.

Homework Problem for Next Class: Rewrite the first paragraph of the excerpted piece to say the same thing, using 50% fewer words, thus saving serious $$ when you publish said paragraph in the Astrophysical Journal. Show your work.

Posted by Evan Goer on Apr. 06, 2008 at 9:05 AM | Comments (3)

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