Characteristics of the scientific writing style - The scientific writing style - The reading toolkit

Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021

Characteristics of the scientific writing style
The scientific writing style
The reading toolkit

Do you have a favourite author? Personally1, I am a big fan of J.R.R Tolkien. As a child, I would stay up at night reading The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was a master at describing imaginary worlds. He could describe a single fictional location over two full pages, breathing life into every little corner, creature, shadow, or stone present. He was so detailed that I felt as though I wasn’t only imagining the places in his books, but could almost see them for myself. My brother, on the other hand, wasn’t as much a fan of Tolkien’s writing. He enjoyed the story and the characters, but the nearly-excessive level of detail got in the way of his reading enjoyment.

Every author has their own writing style. Tolkien does not write in the same way as John Grisham, Ursula K. le Guin, Seth Godin, George R.R. Martin or J.K. Rowling. They don’t just tell different stories. They tell stories differently. If this group of authors were to accept a writing challenge where every element of the plot had already been laid out in advance, we would nevertheless end up with six different books. Do not confuse content with style: content is what is described, whereas style is how it is described.

In fact, you do not need to be an author to have a writing style. Individually, each one of us thinks differently, and we thus express ourselves differently on paper. Some, like in this example sentence, place many commas in their writing, leading to frequent pauses in reading. Others prefer punctuation like semicolons or em-dashes. For some people, writing style is affected by a lack of vocabulary — perhaps because English is a second language. Writing style is so individual that a science has developed around its classification and identification: stylometry. Much like each fingerprint is unique, a writing style can serve as a signature identifier. At first, the science was limited to experts in linguistics who had deeply studied specific authors. But with increasing developments in computer-aided techniques and machine learning, its ease of use, precision, and field of applications has rapidly expanded2.

For the first part of your life, finding your own ’voice’, your own writing style, was encouraged. Your teachers in primary and secondary school would make sure that your writing was grammatically correct, but they would also say “Don’t just copy what you read. Find your own voice!”. You took that advice, and applied it when writing your University or College admission application. Congratulations! You were accepted. You were then shepherded through to the next step of your educational journey, and just as you started getting excited about how your writing would further progress, it stopped. What happened? You encountered a great barrier to individual expression: the academic writing style. The celebration of uniqueness that existed in high school is gone. You had entered into a 4-year cycle that slowly but gradually stripped away individual expression in favor of crafting a standardized product, the academic paper. Personal style was not encouraged; referencing appropriately was. Following the same guidelines as everyone else was. The underlying logic behind this narrowing of styles seemed sound: a standardized paper will be easier to read because fewer variations from the norm will create fewer reader problems. Fair enough. But what happens when the norm itself is plagued with problems?

Characteristics of the scientific writing style

Let’s take a look at a simple english sentence, written in a casual style:

I wondered if I should go shopping.

What a short and pragmatic sentence! It clearly and concisely expresses the subject and the action of the sentence. But it lacks… flair. How would Shakespeare, the great literary author, express this sentence using his trademark style?

To shop or not to shop, that is the question.

Same content, different style. It’s interesting, but we’re unlikely to use any of Shakespeare’s now-outdated phrasing in our own writing. So how would a scientist express it?

Consideration was given to the possibility of departure for the acquisition of merchandise.

Did you chuckle to yourself? If so, you should perhaps pause to reflect on why you did. This sentence is so over the top that it is practically parodic. But at the same time, it is difficult to deny that it indeed sounds “scientific”. As the adage goes, it’s funny because it’s true.

This sentence expresses the exact same content as the first, simple one: I wondered if I should go shopping. But it does so in such an indirect style that you can almost imagine the lab coat. What makes it so “scientific”? Or in other words, what are the characteristics of the scientific writing style? Here are six telltale signs.

Longer sentences: The new sentence is considerably longer than the original. In the casual style, the sentence is 7 words long (35 characters). In the scientific style, the sentence is 13 words long (91 characters). That’s nearly twice as many words and nearly three times the length of the original! Research around readability has demonstrated that sentence length is inversely correlated with clarity3. Therefore while the scientific style might seem more elevated than the casual style, it is markedly less clear.

Intensive use of the passive voice: “Consideration was given”. Who gave the consideration? Is it the author? A committee? As the writing style removed the subject from the sentence, it is impossible to give an answer.

By putting the sentence in the passive voice, the author de-emphasizes the subject’s role in the action. “It does not matter that it was me who considered it — what matters is that it was considered”. Such de-emphasizing can be appropriate in a scientific paper, especially in the methodology section where it doesn’t matter who titrated the solution as long as the task was done. But the unnecessary use of the passive voice, as in this example sentence, is pointless and makes for less dynamic reading. Instead of “who is doing what” (dynamic), all we are left with is “something is being done”, or “something results from something else” (passive).

Supremacy of nouns over verbs: Let’s count the nouns and verbs in this sentence:

Consideration was given to the possibility of departure for the acquisition of merchandise.

The sentence contains five nouns, but only one verb (that is weakened by being in the passive voice). Nouns serve to identify people, places, or things — in other words, objects. Verbs bring action to a sentence. With this imbalance of nouns over verbs, many things are being described but with very little action. The sentence lacks life and interest.

Multisyllabic nouns: Not only is the sentence long, but it contains many complex words. Every underlined noun in the sentence above has at least 3 syllables. Why write merchandise which has four syllables when you can write goods? Or acquisition instead of buy? The English language is remarkably rich in redundancies, offering its writers many ways of expressing the same idea. Have you ever wondered why this is so?

To answer that question, we must jump back through time nearly a thousand years, and take a closer look at events transpiring in medieval England. In the year 1066, Norman king William the Conqueror invaded the British Isles, establishing an Anglo-Norman4 speaking government in England. In his generosity (and wisdom), William did not attempt to ban the use of the English language in its current iteration (Anglo-saxon, or Old English). However, he did insist that French would be spoken in his court. Therefore, if you were of the aristocracy, you learned French. If you were educated or wealthy, you learned French. If you studied in the sciences, you learned French. Over hundreds of years, Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon combined to form new languages that used words from both vocabularies: Middle English, and eventually Modern English. The integration of French into English was so pervasive that today, it is estimated that 45% of all English words have a French origin.

Let’s take another look at the long words from the example sentence. How many of them are originally French? All of them. Consideration comes from the French word considération. Possibility from French word possibilité, departure from French word départ, acquisition from the identically-spelled French word, and merchandise from French word marchandise.

We find it personally fascinating that the scientific writing style is in fact a French saturated style. Objectively, these French-based multisyllabic nouns decrease readability. So why do scientists still today, in 2020, use such vocabulary? As we have seen, academics of the eleventh century had to learn French to ingratiate themselves within the upper ranks of society. This linguistic tradition was passed down century by century, surviving even today. Could it be that the reason modern scientists write unclearly is due to historical events that took place nearly a millennium ago? Does it seem a cultural legacy worth preserving, if it directly comes into conflict with reader understanding? As always, we encourage you to make a reader-centered decision. It is more important to be clearly understood than to write in a style that “seems scientific”.

Specialized vocabulary: Generally speaking, multisyllabic nouns are more rarely used than their short saxon counterparts, but not always. The French-based word continue5, for example, is widespread in English. The scientific writing style not only suffers from having many multisyllabic nouns, but tends to use specialized ones that are otherwise rarely used in daily conversation. Unless working in a logistics or freight company, the word merchandise is rarely used. And when was the last time you found yourself speaking the word acquisition out loud? On top of that, we’re just examining an example about shopping. If we plunge into the actual jargon of scientific fields, it is almost comparable to having to learn a whole new language. One of the reasons that scientific papers are especially difficult for younger readers is that they have to grapple with building both knowledge and vocabulary simultaneously, a gruelling task.

Hedge words: As this is a relatively obscure grammatical term used in a subfield of linguistics, let us clarify what hedge words are using simple examples. In sentences without hedges, things tend to be black or white, with little room for interpretation: he is the best boxer in the world. Introducing a hedge word removes that certainty and replaces it with possibility: he might be the best boxer in the world.

Hedges can be adjectives (possible), adverbs (potentially), verbs (seem) or even phrases (it is likely that). In scientific writing, it is essential to hedge your claims as they might otherwise be disputed or overstated. At the outcome of a study showing a correlation between air pollution levels and hair loss, it would be dangerous to claim that “air pollution is responsible for hair loss”. A reviewer could point out that other factors or variables which have not been controlled for might instead be responsible. If, however, you write “air pollution seems to increase hair loss”, a reviewer is less likely to argue.

Concluding on the previous paragraphs, we have seen that the scientific writing style tends to favor long passive sentences composed mostly of specialized multisyllabic nouns and hedge words. Independently, none of these characteristics are inherently bad. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using hedge words. But when these words are overabundantly applied or used incorrectly, writing suffers. There’s nothing wrong with a sentence in the passive voice. But when multiple passive voice sentences stack up, the reader loses all interest. Combine the excessive use of the passive voice with excessive hedges, and writing suffers even more.

We are not asking you to abandon the scientific writing style altogether. But we are making you aware of its weaknesses, so that you may decide whether it is helpful or harmful. Do not be shy to deviate from the norm! While you may have been graded on your conformity to a standard of academic writing in your tertiary education days, the real evaluators of your scientific paper are its readers — your peers. We assure you that the majority prefer clarity and ease of reading over convention. Wouldn’t you feel the same way?