Curing the scientific style virus - The scientific writing style - The reading toolkit

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

Curing the scientific style virus
The scientific writing style
The reading toolkit

We’ve seen that the virus reveals its presence in meandering sentences, word spikes, and nominalizations. Now it’s your turn to move on from diagnosis onto the cure. Try to rewrite the following sentence removing as many viral symptoms as possible. (One potential correction will follow below)

To get a ballpark figure, the research team, aided by their collaborators at the German Health Policy Institute which they partnered with the year before, adopted the maximized survey-derived daily intake method for the evaluation of the per capita intake of the monosaccharides.

1)Remove the colloquialism word spike by replacing ballpark figure with approximate figure.

2)Notice that to get an approximate figure is a nominalization. Replace with approximate the verb.

3)Remove the sentence meander about the German Health Policy Institute by shifting it either to the beginning or end of the sentence, or place it as its own separate sentence.

4)Dismantle the long compound noun by introducing a few prepositions.

5)Replace the Latin with simple English.

6)Define the jargon so it can easily be understood.

Through a survey conducted in partnership with the German Health Policy Institute, we approximated the maximum daily intake of simple sugars (manosaccharides) in people’s diets.

1 Co-author Justin Lebrun here!

2 Stylometric tools can even be used to identify the authors of a piece of computer code. Each individual’s unique writing style clearly applies beyond simple prose!

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability#Popular_readability_formulas

4 Anglo-Norman is a close relative of French. The written forms of both Anglo- Norman and French are considered mutually intelligible, meaning that if you have knowledge of one language, you could fully understand the other without any further education or training.

5 The saxon equivalent of continue is to go on.

6 Jean-Luc Lebrun, one of this book’s authors, has published a free book on the topic. You can download it here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335689539_Scientific_Writing_Style_Virus or here https://books.apple.com/us/book/scientificwriting-style-virus/id1476877645

7 Arguably, we humans cutting them in great numbers to celebrate our holidays are capable of harming roses more effectively than anything in the animal kingdom. Put another way, humans are the world’s most effective rose predators.

8 If you’re still curious to know the origin of the expression, a ballpark figure means an approximate figure because unlike in football, where every playing field has exactly the same dimensions, a baseball park’s dimensions are variable.

9 Think Reader does not focus on the scientific paper, but more broadly on writing itself. All humans have physiological shared limitations when it comes to reading: limited attention, limited time, and limited memory. Think Reader explores those limitations, and how good writing can bypass them. Think Reader is available on iBooks, Kindle and Amazon.