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

Keep the story moving forward
Sustain attention to ensure continuous reading
The reading toolkit

Attention-getters

Vladimir and his wife, Ruslana, usually read in bed before going to sleep.

“You haven’t finished it yet?” Ruslana asked.

It was more a remark than a question. Her husband had been reading a 10-page scientific article for the past three nights, while in the same amount of time, she had read close to 250 pages of a suspenseful novel. Each evening, she had remained in bed; whereas Vladimir, unable to remain focused, had been in and out of bed, for a drink, a phone call, the late-night TV news, or a snack. She knew the signs. Tired after a long day at the lab, he did not have enough energy to stay attentive for more than 10 minutes at a time. His article required too much time and concentration. She asked Vladimir,

“Have you ever read a really interesting scientific article that you could not stop reading?”

He looked at her, and remained silent long enough for her to know that there could not have been many.

“I can’t think of one!” he said finally, “Even my own papers bore me.”

“Don’t they teach you how to write interesting papers at your Institute, you know, papers that attract the attention of scientists?” Vladimir sighed.

“Attracting is fine. It is sustaining the attention that is hard. I wish I could keep my readers as awake and interested as you are.”

She could not resist the tease.

“Oh, I am awake, darling, and interested. Are you?”

Love, drama, and suspense add spice to novels. But how can there be any suspense in a scientific paper when the writer reveals all secrets right upfront in the title? Imagine crime author Agatha Christie writing a novel with a title like “The butler killed the Duchess with a candlestick in the library”. The book would surely make it to the top of the worst-seller list — at least, as far as suspense goes!

It would start with a summary that says “In this book, we will show that it was the butler who killed the Duchess with a candlestick in the library.” The introductory chapter would mention that the chamberlain, the gardener, and the maid also live with the Duchess, but none of them have any motivation to kill her. The middle chapter would show the photo of the butler caught in the act of bashing the Duchess over the head with a candlestick. Additional chapters would include the signed testimony of the butler admitting to the murder. And the final chapter would reinforce the facts already established: the weight of the candlestick and the muscular strength of the butler are enough to kill the Duchess. It would end with a proposal for further research, such as the criminal use of candlesticks by Geishas on Sumo wrestlers. You have here a possible rendition of a scientific paper à la Agatha Christie, but not by Agatha Christie.

How would Agatha Christie make any scientific paper more interesting? Let me suggest that, for one thing, she would turn your contribution into more of a story. She would bring twists into your story plot, mention unexpected problems, which you, the scientist hero deploying inductive and deductive logic, would victoriously solve. Sometimes, she would have you pause to elaborate or clarify, instead of blissfully moving athletically through your complex story with total disregard towards the breathless nonexpert reader. And even though she could not use suspense at the top-level of the story to hook the reader, she would recreate local suspense, whenever the opportunity arose. There would rarely be a dull moment. Indeed, having listened to some riveting Nobel Laureate lectures, I am now convinced that a scientific story need not be boring at all.

Keep the story moving forward

The most challenging word of this heading is the word ’story’. Somehow, scientists do not see the active story as an appropriate model for a scientific paper. Granted, not all parts of a scientific paper gain clarity and garner interest through the story style (the methodology section rarely does), but all parts can benefit from the techniques presented next.

The great attention-getter, change, is what keeps a story moving forward.

Take a change in paragraph, for example. With each change, the story progresses, widens, narrows, or jumps. When ideas stop moving, a paragraph lengthens. Imagine a river. When does water stop moving?

Sometimes, the river widens to form a lake with no discernible current. Ideas stop moving when they stagnate or expand into paraphrases. Sometimes water gets caught in a whirlpool. The author traps the reader in a whirlpool of details before returning to the main idea. Sometimes the river has deep meanders. The author makes an unexpected Ω turn to complete an already presented idea. Sometimes slow counter-currents form alongside the riverbank. The author, inverting subject and object positions in a sentence, slows down reading because of constant use of the passive voice — a proven story-killer.

The lake

When there is no purpose (because there is no current), a paragraph grows in length. Ideas are presented in no specific order, or in an order obvious only to the writer. Extensive paraphrasing may also take place, unnecessary lengthening the paragraph until it resembles a hefty chunk of text that is discouraging to the eye. Without having to read a single word, the reader knows by experience that reading will be slow, and clarity will be low.

When ideas are not in motion, a paragraph grows in length. The additional length slows down reading and reduces overall conciseness. With paraphrasing, the paragraph lengthens without actually moving the ideas forward since the sentences have the same meaning. …

The sentence in bold paraphrases what the first two sentences already cover.

The whirlpool

Nested detailing (when details explain details) also prolongs paragraphs. Nested detailing takes the reader away from the main intent of the paragraph. When the details stop, the reader is ejected back into the main topic stream. In the next paragraph on embryonic cell proliferation in culture dishes, the in-depth description of the culture dish (text in bold) distracts the reader (dish → coating → reason for coating). These details could have been described elsewhere, or simply removed.

For the next three days, the thirty embryonic cells proliferate in the culture dish. The dish, made of plastic, has its inner surface coated with mouse cells that through treatment have lost the ability to divide, but not their ability to provide nutrients. The reason for such a special coating is to provide an adhesive surface for the embryonic cells. After proliferation, the embryonic cells are collected and put into new culture dishes, a process called ’replating’. After 180 such replatings, millions of normal and still undifferentiated embryonic cells are available. They are then frozen and stored.

The omega meander

The reader is distracted when the author makes an unexpected Ω turn to add detail to a point made several sentences earlier. The flow of thoughts is disrupted. In the following example, the sentence in bold should follow the first sentence to remove the meander and linearize the flow.

After conducting microbiological studies on the cockroaches collected in the university dormitories, we found that their guts carried microbes such as staphylococcus and coliform bacteria dangerous when found outside of the intestinal tract. Since cockroaches regurgitate food, their vomitus contaminates their body. Therefore, the same microbes, plus molds and yeasts are found on the surface of their hairy legs, antennae, and wings. It is not astonishing to find such microbes in their guts as they are also present in the human and animal feces on which cockroaches feed.

The counter current

A normal sentence has current. It pulls reading forward from the old information upstream to the new information downstream, from the sentence’ subject to its verb and object. When such a natural order is unduly inverted (with the passive voice for example), the sentence commonly lengthens, and reading slows down.

The cropping process should preserve all critical points. Images of the same size should also be produced by the cropping.