Bridge to ground zero - Bridge the knowledge gap - The reading toolkit

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

Bridge to ground zero
Bridge the knowledge gap
The reading toolkit

Apple computer

In the past, the computer Gods in the mainframe world could only be approached by the grand priests in white coats serving them. When the personal computer arrived, the Gods did not quite fall off their pedestals. They just moved from the computer room temple to the living room shrine. The computers had tamed their owners. Occasionally, through what looked like sorcery to humans, some PC owners managed to tame their computers. Application programs responded with docility to the secret incantations they typed. That knowledge, known only to them, had corrupted their virgin brains. They no longer remembered what it was like not to know. Then came the Macintosh, to give hope again to the rest of the human race. History tells us the Mac dispelled the Orwellian vision of 1984, but it did not quite manage to allay the fears of the uninitiated the way the iPod and the iPad did.

Crossing the knowledge chasm between you and your reader is not easy. The reader knows less than you, but how much less?

· It depends on you. If the new knowledge you are contributing is significant, the knowledge gap between you and your readers is large.

· It depends on your readers. If their own knowledge of your field is small, they may not be familiar with the vocabulary or methods used. As a result, their initial knowledge gap is large, even if the additional knowledge you bring is modest.

You need to evaluate the gap to make sure your paper reaches the readers described in the previous chapter: the field intelligence gatherer, the competitor, the problem or solution seeker, and the young researcher. Of course, you could assume that the reader is knowledgeable enough to follow your paper, but is this assumption valid? What do you, the writer, know for sure about your readers’ initial knowledge?

You know that your readers found interesting one or several keywords in your title. You know that your readers have enough knowledge to tackle and explore parts of your paper. You know that your readers read the journal in which your paper is published or attend the conference where your paper is presented. You know that their work is related to the domain covered by the journal or conference. For example, readers who attend the International Symposium on Industrial Crystallization are in chemical engineering. They know the tools and techniques used in the domain. They know the meaning of centrifugation, phase separation, concentration, calorimeter, and polarized light microscope. They know the principles of science, how to conduct experiments, and how to read a concentration and temperature chart. They know English — the Queen’s English, the President’s English, or some flavor of broken English.

Now that we have ascertained what you know for sure about your readers’ initial knowledge, what then do you not know for sure?

The answer is short and simple: everything else. Indeed, everything else cannot be assumed to be known. Even though it is tempting to believe that readers have the same level of knowledge as the one you had at the start of your project, nothing could be further from the truth. Readers are not younger versions of you.

Now that we have looked at their initial knowledge, let us consider your contribution. How much do they know about it? Nothing! Your contribution is unknown to them, just as it was unknown to you before you started the research that led to your paper.

Let us suppose that the title of your article is the following:

“Phase transitions in lysozyme solutions characterized by differential scanning calorimetry.”1

Some readers may be more familiar with characterization techniques than they are with lysozymes. Therefore, they do not know which data, method, or experiment best applies to lysozyme, nor would they know what others before you have done in this domain or what specific problems remain unsolved. That is precisely what they will discover while reading your article.

Bridge to ground zero

I hope you now see that, on the whole, the gap between your elevated knowledge and your readers’ basic knowledge (ground zero) is wide.

Since it is impossible to guess how wide the gap is, you will have to set the minimum knowledge required, the reasonable ground zero on which you will build new knowledge. It would be unreasonable to write your paper for college students or for scientists who are not regular readers of the journal your paper targets.

To put it in an easy to remember formula:

Reader Knowledge Gap = The new knowledge you acquired during your project + The new basic knowledge the reader requires to reach your starting point.

Ground zero will be conditioned by the number of pages given to you by the journal. The more pages you have, the more you can lower ground zero or increase the size of your contribution. For short papers for example, you can settle for a higher ground zero or a smaller contribution, and you can use the short reference section of your paper as a knowledge bridge. References are convenient shortcuts that tell the non-expert reader “I’m not going to explain hidden Markov models. Indeed, I’m going to use the acronym HMM when I refer to them. This should be common knowledge to anyone working in the domain of speech recognition. Go and read reference [6] that represents the classical work on the subject if you need more basic information.

Assuming the editor gives you enough pages, you may decide to lower ground zero by providing extra background knowledge instead of asking readers to get up to speed by themselves. Writers often provide this knowledge in a background knowledge section that immediately follows the introduction. This section is a great place to summarize what readers would have learned had they had the time to read the articles you mention in your reference section (you can safely assume they will not read your [1], [2], and [3] before reading the rest of your paper). This background knowledge section is not part of your contribution, but it is necessary to understand it.

Ground zero is set by the latest books or review articles written by domain experts. If such articles are not available, then a look at the latest conference proceedings in your domain area should give you a couple of general articles that will accomplish the same function. Ground zero keeps moving up. Science is built on science, and scientists are expected to keep abreast of what is happening in their domain.

Ground zero is set by the type of journal. Some journals are multidisciplinary. The journal of bioinformatics, for example, is read by two distinct types or readers with widely different backgrounds: computer scientists and biologists. Some journals have such a broad audience (Nature for example) that the whole paper has to be written for non-experts. Just-in-time background is extensive in these journals.