Is Bad Writing Bad Science?
PART I
I’m always amazed at what great questions I come across on Twitter, my favourite social media platform for casual discussions about academia.
Here’s one that really got me thinking: Is bad writing bad science?
The question itself is revolutionary because of the way it is framed. It puts writing AT PAR with science, giving it the SAME WEIGHT as science, which is an extraordinary position to take, especially when it comes from someone in the scientific community.
In giving writing the same weight as science, the question shatters one of the most fundamental notions our society holds dear: that science is MORE IMPORTANT than writing.
This implicit hierarchy needs no citations. Let’s look around—every language teacher / practitioner is paid one fiftieth of what a banker is paid, and perhaps half or less what a scientist is paid. The way our society is structured is evidence for what we inherently value.
PART II
Having levelled the two disciplines, the question asks: when a scientific text is poorly written, is it producing bad science?
“Bad science” does not necessarily mean poor research design or ill-thought-out variables. Here, bad science means irrational, illogical, incomprehensible, open to misinterpretation, unclear, imprecise, vague, and hence, perhaps irreproducible.
Because if there were one quality of science that every scientific field could agree on, it is precision. Whether that field is physics, sociology, business or aerospace engineering, it demands precision from its researchers. What never works in any scientific field are wishy washy ideas, unstructured ideas, poorly researched ideas, and most importantly, poorly linked ideas.
Bad science here refers to imprecision. Based on that idea, we can say that imprecise scientific writing—which is another way of saying “bad writing”—definitely creates bad science.
PART III
To unravel the idea of “poor writing indicates poor thinking”, I offer you a quote by Eric Hayot from The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities:
Ideas don’t exist except when they’re communicable. The best idea in the world will do almost no one any good if it can’t be spoken or written down or drawn or sung or danced or carved or otherwise passed on.
This is especially true for the professional scholar, since in that realm, the ideas are, effectively, the sentences they’re in. From this perspective people don’t have ideas; they have sentences that communicate ideas.”
The sentence is a container for your idea, as is a paragraph, and the entire text that you produce. If you have a poorly structured container, you’re delivering a poorly structured idea, a poorly framed idea. And in science, this can have some damning consequences.
A poorly structured sentence / paragraph could be propounding logical fallacies, or imprecise language use could lead to ambiguity, which leads to multiple possible interpretations of the writer’s intention.
And if science is about anything, it’s about a perfectly and precisely shared idea about how the world works. A scientist’s worst nightmare would be to allow multiple interpretations of their text, because exactitude is the very cornerstone of science. Any wavering in the understanding of the writer’s meaning can lead to confusion, misrepresentation and miscalculations by those readers relying on the writer’s text for further knowledge production.
PART IV
Imprecision in writing is a result of ambiguity in writing, which can be created in any number of ways (this list is non-exhaustive):
Excessive use of passive voice, clouding the most essential piece of information that readers of English look for in any sentence: Who is Doing What?
The use of “it” when the previous sentence has several nouns that “it” could possibly refer to; the use of “this” not followed by the noun it refers to (a dangling modifier)
Sentences crowded with extraneous information that leave the reader wondering what and where the focus of the sentence really is, e.g., “We adopt this broad-scale approach to determine that relationships occur both at the level of the population (and hence not confounded by potential environmental variation and/or statistical non-independence of individuals) and also across individuals (because relatively recent colonization of the UK by rabbits […], and previous work […] demonstrating extremely fine-scale genetic structuring in UK rabbits over short spatial scales both make it difficult to define what constitutes a ‘population’ for analysis)”.
Poorly laid out relationships between concepts across sentences: “Thus far, liquid-phase TEM has rarely been applied to study protein-folding due to the technical challenges associated with obtaining sufficient temporal and spatial resolution. On the other hand, proteins require a specific three-dimensional structure in order to be biologically active and are conventionally studied by cryo-TEM or in nano/microcrystallized forms where their crystal structures are solved by diffraction techniques.”
The overuse of the weak verb “to be” which merely means “to exist” in place of stronger words that actually show action [recall, readers want to know WHO is DOING WHAT]: “Of particular relevance is the diversity of the network or social orientation.” OR “Although rurality and urbanity are an underlying dimension of cultural capital in Bourdieu’s (1984) class analysis…” OR “A useful way of grasping the experiences of these rural migrant workers is by focusing on the bodywork that workers carry out on themselves …”
Using multiple terms for key concepts rather than using one term consistently throughout the text.
These writing moves, and many others, lead to researchers unwittingly creating ambiguity, imprecision, and a lack of clarity—all traits that science abhors.
Hence, it may be worth remembering that good science writing is writing that is clear and precise. And when the writing is clear and precise, so is the science it is creating.
copyright: Gary Larson, The Far Side