08 Dec 1999, The Daily Telegraph

Kill the gerund, slay the adverb,
slaughter the semi-colon

By Steve Jones

"SCIENCE writing" seems, like "Scottish Amicable", rather a contradiction in terms. To open any journal - the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say - at once reveals a morass of jargon, a desert of dead prose and a muddy torrent of figures. Now that accountants weigh (rather than read) every academic's scientific output, its cultural standards are being
trampled further into the mud.

But, we are told, we are in a Golden Age of popular books on science. How can this be? It is because the rules of science writing differ utterly from those of writing about science.

To a scientist, all that matters is to convince an audience trained to pick holes in his argument. Every sentence must be weighed not for style but for accuracy, every "if" matched with a "but". Terseness is all and elegance much frowned upon. Nobody reads such stuff for pleasure (unless it is for that mitigated joy of seeing a fatal flaw). Scientific prose is not literature in the conventional sense, but merely part of a job: a simple means of conveying information. Soon, most results will appear on the Internet alone, which will probably mean another retreat from grace.

However barbarous their own prose, most scientists (I speak from experience) look down on popularisers of science, authors of books best described, with Gallic accuracy, as "oeuvres de vulgarisation". Writing about science, in a Telegraph essay competition or as a Science Book Prize contestant, demands skills that most of the subject's actual practitioners never bother to acquire.

They are, though, quite straightforward. In general (I except Stephen Jay Gould, the Edgar Allen Poe of science writing), it pays to keep things simple. The beauties of plain language are seen in the works of J B S Haldane (no mean practitioner of the obscure when it came to his own research). In his famous essay of 1928, "On Being the Right Size", he asks how big animals can afford to get before they are in danger of harm just by falling over. He imagines them dropped down a mine shaft. A mouse, he says, "gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes".

That last sentence contains within itself the rules of plain English: present and active rather than past and passive (it splashes not it was splashed) and Anglo-Saxon rather than Romance (the equine was not pulverized, but suffered a simpler and messier fate). For today's essayists, a Gerund Killer programmed into a lap-top to erase all words ending in "-ing" helps, as does an adverb-slayer that ruthlessly kills off those awkward "-ly" words. It is also wise to tell your computer to light up all semi-colons ready for slaughter; and, with the help of the word-count program, to wipe out sentences more than 30 words long.

The essays shortlisted for the Telegraph Young Science Writer competition all, wittingly or otherwise, follow these rules. Any one would (or should) get an "A" in a first-year university course: and, it seems reasonable to assume, anyone with three A grades at A-level (which many of my own students have earned) should be able to produce 700 words of at least comparable standard.

Alas, that it is far from true. My own first-year genetics class is now so huge that I cannot hope to mark all their essays but I have come up with a wheeze that gives all the pleasures of essay-setting with none of the pain - and, as an incidental, introduces students to the real world of the literary or scientific hack. Each member of the class emails an essay to me; I take off the name and send it randomly to another student on the course, who has to produce - again anonymously - a 500-word report and a mark.

This causes squeals of outrage, but is close to what happens in the real world when a scientific paper is submitted to a journal or a book to a publisher. Anonymity is a great aid to honesty; and some of the reports are vicious: "tedious, confusing, illiterate; should have gone to Oxford".

Unfortunately, today's students have a strong sense of self-preservation and, to my dismay, have worked out a zero-sum game in which everyone gives their target essay a good mark in the expectation of a pay-back in their own grade.

Perhaps the answer is to email them to first-year English students. Ah yes, Structuralism One: "Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by differences among signs in a signing system".

Anyone taught to write with such clarity should have no problem in improving the literary style of a mere scientist.