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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and this is the Thursday show where we talk with people doing interesting things with language.
I am so excited because I'm here today with Anne Green, author of Writing Science in Plain English from the University of Chicago Press.
This is one, a fabulous book.
And two, it doesn't matter if you're writing about science because the advice in here, it is applicable to all kinds of nonfiction writing.
It's just, it's wonderful.
I can't wait for you to hear all about it.
Anne Green, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you very much, Mignon.
I'm glad to be here.
You bet. Well, you know, one of the things that you pointed out in the introduction to the book that really hit home with me is that in science, we actually have citation data to show that good writing actually matters.
Yes. In the second edition, I reviewed some of the literature on scientific writing and what researchers have been doing.
It's very interesting.
It was different It had been before, when I wrote the first edition, it seems like scientists are taking this issue about poor scientific writing seriously, and they are analyzing vast amounts of papers to find out, for instance, if there's a benefit to writing clearly and concisely.
And in fact, there is.
One study of 700 papers in the scientific literature showed that the number of acronyms, for instance, has been increasing dramatically and that papers that have acronyms in them seem to be harder to remember and therefore are cited less often than papers without so many acronyms. Especially acronyms appear, as we all know, in titles and in the abstract.
But in papers that have very few or no acronyms or few, these papers seem to be, you know, readers seem to be able to remember them and cite them more often than papers with.
And the same goes for jargon as well.
But it's interesting that, you know, when I first wrote the when I wrote the first edition in 2013, that kind of research wasn't happening.
And it's interesting that scientists are now taking it seriously enough and finding out that, hey, this is really impeding my ability to work with other scientists.
My writing style, for instance, my my ability to work with scientists who are outside my field and what's going on.
Maybe we should look into this, and some are, and it's very interesting what they're finding.
Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned the Watson and Crick paper, the discovery of the structure of DNA.
And, you know, I was a biologist many years ago before I was a writer.
Yeah, and I remember in school, our professors holding up the Watson and Crick paper as an example of good writing, and it sounds like it's still used.
Well, that's interesting that you say they held it up.
Because it's one page and they could hold it up.
And it was written in 1953 in Nature.
And it described in plain English, really, the novel idea, the novel structure of DNA.
Nobody else. They won the Nobel Prize for that research. search. And I use it in my classes.
And there's quite a lot of good writing among the Nobel Prize winners, I like to say.
But that paper and another one by Hodgkin and Huxley, for instance, that also won a Nobel Prize.
We analyze them in class to find out how many short, simple words are in those.
60 % of the words in both those papers are short and simple words that we use every day.
That's amazing. And so to be impressive, to win the Nobel Prize, you don't have to use all the big words.
In fact, the other thing that I had never heard that was in your book that was so amazing is about short words and the retina, like how our eyes work.
Please share that. That is fascinating.
It is fascinating. Short words, it turns out, are much easier for us to read than long words.
And that's because the retina has only one small area called the fovea, which has enough high resolution cells in it that enables us to read.
That's the only part of the retina that has the right number of cells in it that has the acuity to read.
read. So because the fovea is so small, we are limited in our reading to all I can see is seven letter spaces.
That's the extent of the space, you know, the letters and the letter spaces that the fovea can see or fixate on at one time.
So if you're writing 12, 14 letter space words over and over and over, you're forcing your reader to slow down.
And actually what happens is they have to fixate or focus on the long words twice.
They only have to fixate on a short word once.
And for words like and, but, or, so, we don't fixate on them at all.
We just zoom right through.
But for long words, you're forcing your reader to fixate on the beginning of the long word and at the end of the long word, put those two together somehow and come up with a complete word. And why would you want to make your writer, your reader work that hard?
This is a kind of attitude or a way of looking at writing.
That's quite different.
I, when I first set out to teach my class on scientific writing, I went and read lots and lots of books and they all All were focused on the writer, but there was one by Joseph Williams, who was a linguist at University of Chicago, who wrote a book called Style Towards Clarity and Grace.
And in it, he focused not on the writer, but on the reader.
So what does a reader need from us?
How can we make reading complex information that's new to us?
How can we make that as easy as possible?
I love that. We don't think like that.
I just don't think like that.
This was a novel idea that I had never seen before.
So this is the way I taught my class.
And the results were so amazing and so good that I felt it was important to write a book.
Joseph Williams had written his book for all kinds of professionals.
And I wanted to get those ideas out to scientists specifically.
So it's just about science.
It's not about economics or law or any of the other, you know, professions that Joseph Williams wrote for.
But I was concentrating on scientists.
Yeah, I mean, well, it's not.
I mean, it's not about anything else.
But I think the examples are all science -based and they seem like they're from real scientific papers.
But the principles, I think, are widely applicable.
I mean, for example, you had some really good examples thinking about the short words, like how to go from long words like demonstration and prediction.
Talk about how we can make those shorter and why they're long to start with.
Yeah, that's a good question.
And it goes back to the 11th century in what we now call England.
And at that time, people in that part of the world were speaking Anglo -Saxon, which were Old English, which is a language, Germanic in its origins, of words that were short and simple and had broad applications.
So the verbs like is, have, do, make, the prepositions on, in, at, by, with, from, words like woman, man, hand, head, moon, earth, those are all Anglo -Saxon origins.
They all have Anglo -Saxon origins.
And in 1066, England was invaded by the Norman French, and the French won the Battle of Hastings, which was the deciding battle, and they became the rulers of England for quite a long time.
And as they took over institutional and religious and political arenas, they did so with first with using Latin and then next with Norman French. And anyone who wanted to have a job in those areas, like if you wanted to be a lawyer, you wanted to be an educator, you wanted to be a doctor, you had to learn a separate language from Anglo -Saxon that many of the words had Greek, Latin and mostly Norman French origins.
All these words or most of these words were longer and more formal than Anglo -Saxon.
And so you have developing a two -tiered sort of language in that part of the world.
And English is, I guess, benefited.
It's very flexible and lots of vocabulary in English language.
But the man in the street was still speaking Anglo -Saxon.
But if you were educated, you had this other vocabulary full of more formal, longer words that you could use.
And it made you feel very smart and who can resist it.
Anyway, it's still the same today.
If you and I were talking just informally about our families or just chewing the fat, we would speak 80 % of the words we would be speaking would be Anglo -Saxon origin.
If we started to talk about science automatically, we would have to use some of these words that have Greek, Latin or Norman French origins.
It still happens today.
And it still makes people feel smart when they use these long words and they don't have to.
And they are just making their reader work harder whenever they use them.
We can't help but use some of them.
And most people are reading science, some background in it, and they understand what evolution is and they understand what mutation is.
But there are words like you said, demonstration, you know, we could use show.
That's a very short Anglo -Saxon word that would be perfectly adequate in that situation.
There are many, many examples of that in the book where the whole list of long words with short equivalents that we could easily use.
So instead of saying something like we provided a demonstration of something, you could just say we showed something.
Yeah, exactly. And instead of provide, you could say we gave or, you know, it's, you know, whatever long wrong word almost to come up with.
There's simpler words.
And some of these sentences that I got out of the literature, it wasn't hard to find.
This is some of this bad.
It was not hard to find at all.
But they're almost incomprehensible.
There is one example that because it was so convoluted, and there were so many long words in it, and various other problems, I, after much deliberation, And everyone had edited it.
Everyone, you know, my editor looked at it and my all these people that were involved in the team to get the first edition published.
We all got it wrong.
It was wrong for years until I finally realized that it was incorrect.
And it was incorrect because it was so hard to understand what it really meant.
So we fixed it. That's amazing.
And you have a quote from an editor from the journal Nature bemoaning the quality of the writing and the work that they receive.
Yeah, that's right.
I think it was Leslie Sage from Nature, and he said many of the crank papers that were submitted to Nature were actually better written in terms of style than the papers that were submitted from publication.
That's so sad. So, you know, you talked about how people feel smart when they use the big words.
And, you know, and so how do your students react in your classes when they start?
Do they, are they typically resistant to this idea that good writing can be simple?
Or are you finding that, you know, students today more understand that idea?
I think that most of my students were relieved to hear that they didn't have to copy the style they found in the papers that were assigned to them in their classes.
Many, most of those students were also worried that they wouldn't get good marks because the person who was grading those papers still wanted them to write that way.
and i you know sort of promoted their you know you have to go and fight the good fight you know but their grades were on the line so i don't know really but some of them were very invested in their writing styling and got a little upset the the the later they got the the longer they've been in science so for instance graduate students to postdocs to faculty the longer their the style had been successful for them.
They're getting grants.
You know, these faculty and graduate students are getting grants.
And even though this writing style is so hard to understand for a broad audience, they're still getting awarded for it.
So as I tried to talk to people who were in science for a longer period of time, their careers were longer, the more resistance there is.
is. But yeah, in general, my students were, I think, relieved and they thought it was quite fun really to learn this different, you know, straightforward style.
One student said, clear writing really is just easy reading.
Nothing too spectacular.
Easy reading. They got it.
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you said another thing that has been found to be a contributor to good writing is having sort of a story with characters taking actions can you give an example of what that would be in science writing you want a good example you mean from a journal just you know if you have something from your book or off the top of your head i just i imagine people might be thinking We tell stories in fiction or maybe narrative nonfiction when I'm reading a magazine article.
I can imagine telling a story, but how does that work in a scientific paper?
The example, there's many examples.
The Watson and Crick paper is we're doing work on organisms usually.
They could be macro like deer and elk and Columbia spotted frogs, or they could be micro organisms. But we often were doing work on that can serve, those are concrete things that can serve as characters in a story.
So the story is a burdened term in science just because many scientists feel that it conjures up make -believe.
And I just use story the way linguists do, and they define it as simply a very effective way to communicate information to an audience.
And the two requirements for a story are very simple.
One is that you have to have a character and it has to be doing something.
A character in this definition is a concrete noun and that serves as the subject of your sentence.
So in this example in my book, for instance, it starts off in the great lakes of Africa, large and diverse species flocks of cichlid fish have evolved rapidly.
that's awesome and the first part is the prepositional phrase in the great lakes of africa but we have large and diverse species flocks we have flocks as our subject and we all you know we know what a flock is it's not an abstract idea a flock is something we can see you know a concrete noun is something that we can perceive with our senses and it goes on about Lake Victoria.
The largest of these lakes had until recently at least 500 species of haplochromine cichlids.
So the subject is Lake Victoria, something we've talked about since before.
So we know what the writer is talking about.
But Lake Victoria is definitely a concrete thing, right?
I mean, this person is describing, this is the introduction to a paper, but they're describing where they did their their studies right and lots of concrete examples there there's already introducing cichlid fishes and that's concrete so we can and if we're really desperate we can talk about ourselves we can say we can say we or Paris the thought I but usually we like to include everyone who has had anything to do with the research which is fine so we can talk about we, or if we have a sentence and in brackets at the end, we cite who wrote that paper and did that research, we can start the sentence
with those people. And they're concrete.
But instead of using concrete nouns, which we've probably been telling stories to each other for 70 ,000 years.
And those stories have a certain structure.
And we, I'm telling you, we were telling stories about concrete things.
We were telling stories about bison, and saber -toothed tigers and things very, you know, concrete things.
But instead of using concrete subjects in our sentences, scientific writers often use abstract nouns, abstract things.
So abstract nouns come from verbs and sometimes adjectives.
So, the verb to observe, we change that into the observation.
Now, it's really, really hard. I know everybody sort of knows what an observation is, but if I choose something like mitigate, that's a verb, and we change it into the abstract noun Now, mitigation, that we do not know about.
Observation, even though we kind of know what observation is, I would love to put a reader under an fMRI machine and see what happens to their brain when they read about an observation.
It's something that we can't conceive of it.
Mitigation, there's a continuum of abstraction.
abstraction and mitigation is way out on the end.
Maybe observation is somewhere around the middle.
Species may be a little bit abstract, but you know what I mean?
There's sort of gradation.
And the mitigation, what happens to you when you read about a mitigation?
It just kind of glues over.
Exactly. And scientific writing is full of that.
In mitigation, it's not an actor.
It can't do anything.
Exactly. It can just be.
So the second rule or the second requirement of a story, besides having concrete nouns as subjects, is action verbs.
Follow closely after your subject.
Don't make your reader wade through 8, 10, 12, 14 words before they finally found out what that character did.
They want to know right away.
OK, so in this example, flocks of cichlid fish have evolved rapidly.
Evolved is a great action word. OK, and they disappeared later on in the paragraph and they were eaten by Nile perch and all kinds of things happened to them.
And when you use abstract nouns and you combine them, often this happens with weak verbs that have no action in them.
You've lost the whole story element.
And some research in Princeton by Uri Hassan shows that if you have a very good storyteller or a very good book to read, your brain and the storyteller's brain start to look exactly the same.
so if the storyteller is telling you about running down an alleyway to get away from the robber your brain the part of your brain that takes takes care of running and fear lights right up why wouldn't you want why wouldn't you want your reader why don't you want to change your reader's mind to so that it was completely engaged with your writing like that the better the story the more action, the closer linked those, your, the brains of your listener or your reader are to, to, you know, the storyteller.
It's amazing. Yeah.
And then it's easier to remember.
It's more likely to be cited.
Um, even if you're not in science writing, it's more likely to be remembered and appreciated and understood by your readers.
Yep. Yep. So it's the use of these abstract nouns and a very weak verbs like is or have or allow or suggest there's no action none whatsoever in those kinds of verbs there your story goes out the window you're no longer engaging the brains of your readers they're they're gone yeah and then you mentioned um having your subject close to your verb not having a bunch of stuff in between and that reminded me of all the other great stuff you had about having sort of the expected sentence structure and putting like the new information at the end, like where it's expected.
That was, that was all so useful.
Yeah. Yeah. That has, that has more to do with, we've been talking about sort of sentence structure you and I up to now, that has more to do with paragraph structure.
How do you structure structure a paragraph so that the reader doesn't get lost as you proceed from sentence to sentence.
So one of the rules we all learned when we were in English 101 is a paragraph is supposed to be but one thing or maybe two if you can swing it.
And that's good. That's fine.
And in order, the reason for that is so that you don't lose your reader switching from character to character character to character.
So a lot of writers think it's boring, but if you have the same or very similar subjects at the very beginning of each of the sentences in the paragraph, the reader says, thank you.
I'm not, I know exactly what you're talking about.
I don't have to worry about it because it's at the beginning of the sentence, like cichlid fish, cichlid fish, flocks of cichlid fish.
They, we all, we can follow all that right at the beginning of the sentence.
So they don't have to worry uh -oh here comes a new sentence with a totally different subject what am I going to do it's all the same they swim through that swim through the verb and then since they're so relaxed and happy you give them the punch at the end just before the paragraph with the new information that you want them to learn about those cichlid fish they disappeared because now perch were feeding on them or they whatever and there's the period at the end of the sentence is is a place where readers pause, and that time when they're paused, that lets that information they read just before
the period sink in.
It's just a little bit of time, and it's so important to end that sentence with a punch. And if you, I'm sure you've read sentences where, you know, the tree line appeared to be lower than the tree line in another place, where you get repeated Heated words to the beginning and the end.
So you have old information, hopefully at the beginning, and then you end the sentence with the same old information and you feel this dip, you feel this drop.
Anyway, you want to avoid that.
You want to save your interesting information that you want the reader, the new information you want your reader to remember at the end of the sentence.
You know, you reminded me of, there used to be, I think it was a Twitter account called Second Dimensions, and it would take a newspaper article where they would start with someone's name, you know in the story and then on the second dimension they would call them something like i don't know the the wily author from brazil or something like that you know some like wild thing and i'm trying to imagine someone doing that in science and i am sure it has happened and i don't know anything about cichlids but i'm imagining you know a way to not to to not do what you're suggesting and keeping it simple
would be something like the genus from, you know, and, and people would be wondering now, is that the cichlids?
Or is that something new that I'm supposed to be learning new information about?
I mean, not only is it not easy to read, but it can actually be confusing.
Exactly. And, and it's scary to think that, you know, the results and And the methods of some of the papers are so confusing that it was hardly possible to to replicate them.
And that's sort of the basis of what we're trying to do, you know, is to, you know, you publish these papers so people can can try them on their own and see if they get the same result.
But if they can't understand your methods or some other part of your analysis, just because the writing is so hard to follow.
But you're right. If we can keep terms the same, it sounds so boring.
And people have often said to me, I don't want to use the same word over and over.
That'll be boring to my reader.
It is not. on. Your reader is working so hard to understand the new information that you've got to give them a break and use the same term for the old information.
You can't use for herbivores, grazers, elk and deer.
Just use herbivores over and over and over, or they, if you've got the herbivores down pat.
Your reader is hard. It's hard work reading.
It's very hard work.
You know, You know, you've got this little phobia and that's why people's eyes flick back and forth.
Have you ever seen people read and their eyes are flicking back?
That's so they can center the phobia on the word that they're reading at the time.
And it's so, reading is really, really hard. And so you, as a writer, you need to take pity on your readers.
And it's hard enough, the scientific, it's so complex. Make the writing as simple and easy to understand.
as you can. Yeah. And you can make your work exciting in other ways.
I mean, you can have the action verbs and I mean, the things that are happening are exciting and you can vary your sentence structure, you know, in some ways to me, you know, you're not going to just because you have the same subject doesn't mean it's going to be monotony.
Not at all. Because your reader is not paying attention to the, the first part of the sentence, because that's the part that's the old stuff that they know that they're reading about DNA structure and you go DNA structure, the structure of DNA, DNA structure, it, that leaves them open to concentrate on what you're going to say about the DNA structure.
And that's what you want to put near the end of your sentence.
But, you know, these papers by Watson and Crick, for instance, a paper by Watson and Crick, extremely exciting and new, but all written in simple, simple language, very clear, hear short sentences, short words, majority of them, just, it was, it's, it's beautiful, beautiful.
Yeah. Well, again, the book is Writing Science in Plain English by Anne Green.
That's green with an E, Anne, Anne with an E and green with an E.
And, you know, I will say it's a, it's a tiny little book.
It is, it's very thin and it is packed with useful information.
I just just highly recommend it.
It's an excellent book for anyone who is doing any kind of nonfiction writing.
And Anne, you told me that there is a free online teacher's guide that goes with this book as well.
That's true. It's a new thing that is in the second edition.
It wasn't available in the first edition.
And it's in response to requests by some of the instructors who use my my book.
And I taught this from the book or basically the same principles for 15 years.
So I had lots of time to develop some really successful assignments, short assignments, long assignments, class activities.
I developed also means of supporting my students like one -on -one tutoring.
So I describe how I did that, peer tutoring we used in class and how we did that.
There's often been questions from instructors about plagiarism, so I cover the plagiarism in detail.
So I think it will be a really, really useful resource to anyone who teaches writing, hopefully teaching from this book, if that's what it's meant for.
And I think there will be something in it for everyone.
one. It's got lots and lots of downloadable documents in it that you can just take into class and have kids work on.
And there's lots of class activities that are hands -on and involve, you know, I had kids sitting on tables deciding how to reorganize an essay, for instance.
It was, there's, they're really fun, some of them.
So I hope it'll be useful to instructors.
We'll put that in the show notes because that's a long URL.
So if you're looking for it, look in the show notes in the in the description.
I can be a tough sell when it comes to sort of how to books because there are so many of them.
And, you know, they don't all distinguish themselves.
When you first pitched me on this book, I was like, Yeah, I don't know.
And then I read it.
And I was like, I have to talk to her because this book is fabulous.
So and thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
You bet. And so that's the wrap up for the main episode.
If you are a grammar palooza, And if you support our show, which we appreciate so much, look in your feed because we're going to have a bonus episode with Anne's book recommendations.
But for everyone else, that's all.
Thanks for listening.
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