What clear and precise scientific language is held to
Scientific language is held to more than being understood: it has to be true to the evidence, precise about what it claims and clear to the reader it is written for, and the three pull against each other. This leaf sets out that standard, a short working version of it for a scientific paper, and the evidence that the published literature a writer learns from has been moving away from it. Saying something specific and choosing the plain word over the impressive one apply the standard to individual words, writing in English for an international readership to readers and writers working in an additional language, and plain language takes it to readers outside the profession.
Hold the text to truthfulness, precision and clarity
Whatever the text is and whoever it is for, Blanca Mayor Serrano's formulation of the standard is that it ought to observe the three features that should characterise every scientific language: truthfulness, precision, and clarity. Holding all three at once is what makes the work difficult, because a passage can be made clearer by becoming less precise, and more precise by becoming less true to the uncertainty in the evidence behind it.
Scientific prose succeeds when readers can recover the intended meaning accurately. Familiar words and manageable sentences help both specialists and readers working in an additional language. Elaborate language can obscure sound science, while careless wording can undermine confidence in the work.
Plain language presents an accurate message concisely, in a suitable tone, with the reader in mind. The Plain English Campaign's chapter in The Complete Guide to Medical Writing emphasizes its value for professional readers as well as the public. Explaining complexity clearly is a writing skill, not a reduction in the seriousness of the subject.
Work from three C's when the text is a scientific paper
A short rule is easier to apply under deadline than a long list, and Julia Bates's 2018 column in EMWA's journal organises the whole problem around three: be clear, be concise, be correct. The framing she starts from is a target rather than a style preference — the goal should be to inform others, not to impress your peers, and the test of a scientific paper is whether it could be read by scientists outside its field, by medical professionals who might implement its findings, or by journalists who could pass them on. Scientific papers are difficult because they are written for a specific audience, usually fellow scientists in a niche field, and so are full of technical information and jargon.
Clarity, on her account, is mostly word choice plus a check. Use words familiar to the reader where possible — "increasing" for "burgeoning", "cause" for "aetiology" — define or explain terms the reader may not know, and do not try to impress with complicated phrases. Her general rule for pitch is a usable one: the text should be understandable to an undergraduate-educated scientist outside their field of specialty. And her check is a reader rather than a formula: give the draft to a colleague or friend and ask what they thought the main points were, which tells you whether the writing is clear.
Conciseness is subtraction with a criterion. Work out the main message and stick to it, and ask of each sentence or paragraph whether it helps the reader interpret the findings presented in this paper — because years spent on a protein or a technique do not make that material relevant here. Check that sentences or whole paragraphs have not been duplicated between introduction and discussion. Break long sentences, which leave a reader re-reading, and spot them by reading the paper aloud. Remove unnecessary words: "reflects" for "is a reflection of", "we analysed" for "we performed a detailed analysis of", "whether" for "the question as to whether", "to" for "in order to", "most" for "a large majority". And use references to do the work of background, picking out the points most relevant to the paper and directing the reader to a comprehensive review for the rest.
Correctness covers grammar and content together, and the boundary between the second C and the third is where Bates puts her strongest rule. Punctuation is worth the effort because it makes the difference between a sentence that means nothing and one that reads easily — her example being a list of inclusion criteria that is unintelligible until it is numbered and semicoloned. Content correctness means being specific: "we analysed 115 patients with non-small cell lung cancer treated with single-agent nivolumab" is not the same claim as "we analysed 115 cancer patients treated with immunotherapy". And the rule that orders the three: being concise at the expense of being correct is not acceptable when reporting a scientific method or its results.
A plainer statement of the same clear-writing programme was published for surgeons in 2012 and reported for medical writers in EMWA's journal by Nancy Milligan. Its authors' premise is that the communication of study findings is at the core of scientific research and that medical writing is still often seen as dry and formulaic, and the tips they offer to change that overlap largely with the three C's: shorter articles are easier to read and most could be considerably shorter without losing the message, so edit an article several times to condense it; write unambiguously, logically and succinctly; use the active voice rather than passive phrases, with the word processor's grammar tool useful for highlighting them; and reduce repetition with a thesaurus. Two of their positions are less commonly stated and worth keeping. Authors should be allowed to use and develop their own personal style of writing. And there is room for imaginative composition in the introduction, discussion and conclusion sections of a manuscript even where the methods have to follow a strict format — which locates the freedom in specific sections rather than treating the whole document as either formulaic or open.
Know that the baseline you are copying has been getting worse
A writer who learns scientific style by imitating published articles is copying a moving target, and the direction it has moved is documented. John Dixon's 2018 article in EMWA's journal assembles the evidence: a study of 700,000 abstracts in over 100 biomedical and life sciences journals from 1881 to 2015 found that articles have become progressively less readable, and associated the decline not with discipline-specific words such as theophylline, postsynaptic or mutagenesis but with an increase in general scientific jargon — words such as mediated, paradigm and attenuated. Earlier work had already reached the same place: a 2002 study in the BMJ found medical articles in major journals extremely difficult to read, and a readability consultant responded in a letter that no more research on the topic was needed because researchers will keep reaching the same conclusion and readability studies have no influence on physicians, researchers and writers.
Dixon's diagnosis of the mechanism is the part aimed at practitioners. Scientists have become writers without learning how to write readable prose, so they copy what they read in original articles and take it for good style — intelligent-sounding text with long complex sentences and scientific jargon. That style is a culture and is deeply rooted, and challenging it can meet resistance; his illustration is a doctoral student who came up after a workshop on effective scientific writing to say, in an upset tone, that this meant everything she had been taught about scientific writing was wrong. He is explicit that medical writers are not exempt from the diagnosis: the profession has an important role in preparing manuscripts as readable as possible, despite the tendency of some authors and clients to push for less readable text, and that assumes writers who have themselves shed old habits and misguided beliefs about scientific writing.
Why it matters more than it used to is an argument about access rather than about style. Peer-reviewed articles are the most trusted source of scientific information for everyone from academic scientists to the general public, which is an argument for open access to readable manuscripts rather than merely to manuscripts; and the patronising view that lay people do not care to read the research literature and would not understand it is answered by the case Dixon cites of a mother without a scientific background whose children had a rare and poorly documented genetic abnormality, and whose attempts to access and understand information so that she could talk to doctors and help her children were served only by peer-reviewed articles — most of which, in 2005, sat behind paywalls. Academic staff and postgraduates also benefit from articles being more readable, so the interest is common rather than sectional.