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Writing the wrongs Professional science writers need to put their house in order, argues Liz Wager.
A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Writers Association started with this sentence: 'For improving word usage fluency, students in the sciences, and presumably analytical students in general, are receptive to a flaws approach (ie flaw identification preceding flaw revision)'. I think the author, who is 'Director of Research Writing' at an American university dental school, is trying to say: 'Students can learn to improve their word usage if someone points out their mistakes to them'. But I was so horrified by this sentence that I didn't have the energy to read any further and find out.' However, I did have enough energy to wrestle with the bulging file in which I store examples of awful writing, to unearth another example that had stuck in my mind. This came from a paper about patients' comprehension levels written by members of an education department in a Canadian university. Their first sentence was: 'A growing emphasis on health promotion and self-care activities has significant implications for patient education delivery'. They went on to say: 'Increasingly, health professionals are using printed materials in patient teaching situations'. The Gunning Fog Score for the first paragraph is 17.8, but it is roundly beaten by that for the AMWA article on word usage which gets a storming 20.8. What does this tell us about medical writers and those who teach this arcane art? Personally I would avoid a driving instructor whose car was covered with dents, and I wouldn't employ a builder who lived in a dilapidated hovel. So my first reaction is to ignore these people and their advice, check my own writing and feeling slightly smug. My next is to be horrified that these people may be teaching others how to write in this style. But perhaps there is a more serious message about the current state of science writing? Presumably both these articles were copy-edited before publication, so the journal editor found them acceptable. Perhaps some of the infelicities were forced onto the hapless writers by the journal (although I find it hard to believe that a subeditor would encourage a writer to use sentences with an average length of 34 words.). What does it all say about the writers' views on the journals' expectations? I blame everybody: readers who tolerate (and are even impressed by) foggy writing (see below), editors who publish it, and any professional writers or trainers who inflict the stuff on us. As a writer, I would be mortified if the text of my company brochure included any spelling mistakes or typos. I'm not saying that I'm perfect, but when writing something for public consumption, I take care over it. For example, I made sure that a recent article about writing documents for patients had an acceptable readability score. I felt that, if I was advising my readers to use such scores, I should be seen to be following my own rules. If we professional writers don't put our own house in order, the rest of the world would be quite justified in ignoring us.
RESEARCH ON STYLE Hartley and colleagues have done some nice research into readers' views on articles. They asked MBA students to rate articles that had identical content but were written in different styles. The students though that the less readable writing was more authoritative and prestigious. However, slightly more reassuringly, they did not find that readability was correlated with the prestige of science journals. Hartley et al, Readability and prestige in scientific journals, Journal of Information Science, 1988, 14: 69-75
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