Science Writing

This post is born out of frustration with writing lab reports. I was sitting staring at my most recent physics lab the other day, trying to organize my analysis section in my report and mentally teasing out what elements made it different from my other sections. A professor later that day brought up the theme of science writing in a more general sense, so I decided to write this post. Here's my radical idea:

All science departments should require their students to take a short class on writing methods *for science* in their freshman year.

In science circles, the jokes about humanities being "non-scientific" and subjective never seem to get old. The grain of truth? Science writing is fundamentally different from humanities writing and the kinds of argumentative papers that kids are used to writing in school. The systems have a very basic splitting point: in history, say, you look at the causes for a war in one country, and write a paper stating that these causes could have been factors in other wars in other places. You quote other sources liberally throughout the paper, weave various themes in and out of your structure, have a position that you're defending, and write a conclusion that expands your main idea to a wider application.

In science, a paper structured like that would be considered a mess, if not downright fraudulent. Science writing is more similar to technical writing in many ways. You have specific sections for literature review, methodology, data, results, and conclusions, which -- like food on an OCD person's plate -- aren't allowed to overlap. If you extrapolate your results too far, show a bias, or use overly definitive terminology, your professional integrity goes out the window.

Granted, some students seem to pick up the format intuitively; most don't. With their future graduates' credibility on the line, you'd think that schools would include these building blocks of scientific communication formally somewhere. Almost every science textbook begins with a discussion of the scientific method; why not start classes with a discussion of what makes science writing...scientific?

I can't be the first person to think about this. Surely the devoted science schools of the world teach some sort of Science Writing 101, something to introduce the syntax and structure of scientific academia. So I ran a basic, university-specific web search of undergraduate catalogues for required classes on science writing.

All that came up were optional courses for journalism students looking to focus on science reporting.

I think this is a serious shortcoming. If I were the queen of the Universe, or at least a department head, this is how I would do it: a mandatory 1 credit, 4- or 6-week class in freshman year. Teach the students acceptable and unacceptable terminology, the basic structure of a scientific paper, the sections where you can repeat your data, the sections where you expand it, etc. I'd wrap up the class by having them read one short, well-written scientific journal article to illustrate the way it should be done. Then, turn them out into the world with a little better idea of what they're reading and writing.

Am I crazy? I'd love to know if anyone else out there has the same frustrations, or actually has such a class at their school.