1102. This week, Anne Greene joins us to talk about the importance of writing in plain English, especially in scientific fields. We look at why short words are easier for our eyes to read and how a well-structured story with characters and action verbs can improve understanding. We also discuss how the historical origins of English words influence our writing today.
1102. This week, Anne Greene joins us to talk about the importance of writing in plain English, especially in scientific fields. We look at why short words are easier for our eyes to read and how a well-structured story with characters and action verbs can improve understanding. We also discuss how the historical origins of English words influence our writing today.
Anne's book, "Writing Science in Plain English"
Free, online Teacher's Guide for "Writing Science in Plain English"
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Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and this is the Thursday show where we talk with people doing interesting things with language. I'm so excited because I'm here today with Anne Greene, 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 is applicable to all kinds of nonfiction writing. It's just wonderful. I can't wait for you to hear all about it. Anne Greene, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Anne: Thank you very much, Mignon. I'm glad to be here.
Mignon: 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.
Anne: Yes. In the second edition, I reviewed some of the literature on scientific writing and what researchers have been doing, and it's very interesting. It was different than 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 show 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 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.
Mignon: 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.
Anne: Well, that's interesting that you say they held it up because it's one page, and they could hold it up. It was written in 1953 in “Nature,” and it described in plain English, really, the novel idea, the novel structure of DNA that nobody else had seen. They won the Nobel Prize for that research. And I use it in my classes.
There's quite a few, 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 papers—60% of the words in both those papers are short and simple words that we use every day.
Mignon: 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.
Anne: 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 bright number of cells in it that has the acuity to read.
So, because the fovea is so small, we are limited in our reading to, well, all it 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 are 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.
Why would you want to make your reader work that hard? This is a kind of attitude or a way of looking at writing that's quite different. When I first set out to teach my class on scientific writing, I went and read lots and lots of books, and they all were focused on the writer.
But there was one by Joseph Williams, who was a linguist at the University of Chicago, who wrote a book called “Style: Toward 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?
We don't think—scientists 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 professions that Joseph Williams wrote for, but I was concentrating on scientists. So anyway, it worked.
Mignon: 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," like how to talk about how we can make those shorter and why they're long to start with.
Anne: That's a good question. And it goes back to the 11th century in what we now call England. 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, have Anglo-Saxon origins. 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. As they took over institutional, 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, if 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 the words, or most of these words were longer and more formal than Anglo-Saxon.
And so you start, 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 there's lots of vocabulary in the 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 happens, 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 in 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.
Or we can't help but use some of them, and most people reading science have 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 there is a whole list of long words with short equivalents that we could easily use.
Mignon: Right. So instead of saying something like, "We provided a demonstration of something," you could just say, "We showed something."
Anne: Yeah, exactly. And instead of "provide," you could say, "we gave," or, you know, whatever long word almost you come up with. There are simpler words. And some of these sentences that I got out of the literature it wasn't hard to find; some of this is bad writing. 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, everyone had edited it. Everyone had, you know, and my editor looked at it and 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 in the second edition, but…
Mignon: Oh, that's amazing. And you have a quote from an editor from the Journal Nature, sort of bemoaning the quality of the writing and the work that they receive.
Anne: 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 for publication.
Mignon: Oh, that is so sad. 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? 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?
Anne: I think 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 really know. But some of them were very invested in their writing style and got a little upset. The later they got, oh, the longer they'd been in science. So, for instance, graduate students to postdocs to faculty, the longer their style had been, you know, successful for them. They're getting grants; everybody, 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 have been in science for a longer period of time, the careers are longer, the more resistance there 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. They said, easy reading that they got it, you know?
Mignon: Absolutely. 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?
Anne: You want a good example? You mean from a journal that's very—
Mignon: Or just, you know, if you have something from your book or off the top of your head. I just imagine people might be thinking like, okay, well we tell stories in fiction. Or maybe, you know, narrative nonfiction where I'm reading a magazine article, I can imagine telling a story, but how does that work in, you know, a scientific paper?
Anne: Well, the example, there's many examples. The Watson and Crick paper is—we're doing work on organisms. Usually, they could be, you know, macro, like deer and elk, Columbia spotted frogs, or they could be microorganisms. But often we’re doing work on, right, 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 your subject in the sentence.Â
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—and the first part is the preposition phrase, “In the Great Lakes of Africa.” But we have “large and diverse species flocks.” We have "flocks" as our subject, and we all 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 like 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 in the sentence 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 the, this is the introduction to a paper, but they're describing where they did their studies, right? And lots of concrete examples are there. They're already introducing cichlid fishes, and that's concrete.Â
So we can, and if we're really desperate, we can talk about ourselves. We can say "we" or, perish 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 about, 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. And so the verb "to observe," we change that into "the observation." Now, it's really, really hard. I know we, 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 "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 put our, like we can't conceive of it. "Mitigation" is—there's a continuum of abstraction, and "mitigation" is way out on the end. Maybe “observation” is somewhere around the middle. “Species,” maybe a little bit abstract, but you know what I mean? That is a sort of gradation. And the “mitigation.” What happens to you when you read about a mitigation? And…
Mignon: Eyes kind of glaze over.
Anne: Exactly. And scientific writing is full of that. And then we in a…
Mignon: And mitigation. It's not an actor; it can't do anything.
Anne: Exactly. It can. 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, or 14 words before they finally found out what that character did; they want to know right away. Okay?
So in this example, “Flocks of cyclic fish have evolved rapidly,” "evolved" is a great action word. Okay? 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 Yuri Hassan shows that if you have a very good storyteller or 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 care of running and fear lights right up. Why wouldn't you want, why wouldn't you want your reader? Why wouldn't you want to change your reader's mind so that it was completely engaged with your writing like that? The better the story, the more action, the closer linked those the brains of your listener or your reader are to, you know, the storyteller. It's amazing.Â
Mignon: And then it's easier to remember. It's more likely to be cited, even if you're not in science writing, it's more likely to be remembered and appreciated and understood by your readers.
Anne: Yep. So it's the use of these abstract nouns and very weak verbs like "is," or "have," or "allow," or "allow" or "suggest" there's no action, none whatsoever, in those kinds of verbs. Your story goes out the window. You're no longer engaging the brains of your readers; they're gone.
Mignon: Yeah. And then you mentioned, 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 the new information at the end, like where it's expected. That was all so useful.
Anne: Yeah. 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 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 that a paragraph is supposed to be about one thing or maybe two if you can swing it, and that's good; that's fine. And the reason for that is so that you don't lose your reader switching from character to 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 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 “cyclic fish,” “cyclic fish,” “flocks of cyclic fish,” “they.” We all, we can all follow 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 gonna 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 a punch at the end just before the paragraph with the new information that you want them to learn about those cyclic fish.They disappeared because Nile perch were feeding on them or whatever. And there's the period at the end of the sentence is a place where readers pause and, that time where readers pause just before the period sink in. They have time. It's just a little bit of time, but 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 one or the tree line in another place,” where you get repeated words from 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.
Mignon: Yeah. You know, you reminded me of, there used to be, I think it was a Twitter account called Second Mentions, and it would take a newspaper article. They would start with someone's name, you know, in the story. And then on the second mention, they would call them something like, I don't know, “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. I don't know anything about cyclics, but I'm imagining, you know, a way to not do what you're suggesting. Keeping it simple would be something like the genus from, you know, and people would be wondering, "Now is that the cyclics, 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.
Anne: Exactly, and it's scary to think that, you know, the results and the methods of some of these papers are so confusing that it's hardly possible to replicate them. And that's sort of the basis of what we're trying to do, you know, is to publish these papers so people 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 prior 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. 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 "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, it's hard work reading. It's very hard work.Â
You know, you've got this little fovea, and that's why people's eyes flick back and forth. Have you ever seen people read, and their eyes are flicking back and forth? That's so they can center the fovea on the word that they're reading at the time. Reading is really, really hard. And so you as a writer, you need to take pity on your readers. It's hard enough; the science is so complex. Make the writing as simple and as easy to understand as you can.
Mignon: 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. You can vary your sentence structure, you know, in some ways to, you know, you're not going to just because you have the same subject doesn't mean it's going to be monotonous.
Anne: Not at all, because your reader's not paying attention to the first part of the sentence because that's the part that's the old stuff that they know. If they're reading about DNA structure and you go "DNA structure,” “the structure of DNA,” “DNA is 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.Â
But you know, these papers by Watson and Crick, for instance, were by Watson and Crick extremely exciting and new, but all written in simple, simple language, very clear, short sentences, short words, the majority of them. It's beautiful. Beautiful, right.
Mignon: Yeah. Well, again, the book is “Writing Science in Plain English” by Anne Greene. That's Greene with an E and Anne with an E and Greene with an E. And, you know, I'll say it's a tiny little book. It's very thin, and it is packed with useful information. I just highly recommend it. It's an excellent book for anyone who's doing nonfiction writing. And Anne, you told me that there is a free online teacher's guide that goes with this book as well.
Anne: 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 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, and 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 have 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. That's what it's meant for, and I think there will be something in it for everyone. 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. They're really fun, some of them. So I hope it'll be useful to instructors.
Mignon: And the link is press.uchicago.edu/sites/greene, G-R-E-E-N-E. And 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 description. You know, 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, "Eh, 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 Anne, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Anne: Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Mignon: You bet. And so that's the wrap-up for the main episode. If you are a Grammarpaloozian, 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.