Need for Plain English

Take big, wonderful and startling ideas and make them comprehensible

You've got metaphor, analogy and imagery at your disposal, and a lexicon that would be the envy of Shakespeare. Tim Radford reveals the secrets of good science writing

Shakespeare deployed around 30,000 different words. Biology alone has added 60,000 new words to the language. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty

Science writing would be easy if it were not for two problems: the ideas and the words. The ideas are quite often either counterintuitive, unimaginable or just very difficult (think special relativity, cosmic inflation, dark matter, quantum states, epigenetics or almost anything to do with cell biology) and the words are unfamiliar, misleading or simply hostile: how many non-scientists do you know who instantly understand what you mean by an alpha particle, a sodium ion channel, a phenotype or Mesozoic?

The ideas, however, are also part of the delight. Science writers get the chance to compose sentences that have never been written before. How many poets, sports reporters or political correspondents ever have that privilege?

But the words really are a problem. In the first place, there are an awful lot of scientific words. According to a casual aside in a Nature review two years ago, biology alone has added 60,000 new words to the Oxford English Dictionary. Shakespeare composed all his sonnets, plays and poems with a lexicon of little more than 30,000 words.

Some scientific words are coinages, some of them are existing words with new meanings, and some of them represent ideas that are as freshly minted as the words themselves: that is, they are not in a dictionary at all.
So a science writer has at some point to become a translator; to convert science into journalism without, if possible, using journalese; to take big, wonderful and startling ideas and make them comprehensible with help from metaphor, analogy and imagery, but if possible without using the hand-me-down language of cliché. So that rules out the missing link, the Holy Grail, the magic bullet and Pandora's Box for a start.

To be of any use, a science writer has to deliver something that does not necessarily induce apoplexy in his scientifically trained readership, but at the same time keeps the lay reader glued to the text. This has its own dangers: science isn't simple, but newspaper paragraphs and news bulletin scripts have to be vivid, clear and headlong – in a word, simple, with few asides for proviso or caveat.

Bloggers have the luxury of the optional hyperlink, but they too must write something that will bring their fans back to the web page. In a 450-word account of palaeontological discovery, biomimetic experiment or exoplanet identification, the science writer must navigate between the rock of scientific rigour and the hard place of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column.

Why go to all that trouble? Alas, science journalism is not a take-it-or-leave it activity. Science is funded by the public, for the public good: in a democracy, journalists have an obligation to report on scientific advance, however baffling. So the hapless hack must decide what the story is, and then write it.

A writer's first duty is always to the reader (without a reader, who says you are a writer?) but unless what you write is also right, why bother? So as Albert Einstein is supposed to have once said, in what I have always imagined was advice to science journalists: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Thanks Albert. You've been a big help.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/apr/13/secrets-good-science-writing