We humans are pretty good at working out whether other humans give a shit about us. Sure, there’s a new scam every minute. We all know that. But scams also wear out pretty quickly; people get wise to them – it’s what we do.
We live in an age with floods upon floods of “information”, but almost as fast as the floods have risen, most of us have, I think, actually kept up quite well with the task of selecting what’s relevant to us. Misinformation, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, hybrid warfare; people using AI to amplify bullshit – all that junk may still wreak terrible damage. A lot of trends in the world look pretty bleak right now, in early 2024. I’m not an optimist. But you could call me a kind of hopeful pessimist. Humans communicating with humans, how we win and give trust, how we learn to cooperate, how we share ideas and lay out arguments and explain and discuss things, all of this isn’t going out of date. If anything we need to do it better, and pay more attention to how we do it. People find ways. And especially, they find ways to connect with each other and do good stuff together. How we do that fascinates me.
I’m a scientist, and most of my working life has been about communication in science, engineering, technology, and even bureaucracy of large organizations. These are fields we tend to think of as dry, strictly rational, unemotional, factual, impartial, impersonal. In fact they are fields where we specifically train ourselves to communicate “impersonally”: such are the conventions, and they have their good reasons. And of all the forms of communication we do in these fields, surely writing is the least personal. No? Maybe. Let’s think about it.
If I speak to somebody face to face, I know, as I am speaking, simultaneously, whether they are understanding what I say. Or also whether they are liking it, whether they agree or disagree. I can see these things so instantly, in fact, that I can respond by changing what I’m saying in the middle of a sentence – if I even finish my sentences at all. Speaking, we use expressions that are idiomatic, meant ironically or humorously, or made up on the spot; we can use all the warmth (or otherwise) of our personalities, gestures, facial expressions, the whole show. We can make up for less-than-perfect skills in the language we’re speaking by interacting well with the person we’re talking to. Have you ever read a transcript of a real, informal conversation? Have you seen how different it is from writing? Even the most informal writing – for example, in WhatsApp messages – is different.
But what about formal scientific and technical writing, then? Surely that is just about describing things, and as long as we describe the things accurately, the job is done? But why are we describing the things? Just to send the description out into the ether? No. We are still always writing for people. I want the editors to send my paper out for review; I want the reviewers to think it’s good; at the very least, I want them to understand correctly what we did. I want the board to approve my grant. I want the engineering company to understand our specification and produce an offer that actually meets the requirements; we want the client to see why our design concept is best. We want the users to handle the instrument in a way that doesn’t destroy it. We, the software developers, desperately want to stop the managers in the client company making a huge mistake they seem intent on making. You see, science and technology are full of writing that needs to reach people and influence them in some way. And yet, because it’s writing and not negotiating face to face, we have less means at our disposal to reach the people.
Or we have other means. The very fact that writing is not spontaneous gives us power. We can think carefully about it. We can’t respond on the spot when someone misunderstands something in our writing. But we can anticipate how they might do so, and make the writing clearer. We can sketch out a good picture of our readers’ knowledge, and pitch the writing so that they won’t feel talked down to, or fail to understand something. We can try to arrange the information so that we don’t confront them with a term they don’t know already without it having been introduced further up in the text. We can imagine their interests and what they are looking for in the text that will help them do their job. And then we can put that into words on the page. We can sleep on it and show it to colleagues and then revise it and make it better. Technical and scientific writing is a craft.
I just looked up a video I have of me reading a book to my daughter. The book is The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Axel Scheffler. And my daughter is ten months old! It’s a complicated story and we are in Graz. She has never seen the sea. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know what a whale is yet. How many of the things in the cartoonish pictures does she know? She’s quite a long way from saying her first word. And yet she is already liking the story: maybe just as a rhythmic, rhyming ritual. But still: we shouldn’t think that language comes first and stories come afterwards. That’s not how young children develop. It’s almost the other way around: they appreciate the contours of a story and the dynamics of conversations long before they understand the words. Stories are a quite primal part of how we understand the world and interact with people; little children are phenomenal pattern-learning and socially learning machines.
And stories play a great part in scientific and technical writing, too. A research article is a drama with a predictable arc. If you don’t believe me, read Joshua Schimel’s book Writing Science. We like it when the drama unfolds as we expect. Now, I notice a lot of chatter in advertising circles about “storytelling” which more or less seems to add up the the idea that if you can attach a seductive story to a consumer product, you’re going to make a lot of money, and it doesn’t really matter what the product itself is like. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. The stories that work in science and technology aren’t added on. They are how we arrange the subject matter itself. Our stories are about the stuff. They’re not decoration.
But how do we build a story out of words? How to make a beginning, a middle and an end? How to show a set of arguments running in one direction, and then a plot twist going the other way? What is a logical order of ideas? Can we make sentences easy to read? How many pieces of information can fit in one sentence? Can we link the information in one sentence to what the reader just saw in the one before? If you’re a scientist or engineer, are you starting to feel out of your depth with these questions? You might, because of course our academic world has a science faculty over here and a humanities faculty somewhere over there on other side of the campus and we tend not to talk or listen to the people from the other side. It seems to me that the people who would have the equipment to analyze the subject literacy traditions in science and engineering, which are really quite highly developed, rarely get involved with this subject matter. We from the science side of things maybe aren’t aware that modern linguistics is largely an empirical science, whose logic shouldn’t seem foreign to us, or that it is possible to say really rational and practical things about structures and qualities in written texts.
I am a scientist and have been over to the other side and I’ve tried to bring back a few ideas from there and make them useful over here. It’s not hocus pocus and snake oil. Good scientific or technical writing is something that can be described logically and is learnable. I can do it pretty well and I can show you how it goes, too. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why I have this slogan.