Reading Between the Lines
Are your scientific papers and medical reports accessible to those outside your laboratory?
As an editor, it’s my job to ensure that text is not only correct, but also clear and readable – and, ideally, fun to read as well. It’s an instinct that I can never entirely switch off, so I often spot instances of unclear wording and unnecessary jargon in everyday life. And that, of course, includes the scientific literature I read. Could that sentence have been shorter and more approachable? Was that piece of specialist language really necessary – and, if not, has it only made the paper harder for non-specialists to understand?
Questions like these are growing increasingly relevant in the modern scientific world. Even specialty subjects often require large-scale collaboration to produce high-impact results. Genetics is a good example; whereas previously a graduate student could spend years creating a custom cell line, publish the work in Nature, and graduate, that work is now only the first few weeks of a much larger project – one that may require the assistance of biochemists, microscopists, bioinformaticians, statisticians, medical specialists, and many others. But if the statistician – trained extensively in mathematics, but less so in the life sciences – can’t understand your experiments, they may struggle to contribute to the best of their ability. If the interdisciplinary scientist who reads your paper doesn’t understand what you’ve done, how can they take the next step in the research process?
A recent study in eLife showed that scientific texts are becoming steadily less and less readable, with longer words, longer sentences, and more jargon (1). The trend may be in part because science itself is becoming more sophisticated, but complex concepts can be explained with simple but powerful prose – something we strive for in the pages of The Pathologist.
Do your papers suffer from low readability? Are they inaccessible to your colleagues or other medical professionals? How about your institution’s lawyers, accountants, or maintenance staff? It may be worth taking a second look at the text. The same applies to medical reports – after all, not every clinician has a high level of laboratory medicine expertise. And perhaps your patients themselves may even want to read your reports to learn about the role you play in their treatment. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could understand at least some of what you wrote?
- P Plavén-Sigray et al., “The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time”, eLife, e27725 (2017). PMID: 28873054.
- D Singh Chawla, “Research papers are becoming less readable” (2017). Available at: bit.ly/2wBHDqb. Accessed 24 January, 2018.
While obtaining degrees in biology from the University of Alberta and biochemistry from Penn State College of Medicine, I worked as a freelance science and medical writer. I was able to hone my skills in research, presentation and scientific writing by assembling grants and journal articles, speaking at international conferences, and consulting on topics ranging from medical education to comic book science. As much as I’ve enjoyed designing new bacteria and plausible superheroes, though, I’m more pleased than ever to be at Texere, using my writing and editing skills to create great content for a professional audience.
