53. Top 6 ‘Best of’ episodes: How to improve your science writing

Let's Talk SciComm

We’re continuing our countdown of our most listened-to episodes and this week we’ve made it to number two. It came as no surprise to us that science writing is a topic so many of our listeners want to learn more about – being able to write clearly is such an essential skill!

In 2014, Steven Pinker published a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled ‘Why academic writing stinks’. While we might take offence at the notion that our writing ‘stinks’, there’s no question that the way many of us have been taught to write as researchers and scientists can be difficult for our readers to make sense of. In this episode, Michael and Jen revisit our conversation about why science writing can be so hard to read. They talk about a number of different approaches to improve the clarity and readability of our writing and chat about the style of writing that is most effective for communicating about science with non-scientific audiences.

Listen for our thoughts and advice on how to improve your writing plus tips from two of our UniMelb SciComm students, Randy Mann and Steven Tang.

Here are the papers we mentioned in the podcast:

Medical Obfuscation: Structure and Function. It’s really worth reading this short but pointed piece by Michael Crichton published back in 1975.

Specialized terminology reduces the number of citations of scientific papers. Research to suggest that if we want other scientists to cite our work, we should be avoiding using jargon – especially in the title and abstract.

UN climate reports are increasingly unreadable. Jeff Tollefson’s research into the readability of ICC climate reports.

The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time. More research highlighting that science writing is getting harder to read. And this has important implications for research reproducibility.

The growth of acronyms in the scientific literature. Research into the staggering increase in the use of acronyms in science papers since 1950.

And if you’re looking for some great science to read, some of our favourites are Belinda Smith, Dyani Lewis, Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer.