On brevity
As another of my new endeavours for the year, I plan to teach a short course on writing. I have been researching the subject, looking for advice, examples and counter-examples. Some of my favourites come from the archives, where I expected to find only dusty obfuscation, written in the tortuous prose many people associate with science. Instead, I came across some tiny but glittering gems. Today: Orwell, and Watson & Crick.
George Orwell
Orwell's short essay, Politics and the English Language, is partly about politics, but mostly about language. A little on the dusty side perhaps, at least to my taste, but it has two highlights. First, Orwell quotes some perverse paragraphs from the more pompous writers of the day, like this unreadable piffle from one scholar:
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
Second, Orwell offers six rules to improve our writing:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Watson and Crick
One of the most important and widely recognized scientific publications of the last century turns out to be nothing more than a one-page letter. As well as being brief, it even reads like a letter, with plain language and plenty of opinion and informed speculation. Although the results were published in full elsewhere, doubtless in more technical language, and although letters are still used in some journals, I love the unselfconscious ease with which this seismic discovery was announced. If anyone is up for the challenge, it would be fun to parody a modern press-release for this discovery.
Click the thumbnail for the full paper →
Tomorrow, I offer two more short pieces to rev up your writing. Meanwhile... do you have any favourites from the archives of science writing? Please share them! Unless they're in Latin.
communication, history, skills in Writing 
Reader Comments (3)
Watson & Crick used to be up on my wall as an incitement to good writing for this very reason. "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material" is my favourite scientific sentence ever.
"Let us consider two semi-infinite isotropic homogeneous elastic half-spaces in contact at a plane interface" is my second-favourite...for slightly different reasons.
@Richie B: Thanks for reading. That is a great sentence, even its whiff of condescension. I love the bluntness of the whole letter. The thanking then immediate dismissal of Pauling. The informed speculation. The fact that it was published in barely more than 3 weeks.
Now I want to know your whole top ten!
Well, I kinda only have a top 2...
I'm not up for writing a press release for Watson & Crick (2011), but I do know that it is more correctly referred to as Bragg, Wilkins, Crick, Franklin, Gosling, Stokes, Watson & Wilson (2011) (although I suspect there would be even more authors than this in a modern bioscience paper). I don't have my copy of the The Double Helix here so I sadly omitted the name of the model-maker at the Cavendish from the authors list.