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Humour in scientific writing

Clarity and obfuscation in scientific papers is the title of a post by Dr Free-Ride (a.k.a. philosophy professor Janet Stemwedel). The post isn't as dry as it may seem from its title, as it draws attention to this list of common statements in scientific writing, and what they really mean. Examples are along the lines of:

"It is generally believed that"
I think this and at least one other person agrees with me.

"Additional work will be required to elucidate the mechanism"
I don't have a clue what is going on and I'm not going to be the one to figure it out.

While acknowledging the humour in the list, Dr Free-Ride asks why some people use words "whose meaning is distant from the truth" in their scientific writing, and how this relates to the "reward structure" for scientists.

Posted by Maxine Clarke on July 23, 2007
Categories: Writing | | Comments (1)

Comments

This reminds me of the recent paper by Kaj Sand-Jensen entitled How to write consistently boring scientific literature published earlier this ear in Oikos, which is also summed up in this post.

Posted by: Mario Pineda-Krch | July 24, 2007 04:19 AM

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