Character or word limits for stylish brevity?
Alice Flaherty of Harvard Medical school wrote in Nature 's Correspondence page (Nature 450, 1156; 20 December 2007):
A common belief about the ways science and art differ is that science convinces with evidence, whereas art persuades through rhetoric. Therefore, we tell ourselves, style does not matter in scientific writing. And yet, of course, it does. Even scientists wish scientists would write more readably.
One place to start is to avoid long words where short ones will do. However, science journals paradoxically foster the use of long words through their 150-word limits on abstracts. Authors who exceed the limit may spend hours looking for bulky portmanteau words to replace several simple ones.
This unfortunate practice has a simple solution. If journals change their word-count limit to a character-count limit that does not include spaces (a function available on most word-processors), scientists will suddenly have an incentive to use short words.
Can such a rhetorical constraint shorten word length? The next call for abstracts could test its effect.
