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.

The consistently intelligent and thoughtful FemaleScienceProfessor, whose blog I highly recommend to all scientists as regular reading, here writes about formatting of articles, by no means a trivial topic. From the FSP’s blog post:

“This issue of formatting is important because if a reviewer of a proposal (or a reader of a research statement) is reading more than a few proposals/statements (e.g., dozens to > 100), they may well not read every word. You need to write your document so that a reader either wants to read every word (because what you write is so fascinating) or you need to structure the text so that essential points will be noticed. It is very important that these essential points have content and not just be empty statements to the effect that you think you are awesome.”

Those wishing to submit their research reports to scientific journals will also benefit from the advice in FSP’s post.

Nature Chemical Biology is updating the formats of its original research papers, as announced in an editorial in this month’s (November’s) issue (3, 679; 2007). Based on feedback from the community, the editors have decided to discontinue the publication of Letters to Nature Chemical Biology. From the January 2008 issue, the journal will publish original research contributions as Brief Communications or Articles. To accommodate this change, the guidelines to authors have been updated to provide two clearly defined formats for research papers in Nature Chemical Biology. Naturally, as the editorial concludes: “Independent of the classification of our papers or how policies are implemented at the journal, authors and readers can be confident that maintaining the high quality and broad interest of the content in Nature Chemical Biology remains our highest priority.”