Steven Shapin of the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, discusses the art of persuasion in scientific writing in his review of the book The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour, edited by Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross (University of Chicago Press). From his review:

“While the term ‘scientific literature’ is a commonplace usage, few scientists would acknowledge any connection between how they write and the works of novelists or poets. As long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century, the English originators of the scientific journal vigorously set themselves against all forms of fancy writing. The newly formed Royal Society of London separated “the knowledge of Nature…from the colours of Rhetorick”. The aim of scientific writing was to report, whereas rhetoric worked to distort. Today, few scientists consider themselves to be rhetoricians. How many even know the meaning of anaphora, antimetabole or litotes?

But it’s not that simple. The scientific literature reports, but it also aims to persuade readers that what it reports is reliable and significant. And the arts of persuasion are inevitably literary and, specifically, rhetorical."

“The accelerating incomprehensibility of scientific writing to the average educated person is not merely the fault of the much-lamented ‘public ignorance of science’. Specialists have been so successful in constructing and bounding their own audiences that they rarely feel any need to address the laity or even scientists in other disciplines. Indeed, the plant physiologist is likely to be just as poorly equipped as any non-scientist to read a paper on superconductivity.”

The complete review is in Nature 448, 751-752 (2007).

The Nature journals’ advice on scientific writing can be found at our author and referees’ website.