It Is Important To Note That…And Other Unnecessary Phrases

I recently received a manuscript that was overly wordy. Throughout the paper, the author had sprinkled completely unnecessary phrases or phrases that could be expressed with a single word. For example, here is a list of phrases that can be replaced with the word "because":

-due to the fact that
-owing to the fact that
-in view of the fact that
-the reason why is that

This particular manuscript was unusually encumbered with these and other annoying phrases (it is important to note that, it is of interest to the reader that, it is indeed of significance that). I pointed out a few of these overblown phrases and explained why the author might want to eliminate them (and perhaps be on the alert for them in future writings). Inexperienced writers often are unaware that wordiness is not a virtue. They repeat the important-sounding phrases they've read in other papers. Unfortunately, they add nothing to the paper, except length. In other cases, I suspect that it is simple laziness. Lazy writers know better but don't make the effort to search out and remove extraneous words—perhaps expecting others (co-authors, reviewers, editors) to do it for them. For some, flowery writing is a habit; they see nothing wrong with their pet phrases.

Sometimes I slip and use a wordy phrase when writing a first draft; however, I usually catch them during revision. Here are a few ways to help purge your writing of wordiness:

1. Make at least one thorough reading of a manuscript to look specifically for such phrases (as well as convoluted wording that could be stated more simply).

2. Some of these phrases are innocuous and easily overlooked. It takes a fresh eye to spot them. Putting the draft aside for a few days or weeks can give you some distance and make it easier to root out those obnoxious phrases.

3. If you have a habit of using certain phrases, one easy solution is to do a word search for them.

4. Read your manuscript aloud; problematic phrases and awkward sentences become more obvious.

5. How do you determine if a phrase is unnecessary? See if the sentence or paragraph is understandable without it (or with a one-word substitute).

Want more? Here's a list of 30 obnoxious phrases.

Bizarre, Sexist Advert for Scientific Equipment

In the "what were they thinking?" category:  http://ika.com/owa/ika/catalog.video?iProduct=dispersers
Be sure to watch until 1:13 min.

Where's The Best Place To Be A Woman?

The Global Gender Gap Report (2013) is out if you want to check. Or there is a nice interactive graphic on the BBC World News site that summarizes the gender gap in five categories (health, economics, politics, education, and overall). You can scroll over countries to see the names and individual ranking.

The gender gap (overall average) is narrowest in the following ranked countries:

1. Iceland
2. Finland
3. Norway
4. Sweden
5. Philippines

6. Ireland
7. New Zealand
8. Denmark
9. Switzerland
10. Nicaragua

The UK, Canada, and the U.S. ranked 18th, 20th, and 23rd, respectively. Nordic countries made a near clean sweep of the top five. However, I don't think I'll be moving; just can't take the light deficit and cold.

Thanks to Chris S. for the link.

Dashed and Confused

Confused about how to use hyphens, dashes (en, em), and minus signs?

I receive lots of manuscripts to review and often see that the author has no clue about when to use a hyphen or a dash (or even that there is a difference). In a few cases, they may realize that the hyphen (-) is too short to use in a place where the en (–) or em (—) dash is required and attempt to recreate it by using two hyphens (--).

There are lots of arcane rules for using these symbols in particular situations, but here's a brief overview that generally holds for most uses.

Hyphen (-): use to join words (e.g., in a compound modifier), with certain prefixes, or to separate syllables of a word (e.g, in a line break). Sea-level rise, how-to book, un-American, science com-
munication. Note that compound phrases require a hyphen only when they precede the noun they modify—not when they follow: "The well-known researcher..." vs. "The researcher is well known."

The hyphen key is located on the keyboard between the 0 and = keys.

Minus sign (−): use to indicate a mathematical operation (subtraction). The minus symbol is longer than a hyphen and similar in length and height to the plus and equals sign symbols.

In word processing programs, you can find the minus sign in the symbol browser.

En dash (–): use to indicate a range of values or in certain word combinations. 5–10 meters, pp. 51–65, Houston–Dallas route, Comet Hale–Bopp.

The en dash is created on a Mac by holding down the option key and pressing the hyphen key. On a PC, you can can create it by holding down the ALT key and typing 0150 on the numeric keyboard. Also found in the symbol library in MS Word.

Em dash (—): use to set off or emphasize a strong break in thought in a sentence. "We all piled into the car—not stopping to worry about our wet clothes—and drove straight back to the city." It's also acceptable to use the en dash in this case, but with spaces: "We all piled into the car – not stopping to worry about our wet clothes – and drove straight back to the city."

The em dash is created on a Mac using shift-option while pressing the hyphen key. On a PC, you can get it by holding down ALT and typing 0151 on a numeric keypad. You can also find it in the symbol library.

For more detailed guidance in the use of dashes and hyphens (and other interesting writing tips), see this post at The Belligerent Copywriters' Guide.

How To Write A Boring Scientific Paper

Someone sent me a link recently to a 2007 paper entitled, "How to Write Consistently Boring Literature", by Kaj Sand-Jensen (Univ. of Copenhagen). I met the author many years ago and can quite imagine him writing such a tongue-in-cheek article.

The first line of the abstract reveals his motivation for writing it: "Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications."

The paper is divided into four sections:

How to turn a gifted writer into a boring scientist
Why are scientific publications boring?
Ten recommendations for boring scientific writing
Alternative writing style and variable outlets

The first two sections are quite short and serve to introduce the main content in the third section. Here are the ten recommendations guaranteed to make your writing dull, incomprehensible, and impersonal:

1. Avoid focus.
2. Avoid originality and personality.
3. Write l  o  n  g contributions.
4. Remove most implications and all speculations.
5. Leave out illustrations, particularly good ones.
6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning.
7. Use many abbreviations and technical terms.
8. Suppress humor and flowery language.
9. Degrade species and biology to statistical elements.
10. Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements.

I find most of these suggestions to be quite useful if your goal is to write a boring paper. Not so sure about the "flowery language". I find that boring writers are adept at producing ornate and excessively verbose narratives. Perhaps what is meant is "colorful", "entertaining", or "provocative"?

There are some additional recommendations I might add:

11. Include all data collected, no matter how irrelevant, and describe it in excruciating detail.
12. At the beginning, fail to articulate your questions, objectives, or hypotheses.
13. At the end, fail to address the questions, objectives, or hypotheses posed at the beginning.

The latter two are essential if your goal is to be incomprehensible.

In the final section, the author suggests some alternative outlets for scientists who wish to have more freedom in their writing styles: books and essays. To those suggestions, I might add: blogs.

Although the article is humorous, it has a serious message, articulated in the last line: "In an atmosphere of increasing competition among educations and scientific disciplines, I argue here that we desperately need more accessible and readable scientific contributions to attract bright new scientists and produce integrated understanding."

If you would like a good laugh (and also learn something about how to avoid being so boring in your scientific writing), you might take a look at this paper. Here's a link to it.

In the next post, I will talk about a new app and book (by Randy Olson) for communication-challenged scientists.


Image Credit: photograph by DrDoyenne; quote from the paper reviewed in this post.

How to Read a Scientific Paper

I remember the point in my graduate training when I realized that I was capable of reading and understanding scientific articles outside my field, even those that involved methods and terminology I was not familiar with. This was quite a revelation to me at the time because I was under the misapprehension that, once I completed my training, I would only be able to critically review papers in my own field or closely related fields.

What changed my mind was a course I took (plant biochemistry) in which the professor assigned published articles on a variety of topics to us to read and discuss. Quite a few of the papers involved molecular and other techniques that were as mysterious to me as the process of flying might be to an elephant. Being a conscientious student, however, I endeavored to teach myself how to read and understand scientific papers about unfamiliar topics. To make a long story short, I developed a procedure not unlike the one recently posted by Jennifer Raff, a Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Texas (which I'll get to in a moment).

With my method, I was able to effectively critique all the assigned papers and to enthusiastically participate in class discussions (we were graded on our class participation). I discovered that not only could I hold my own with the rest of the class (mostly biochemistry grad students who were more familiar with such articles), I was able to point out critical flaws in the studies that no one else saw. My strong background in statistics was particularly useful in poking holes in experimental designs (to my surprise, most of the assigned papers reported no statistics whatsoever, not even standard error bars). When the professor began calling on me for my assessment of a paper's experimental approach and whether the conclusions were supported by the data, I knew I would never wonder again whether I could understand any scientific paper and whether its findings were valid.

If someone with scientific research training can feel inadequate when faced with an unfamiliar topic, imagine how non-scientists must feel–particularly science writers who are assigned the task of writing a newspaper or magazine article about a new discovery reported in a scientific journal. To help such folks, Jennifer Raff has written a nice blog post called "How to read and understand a scientific article: a guide for non-scientists".

Her post is not only a good guide for non-scientists, it is an excellent primer for science students and even scientific researchers wanting to improve their skills at reviewing papers.

Presentation Myths: Tell a Joke to Lighten the Mood

In this latest series of posts, I've been talking about myths surrounding public speaking, specifically focusing on the scientific talk. In this post, I thought I would tackle the idea that a speaker should tell a joke or a funny story during professional presentations to put the audience at ease. Is this a good idea or a disaster waiting to happen?

There is nothing inherently wrong with being funny during a formal presentation, especially when the material being presented is deadly dull. God knows, the audience is likely desperate for something to break the monotony or seriousness of the meeting. The problem is that this is sometimes very difficult to pull off.

Some speakers are naturally funny or have a knack for telling amusing stories. I know colleagues (and students) who could easily become successful stand-up comedians. They are not the problem. It's the rest of us scientists who are so serious and, let's face it, deadly dull. Of course, it's always possible to be so dull as to be hilarious, e.g., Ben Stein in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off:



By the way, that stint as an economics professor in this movie launched Stein's career in film (before that, he was a speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, among other things).

But back to professional talks. The problem comes in when a speaker tells a joke or a funny story that really has no bearing on the speaker's topic. It almost always falls flat. Some even tell highly inappropriate jokes that worked on their beer-buddies (so everyone must like it, right?). The most recent, public example of of a joke-gone-wrong was the knock-knock joke told by one of George Zimmerman's attorneys during the opening statements.

The biggest sin is often not that the joke is inappropriate but that it isn't funny.

Sometimes it's just the wrong audience. A memorable example occurred at a botanical conference and during a talk about gravitropism in plant roots (how plant roots grow in a downward direction). The speaker explained that he had figured out that the chemical signal guiding root growth was dependent in part upon a mucous coating on the root tip (that facilitated ion movement, I think). He had tried all sorts of media in an attempt to replicate this mucous material, but the only one that seemed to work was the "personal lubricant", K-Y jelly (interestingly, the main ingredient is methyl cellulose). He then proceeded to describe his experience buying up large quantities of this product at his local Walgreens and the exchange he had with the checkout clerk. It was hilarious. However, no one laughed, except me, as I seem to recall. The audience was composed of mostly botanists (who are not known for their sense of humor). Upon further reflection, I suspected that this particular audience failed to find this story funny, not because they thought it was inappropriate but because they did not get the reference to K-Y jelly and what it is commonly used for. At least that's my working hypothesis. Perhaps some botanist readers would like to rebut?

The botany story might have gone over much better with another audience. But it was the high point of that meeting for me. In fact, it's been over twenty years since I heard that talk, and I still remember it (both the technical and the humorous aspects)....which relates to my previous post about telling a good story.

My own experience with using humor in professional talks is mixed. Humor only seems to work for me when it is unplanned. All the times I planned to tell an amusing story or make a humorous aside, the audience did not laugh. However, when I have added something on the spur of the moment, even when I was being serious, I've gotten a big laugh.

For example, I was once giving a talk at a conference on restoration of tropical forests and was describing my field site. It was located in Florida adjacent to a golf course. I showed an aerial photo of the site and described how I and my students had to trek across the golf course to get to our study site and were sometimes stopped by the groundskeeper who thought we were illegal aliens (we were dressed in field clothes and carried garbage bags). I thought that would get a laugh. It didn't. Then I later mentioned, off-handedly, that my students, on their first excursion to this site, always expressed fear of snakes, alligators, spiders, or some similar beast. I told the audience that I tried to allay their fears by telling the student that the most dangerous creatures out there were senior citizens lobbing golf balls into the forest. I was serious...getting beaned by a golf ball was much more likely than encountering a dangerous animal. It was a spur-of-the-moment statement that got a tremendous laugh. Go figure.

I suppose the take-home message is that humor can be used in a professional talk but it takes good timing, the right audience, and perhaps some comedic talent (but not always) for a successful outcome. If you have an example (successful or not), please share. We scientists need a good laugh now and then.