Does thinking like a scientist lead to bad science writing?

In his book A Short Guide to Writing About Science [1], David Porush suggests that the mindset useful for doing science isn’t always the best mindset for communicating science. (It’s more than a suggestion, actually — the second chapter of the book is titled “Why Good Scientific Thinking Can Lead to Bad Science Writing.”) Since it’s connected to our prior discussion of ambiguous scientific writing, let’s have a look at Porush’s diagnosis of bad science writing and the ways he thinks it could be better.

Porush notes that most people learn to write scientific papers by reading a whole mess of scientific papers and trying to imitate their style. Unfortunately, this process seems to entrench a lot of bad habits (as Porush sees them) that are treated almost as commandments, or as Porush describes them (on page 11):

The Idols of Science Writing

• Complex sentences are more precise and intelligent than simple ones.
• Passive voice is more objective than active voice because active voice involves stating the agent, who is often a human, and humans introduce subjectivity.
• Descriptive prose is imprecise and unscientific because descriptions rely on adjectives which are often unquantifiable.
• Claims about scientific fact must always be cautious; thus, using very cautious language — squirrel language — in scientific prose is always prudent.
• Be as wary of innovation or taking chances in language as you are in the lab.
• Revision is unnecessary because knowledge is transparent.

If you think these rules define good scientific writing, you will strive not to violate them. However, Porush argues that worshiping at their altar can lead to sins against clear communication.
Take the first idol, the preference for complex sentences rather than simple, direct ones. If you read enough scientific papers with convoluted sentences, you might get the impression that this is what an expert sounds like — so, if you want to be taken seriously, you should write this way, too. Alas, this seems to be the same sort of phenomenon one sees sometimes at scientific talks. The speaker gives an impenetrable talk and the audience members murmur to each other, “I didn’t understand that at all; he must be really smart.” Why isn’t the overwhelming response, “I didn’t understand that at all; this guy can’t communicate clearly to save his life“? If the goal is really the communication of science, “sounding smart” by being impenetrable is a bad strategy. Porush writes:

… the real basis of your authority as a writer is the work you’ve performed as a scientist; the research you’ve done in collecting data, analyzing it, interpreting it, and matching it to current theories or knowledge; and how well your writing explains this work to your audience. (p. 12)

In other words, let your content do the talking rather than using your complex prose as an “expert” disguise.
The second and third idols (favoring the passive voice and eschewing description) both stem from an effort to be objective. Striving for objectivity is a good thing in science. Writing as if you individually have achieved it — as if you have somehow become a transparent eyeball delivering an inerrant view of How Things Are — is not such a good thing. If I may quote myself in an earlier post:

While some thinkers have framed the problem of building objective knowledge as one that depends on each individual scientist being highly objective and switching off his or her own biases, others (including Frederick Grinnell and Helen E. Longino) have put the burden of objectivity primarily with the community — bias is stripped out of what ends up being identified as scientific knowledge when the community “checks the work” of individual scientists within it.

If it really is the coordinated efforts of a community that makes scientific knowledge more objective, then trying to disappear from the account of what you did, what you measured, and how you interpreted it is unnecessary. Your fellow scientists know that the data wasn’t left on the lab bench by elves; it was obtained through the activities of actual human beings. Better would be to use your language to communicate clearly what you did, how you did it, what you observed, and so forth to scientists who were not there so they can reason about your experiment and interpretations, too.
And what of the “squirrel” words? Porush recognizes that conditional language is a natural response when your scientific training cautions against overgeneralizing from your data, overlooking other interpretations of your results, or forgetting that your inferences rest on assumptions that may themselves turn out to be wrong. (Also, you don’t want to put forward a bold claim that you may have to retract later.) He isn’t advocating that scientific writing fall to the level of ad agency puffery, but he does claim that scientific writing can overdo the caution to the point of making claims unnecessarily weak and vague. Porush thinks scientists are better off explaining their conditional claims — the specific assumptions they’re making, the limits to the conclusions that should be drawn from the findings, etc. I’d throw in that seeing science as a cooperative project that requires communication (rather than a contest to see which scientist can score the most points) would encourage more clarity about what we think we know and what we think is still uncertain. Being vague about that may work to protect your reputation, but not to get the community to a point of fuller understanding efficiently.
Indeed, Porush seems to think that the community-level process of building more objective knowledge depends on the individual scientists acting more like individuals. What I mean by that is the scientists have to make reports of how the bit of the world they’re investigating seems to them — reports that are clear enough that other scientists can understand them — and trust the engagement of the community as a whole with these individual reports to result in a more objective account of that bit of the world. Porush writes:

Science writing is not as procedural as the scientific method itself. There are other parts to doing science: drawing conclusions, analyzing the data, speculating about hypotheses, synthesizing all you know to arrive at a theory. In all of these, there is a role for persuasion; for advocating one view or interpretation over another. There is certainly a need for clarity, for an absolute commitment to being understood by your audience without ambiguity. The writer interested in communication — and this is especially true for the scientist-writer — must make sure the audience receives the message. (pp. 19-20)

Taking a stand — saying here’s what I did, here’s what I saw, here’s what I concluded from that, and here’s why that conclusions seems more reasonable to me than this other one — is a good thing in a scientific paper. It makes it easier for other scientists to try to replicate or extend your work to see whether they get similar results and draw similar conclusions. And it may even make it easier for other scientists to identify your assumptions (and blind spots) and thus to challenge them — which, in the end, should make the scientific community’s body of knowledge less biased and more objective.
If the scientific literature is really supposed to be part of an extended conversation among scientists, trying to make it clearer and less painful to read only makes sense.