Science Communication: Importance of Writing Skills

This essay is to appear in the journal published by Istanbul High School Science Club. Citation details will be updated as they become available. Some parts of the essay are modified, as the initial essay was targeted towards high school students.

As a mainstream math-oriented student of science, it took me a while to realize that being able to write effectively is a must-have skill for any scientist. In fact, nowadays, I might go as far as to say that writing down your research is at least as crucial as performing the experiment, maybe even more important. Why, a younger, high school version of myself would have asked, since I was so bad at writing and had my lowest grades from English and German literature classes. This essay will hopefully answer this question.

In early 1900s, scientific endeavors had been carried out by distinct and low number of individuals. Their results would take the form of short letters, exchanged mostly between handful of scientists rather than being published to a public domain. Even when they were published, only those with high curiosity and/or fortune would ever read them. In a way, science was contained within a small group. Therefore, it might have been presumably okay for a scientist to write poorly, as long as they were well-known within the community and had provided trustworthy results in the past. Taking a quick look at Einstein’s five famous papers in 1905, we can see that this is not true even for 1900s. Even then, scientists were very good communicators of science.

With the late 20^th century, science has become a formidable working area for many people who can conduct research and get paid at the same time, while the public funding made the researchers accountable for how they use taxpayer money in their scientific endeavors. This has led to the massive publication network that we have today. Hence, scientific writing is no longer contained to short letters exchanged between scientists, there is now an imperative for every scientist to make their work publicly available. Moreover, every scientist should be able to explain their work to funding bodies which usually consist of non-experts in the field. For many research areas, funding comes directly from the government, meaning that scientists should also justify the benefits of their research to the broad public, leading to the newly developing field of science communication and outreach. Now, the question becomes clear: “If even early scientists of 1900s have written very clear and accessible short letters, should a 21^st century scientist not do the same?”

Let us now take the alternative approach and assume that a scientist should only be able to perform amazing research but without the ability to communicate it properly through publications. Let’s say I have a potential Nobel prize winning result that is published in a journal, but the paper that I have written has no story, no proper connection to the literature and does not tell the reader why the finding is important. Realistically, can you expect a journalist, that has no background in your field, to read and understand your paper, as well as to advertise it as groundbreaking? There is a very high chance that no one will ever come across your paper, and even if they do, after they read the introduction they will just turn away. If your results are not clearly stated in the intro, but rather cleverly disguised as a puzzle throughout the paper (yes, I have seen people do it because they think it will make them look cool and smart), this is what your paper will be: A very cleverly written piece of art that no one ever reads. There are more than a million relevant papers published every year, there is simply not enough time to read them all.

Back to the central question of this essay: “Why is written communication more important than conducting the research itself?” Well, as long as your research is not received and appreciated by the academic community, what good does it have? You might have found the answer to the biggest questions of science today, but if you can’t make others read them, then your research would be in vain. That is, assuming our shared quest as researchers is to increase human knowledge and provide improvements to the literature. Thus, before assuming that Math and Physics classes are far more important than your English and/or literature classes, think twice! Without proper writing skills, you might achieve great things, but no one would know about them!