January/February 2007

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Writing Not Badly

by Donald Christiansen

Engineers don't write well, we are told. O.K., so maybe the first step is not writing badly. Writing well may follow.

How can we tell when we are writing badly? First, it might be useful to scan the winners of the Bad Writing Awards. This annual contest seeks to locate "the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a [recently published] scholarly book or article." (It was conceived by Denis Dutton, a teacher of philosophy and the editor of Philosophy and Literature.) Contest entries cannot be parodies of bad writing, warn its administrators, as "deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread."

The sentence that captured the contest's first prize back in 1998 was this one, from Prof. Judith Butler's article "Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time" in the scholarly journal Diacritics. "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Not surprisingly, the winners of the Bad Writing Contest are not pleased, and do not add these honors to their curriculum vitae. Fifteen academics (one of whom won a first prize in the contest) came together in "Just Being Difficult?" (published by Stanford University Press, 2003) to analyze and largely defend the writing styles of themselves and their colleagues. I did not read the entire book, but jotted down some phrases that might make the uninitiated, and maybe even the initiated, nod off. Here are a few: latent rhetorical proficiencies, corpus-based studies, text-based contexts, construal of the situation, lexico-grammatical elements, ideational macrofunctions. These are particularly lethargy-inducing when strung together in a long sentence.

The following singular nouns also appear frequently in text written by contenders for and defenders of "bad" writing. My gratuitous translations are in parentheses: exegesis (explanation); nonnormativity (not normal); temporality (a transitory state); antinomies (contradictions); obscurantism (making something deliberately obscure). Other favorites of this cohort are hegemony, dialectical, heuristic, didactic, and, of course, cohort.

Some of this academic-speak even creeps into the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications. As examples, these article titles from recent issues: "Constructive Interaction: An Analysis of Verbal Interaction in a Usability Setting," and "Rhetorical Figures as Headings and Their Effect on Text Processing: The Moderating Role of Information Relevance and Text Length."

On our own

The linguists and critics of language and its teaching seem to exempt engineers and scientists from the barbs they heap upon one another. Perhaps they perceive us as writing only in terms of physical facts and unassailable mathematics, and so excuse us from any tests for clear, lucid writing. Or perhaps our writing is totally incomprehensible to them, so they allow us to go our own way. To my knowledge, no science/engineering writing has yet been nominated for the Bad Writing Contest.

Until the "Bad Science Writing" awards come along, we will have to be our own critics. No less a distinguished engineer than John Pierce, when he became editor of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers (the predecessor of the Proceedings of the IEEE), found that neither he nor any members of his editorial board could understand most of the articles. He needed to enlist the aid of specialist reviewers to improve both technical authenticity and the the readability of the journal.

I am constantly on the lookout for good and bad science/engineering writing. I have concluded that, on balance, engineers and scientists do not write as, shall we say, obscurantly as the literary philosophers do. Often we do not write well, but often we do not write badly.

Let's take a look. In a recent issue of Science, one of the articles began: "Large-conductance Ca ^ 2+ - and voltage-activated K^+ channels (BK{Ca} or K{Ca}1.1) are fundamental modulators of neuronal signaling (1, 2) by contributing to action potential repolarization (3, 4), mediating the fast phase of afterhyperpolarization (3, 5-8), controlling dendritic Ca^ 2+ spikes (9), and establishing a feedback loop between membrane potential and cytosolic Ca^ 2+ that regulates release of hormones and transmitters (10-13)." [Editor's note: ^ precedes a superscript; {} denotes a subscript.]

Although imposing at first glance, pockmarked with chemical symbols, and probably amenable to improvement, it is hardly a candidate for the Bad Writing Contest, as it states the subject (channels) of the article, four ways in which they behave, and the outcome. You may have to read further to learn what afterhyperpolarization is and whether the actions stated are serial or simultaneous, but it is not a badly written sentence, and plenty of references are provided throughout.

Of course there are more inviting ways to attract readers to an article, and I found some in the same issue of Science. Here's one: "Based on the growing number of known planetary systems (1) and on the wealth of observations of disks around young stellar objects (2, 3), it is now well established that planets around main-sequence solar-type stars form in massive, gaseous, and dusty protoplanetary disks that survive for several million years around the nascent stars (4)."

And another: "Over the past 6 years, people have realized that security failure is caused at least as often by bad incentives as by bad design. Systems are particularly prone to failure when the person guarding them is not the person who suffers when they fail."

And one more: "A graduate student was recently heard lamenting, "I feel like my life is passing me by!" as he waited for an atomic force microscope (AFM) image to form line-by-painstaking-line."

An article in Scientific American by Stuart Kauffman, a professor of biocomplexity and informatics, intriguingly began: "When the world changes unpredictably over the course of centuries, no one is shocked: Who blames the Roman centurions for not foreseeing the invention of rocket launchers?"

Finally, in a recent issue of Technology Review, Freeman Dyson, famed for his work on mathematical physics, set the stage for his essay on operational research at the RAF Bomber Command during World War II with these opening remarks: "I began work in the Operational Research Section (ORS) of the British Royal Air Force's Bomber Command on July 25, 1943. I was 19 years old, fresh from an abbreviated two years as a student at the University of Cambridge. The headquarters of Bomber Command was a substantial set of red brick buildings, hidden in the middle of a forest on top of a hill in the English county of Buckinghamshire. . . . . The ORS was housed in a collection of trailers at the back. Trees were growing right up to our windows, so we had little daylight even in summer. The Germans must have known where we were, but their planes never came to disturb us." The reader who suspects that Dyson's informal introduction promises an interesting essay, easy to read and devoid of equations, will not be disappointed.

I have deliberately avoided giving examples from our own specific fields of interest. Both good and bad models do exist. Perhaps you'd like to nominate one or more for possible inclusion in a future column. You need not label them "good" or "bad." I think we'll be able to tell the difference.

Resources

For more on bad and some good writing:

• Romano, C., "Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me?," The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 24, 2003.

• Dutton, D., "Language Crimes," The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 1999.

• Culler, J. and K. Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, Stanford University Press, 2003.

• Spears, T., "A Contest No One Wants to Win: ‘Loopy' Academic Prose Vies for Top Honors," Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 9, 1999.

• Nussbaum, M., "The Professor of Parody," New Republic, Feb. 2, 1999.

• The IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication

• The PCS Newsletter

• Christiansen, D., "Engineers Can't Write? Sez Who!, Today's Engineer Online, February 2003.

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.