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Academic Press is an imprint of Elsevier 30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA 525 B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, California 92101-4495, USA 84 Theobald's Road, London WC1X 8RR, UK This book is printed on acid-free paper. Copyright © 2009, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone: (+44) 1865 843830, fax: (+44) 1865 853333, E-mail: permissions@elsevier.com. You may also complete your request online via the Elsevier homepage (http://elsevier.com), by selecting “Support & Contact” then “Copyright and Permission” and then “Obtaining Permissions.” Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Application Submitted British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-12-373980-3 For information on all Academic Press publications visit our Web site at www.books.elsevier.com PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 09 10 11 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Dedication To Mr. Murray Glass, who launched my ship, Rabbi Mark Cogan, who demanded that the ship be seaworthy, Dr. Ralph E. Behrends, who taught me how to row, and Dr. David Finkelstein, who taught me to love the ocean. HR To My Mom, Irene Greenstein My teacher in science, and in life SV Preface S o begins our journey. It is a journey that others have taken before us; in fact, in reaching our destination we will rely on the efforts of those who came before. Just as Columbus retraced steps taken by others before him (perhaps as long as two millennia before he sailed), so we gratefully acknowledge the work of those who went before. Yet, like the voyage of Columbus, there is a sense of beginning, a tenor to the enterprise that makes it a voyage of discovery. Those who came before Columbus came for their own benefit, to find wealth and riches in an untapped land. But Columbus came for other purposes as well: he sailed for king (and queen) and country and to establish trade dominance over the seas, and ultimately the globe. The sudden appearance of a continent barring the way to China was not a disappointment; it was an opportunity—to extend an empire and to provide a place for colonization. Columbus realized that his voyage would make history and that he would return, or that others would follow him. However well visited the Western Hemisphere may have been before Columbus, it was now indeed a New World. We have a similar sense of newness. The guidebooks on scientific style and writing that have appeared have grappled with many of the issues covered in this book and have provided much instruction of the ways of scientific discourse. The approach that we have adopted, though respectful, grateful, and admiring of previous efforts, differs from them somewhat in ways that bespeak a different set of values and guidelines. What is new is presented mainly in Chapter 1 of this work, and it may be summed up as follows: In addition to the importance of precision, clarity, and veracity in scientific reporting and discourse, there must also be a profound sense of reality—a connection to the genuine human thought processes that gave rise to theories; to the details and vicissitudes of the experiments that support one contention or another; to the real life circumstances of science and to the very human concerns that color what on the surface seem to be highly theoretical concerns, even when dealing with the hardware and measurements of the laboratory. vii Manual of Scientific Style This view of science was first explored in theory in Peter Galison’s How Experiments End (1987), and later (1997) demonstrated in his detailed history of microphysics, Image and Logic. (References for all chapters may be found in Appendix I.) The underlying point—that journal articles report what researchers believe happened in some idealized sense, and not what actually took place in the laboratory or in the field; or that theory is more often driven by hunches, inspirations, even dreams, than by the hard mathematical demonstrations on journal pages would allow one to believe—is now being understood as responsible for providing a much-needed corrective to the relationship between science and society. On the one hand, with so much at stake, personally and institutionally, in the assessments made in what constitutes a productive avenue of research and what does not, it is vital that scientists convey their beliefs and findings with a clarity that goes beyond the mere formal requirements of journal publication. If, for example, the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC) which has just begun operation beneath the French-Swiss border, corroborates the predictions of String Theory, then the decision not to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas will be viewed as having been short-sighted and detrimental to American leadership in high-energy physics. And if the rings of the LHC produce the largest null result in human history, then the discussion on the advisability of the SSC will begin anew, but with the severe disadvantage of the argument for its construction not having been made effectively in the early 1990s. On the other hand, public discourse on issues in which science has important things to say, such as the extent and severity of global warming, to take one of many possible examples, needs to be informed by the most precise and cogent scientific writing possible if necessary steps (whatever they may be) are to be taken to deal with the issue. This is the new territory to be charted and which we explore here: how to navigate the human dimension of science—an enterprise that has often suppressed the humanity of the scientist, thus compromising or at least limiting the extent and richness of communicating science, both to the public and to other scientists. We hope readers will find the structure of the book straightforward and useful. Each chapter begins with a table of contents for that chapter. In Part I, we examine the elements of science writing, first regarding creating engaging, effective prose (Chapter 1); then preparing work for the various publication outlets for scientific material, with special emphasis on preparing work for science journals and research-level publications (Chapter 2); and then (in Chapter 3) presenting the general elements of style for English, with a focus on science writing, and ending viii Manual of Scientific Style with a list of words and phrases that are often misused or confused in science narrative at many levels of scientific sophistication. Part I ends with two chapters—Chapter 4, on the proper forms of citations and referencing of sources (unfortunately, still inconsistently framed, even in other style guides); and Chapter 5, on the legalities and practices of copyright protection and permission procurement. The concluding part of Chapter 2 contains guidelines on the design and creation of tables and other graphic material that may enhance or clarify the points being made in the writing. Though we have endeavored to present a helpful set of guidelines, the experience of working on this book has convinced us of the need for a thorough examination of this subject in a work with greater production values than the present volume—something to be addressed in sequels, we hope. Part II contains eight chapters on the style conventions and practices relevant to eight areas of science writing: mathematics; physics; astronomy; chemistry; organic chemistry; earth and environmental sciences; life science; and medical science. Each chapter in Part II begins with a detailed Table of Contents for the chapter and ends, first with a list of the tables contained in the chapter, and then a list of the relevant tables contained in the Appendix chapter for that discipline in Part III. Part III then presents Appendices, one for each discipline, labeled Appendix A through Appendix H, and containing tables, lists, glossaries, and diagrams that authors in these disciplines might find helpful. Some readers may argue that a list of journal abbreviations need not have been so extensive and others will wonder why the style guide to the spelling of proper names used to identify mathematical theorems is not longer. We acknowledge that both opinions may be correct. The final appendix, Appendix I, contains guidance on sources and further reading. The work ends with an Index. By “scientific writing” we mean the physical sciences, as opposed to the technological areas (usually subsumed under the rubric of “engineering”), and the social sciences. There, too, other volumes would seem to be in order, so that we hope we will have the opportunity to continue with manuals of technological and social science style, as well as scientific illustration. The editors and publishers would be most grateful to readers who point out any corrections or failings that have managed to appear in this work in spite of our best efforts to eliminate any errors. This may be sent to the editors care of the publisher (see the contact information on the copyright page), or readers may feel free to communicate with the editors directly at msseditor@thereferenceworks.com. We welcome any criticism, corrections, information, suggestions, or advice that readers may offer, and we thank them in advance for taking the trouble of corresponding with us. ix Manual of Scientific Style One of the people to whom this work is dedicated was a fifth grade teacher in a small, Orthodox Jewish day school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He noticed a young boy’s interest in language and writing and he encouraged him; he even urged the principal of the school (another dedicatee) to “fund” a class newspaper the boy wanted to produce. The teacher impressed upon the boy the need to “make every paragraph a home for ideas,” and to insist that every paragraph “earn its address”—which, of course, meant that every paragraph had to have an address. Thus began the practice (with this writer, at least) of numbering each paragraph, making certain that every sentence that “dwelled” in that paragraph was well-behaved; that every sentence and clause in it had its place there and was consonant with every other part of the dwelling; and that the paragraph made clear to everyone who visited it what the paragraph was saying and what sort of a “house” he or she was in. It was just a small leap from there to seeing how important it was to use these dwellings to create a street, a neighborhood, a town, a city. For the next five years, that boy and three like-minded friends produced a class newspaper (the only publication produced by the students other than a yearbook), and would dutifully submit it to the principal for review on the first Monday of the month. The principal would correct any mistakes (which in those days meant retyping the entire page), but never once asked that any article’s message or content be changed. The principal, the most impeccably tailored rabbi that boy was ever to encounter (in a life densely populated with rabbis of all stripes), remained a mentor and then friend to the boy for the next thirty years. In high school, during a hospital stay of several weeks, the boy discovered Isaac Asimov. At one point, the boy had convinced himself that “Isaac Asimov” was (like “Nikolas Bourbaki”) actually a group of people publishing under this collective name, for no one human being could possibly produce so much on so many different subjects. During that month of convalescence at the beginning of the school year, the boy continued reading Asimov (there seemed to be no end!) and tackled the opening chapters of an introductory college physics textbook borrowed by a friend from the Williamsburg branch of the Public Library. A month into his senior year, still in bandages, the boy returned to high school; it was the day of the physics midterm, and the teacher excused the boy from taking it. The boy asked if he could see it (“Let’s see what I’ve been missing,” he quipped) and instantly recognized the problems as those he had worked on from the physics textbook. Barely able to hold a pencil, the boy zipped through the exam and turned it in halfway through the period. The teacher smiled dismissively and told the boy to sit down as he glanced at what he was certain would be a paper filled with meaningless scribbling. As the boy, in pain and groggy from pain medix Manual of Scientific Style cation, lay on a bench in the hallway, the teacher looked over the boy’s papers. As he read, the look on his face changed (the boy’s classmates told him later) into one of horror, as if written on the paper was either the Kabbalistic formula for the creation of the universe, or a death threat. The teacher raced into the hallway and confronted the supine boy, demanding to know, “How did you do this?”—in full view of the principal, who was about to scold the boy for lying on the bench during class hours. The boy had only enough strength and clarity to call out one word: “Asimov!” After a frozen moment, both men turned and left. That would have been a wonderful opportunity for the boy to make great strides in physics, but the teacher found more joy in playing basketball with the boys of his class (on a court hidden from the principal’s view—different school; different principal), and when some students yelled down at the teacher the word, “Regent’s,” reminding him of the state exam we were obliged to take at the end of the year, the teacher would yell back, “Asimov!”—or he’d just yell out the boy’s name. The boy’s involvement with physics would have to wait for college, where, through an accident of either poor or brilliant planning, the physics department boasted an ivy-league-caliber roster of great physicists. Some were to become famous in scientific circles: Yakir Aharanov; A.G.W. Cameron; Leonard Susskind; Aage Petersen; and Leon Landovitz—and two in particular: Ralph Behrends and David Finkelstein. They had been originally engaged to staff a graduate school, but when not enough students attended that school, they were asked to teach undergraduates. Much to their surprise, they enjoyed these chores; perhaps because it gave them an opportunity to teach a new generation of physicists the way (in their view) they were supposed to be trained. The most advanced textbooks were used (Feynman’s Lectures and the Berkeley Physics Course were background reading), and when those were not good enough, the professors provided translations (nearly always from Russian) of material they thought the students really ought to read. Undergraduates were invited to seminars, colloquia, and special lectures by Nobel Laureates (or soon to be), and were encouraged, prepared (and even fed!), so that the invited notables would not be speaking to empty rooms. (The physics version of “papering the house,” one might call it.) The boy—now a young man—became a devoted student, first of Dr. Ralph Behrends, who drove home the point that no physics problem is solved until it yields a number that can be read on a gauge. Dr. Behrends conducted a private four-year seminar with the young man on mechanics—including a page-by-page study of Ralph Abraham’s Foundations of Mechanics. Then with Dr. David Finkelstein, already widely known as an innovative theoretician, in topics in quantum theory. xi Manual of Scientific Style On the day of the young man’s graduation, his mother suddenly said to him, “Who is that bearded man running toward us and waving?” The young man turned just in time to see a car just miss hitting Dr. Finkelstein as he jogged casually across Amsterdam Avenue. The professor reached the young man out of breath and said, “I saw you from my office window. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve decided that the question you once asked [months earlier!] in class—what is ‘is’?—is the key question in physics.” And with that, he shook the young man’s hand and left, saying not a word to the two puzzled parents standing there. In years to come, the (rapidly aging) young man pursued several careers with varying degrees of success, but each united by the conviction that being crystal clear about what is being said and believed, be it in science, religion, Talmud, the arts, or public affairs, is the key to knowing the truth and knowing what course of action to take. It was once thought that all of the “big” questions of religion and philosophy were going to boil down to questions of science and logic. Now it seems these questions, and quite a few others, will hinge on the clarity of what is said and the precision with which we argue. The intellectual course has come full circle—it seems that in the end, the big questions in science will boil down to questions in philosophy. It will all come down to language—not hair-splitting semantics, but saying what we mean, no more and no less. In light of the above, it would not be an overstatement to say that the underlying message of this work is that a preface such as this, personal as it is, is appropriate to a work purporting to be about writing for science. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance rendered to us over the years it has taken to produce this volume: Robert Ubell, who first saw its usefulness; Dr. Jasna Markovac and Tari Broderick of Elsevier, who saw this work as a worthy addition to the Elsevier/Academic Press list; to Lisa Tickner, the publisher, editor April Graham, and André Cuello, production liaison, all of Elsevier, for generously and patiently tolerating our timetable (and our commitment to “getting it right”); and to Mitch Pessin of MP Computer Services, for use of his facilities and for keeping our equipment humming. Finally, we thank our spouses, Ilana and Daniel, for their unwavering confidence in us, and for their ongoing support of our work, even when we ourselves were uncertain of the eventual completion of this project. Harold Rabinowitz Suzanne Vogel New York City October 2008 xii Chapter 1. Elements of Science Writing Contents 1.1 The Importance of Science Writing • 5 i. Science is a social enterprise ii. Science is a political enterprise iii. Science is an educational enterprise iv. Science is a cultural enterprise 1.2 The Meaning and Nature of “Scientific Style” • 8 i. Correct language and correct science ii. “Science as writing” 1.3 Guidelines for Writing Effective Scientific Prose • 10 i. Verb placement ii. “Point” placement iii. Subject placement iv. Context placement v. Verbs and action vi. Relative placement of context vii. Emphasis and structure 1.4 Guidelines for Effective Word Selection in Science Writing • 17 i. Be clear a. Keep it simple b. Keep it unambiguous ii. Be precise a. Repetition is not a sin b. Connotation c. Level of detail iii. Be direct a. Avoid pretentious, arrogant, and clichéd language b. Strong nouns and verbs c. Concrete vs. abstract d. Pronouns and tense 3