A Matter of Style

Few readers of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews will be unfamiliar with the oddities of disciplines other than their own. Richard Rorty, following Thomas Kuhn's idea of ‘normal science’, gave the cause a name: he called it a discipline's ‘normal discourse’. He defined a normal discourse as ‘that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it’ (1979, 320). But, I wonder, can a discipline also be characterized by a style of writing which practitioners share (and enforce, e.g. through peer review)? I have in mind stylistic phenomena as minute as use of the first-person personal pronoun and contractions as well as colloquialisms and, on the large scale, signs or even discussion of the struggle that went into the writing.

Bruno Latour (whose name may prove a stylistic test of another sort) argues that:

Providing an explanation is, in a nutshell, working at empire-building; the more powerful an explanation, the larger the empire and the stronger the material in which it is built. What we admire in powerful theories we should also admire in freeways, multinational corporations, satellite networks, weapon systems, international banking and data banks. (1988, 162)

To turn away from empire-building, or as I think of it from the illusion of timeless argument, he recommends that we ‘display the work’ of getting from point A in an argument to point B, ‘the work of extracting elements from B, the work of bringing it to A, the work of making up explanations inside A, the work of acting back on B from A’ (1988, 163). Is this recommendation attractive or unattractive regardless of discipline?

Evelyn Fox Keller provides an explanation for its unattractiveness in science. She argues that modern science became what it is between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries in part by the gradual removal of the first-person narrator and substitution of ‘the abstract “scientist”… who could speak for everyman but was no-man, in a double sense: not any particular man, and also a site for the not-man… a hollow place… in the mind of every actual or virtual witness into which a machine could vicariously be placed’ (1996, 419). Does this explanation fit all twenty-first-century natural and social sciences equally? Can traces of an abstract author be found anywhere in the humanities? I would hazard to say that the common practice of constructing an argument from which all signs of struggle have been removed is a strong trace. I would also note that the degree of authorial personality in the humanities varies geographically as well as historically. Is this true of the sciences and mathematics?

I raise these questions as a direct consequence of a spirited argument during the recent Editorial Board meeting that revealed a wide divergence of opinions. To stir up even wider discussion I invited members of the Board to write on the subject of style. Their contributions follow. The conclusion I suspect we will be able to draw is that writing style even at the level of pronouns becomes a matter of the writer's and reader's conception of their discipline.

Philip Ball. Almost any writing, from the description of a laboratory procedure to a work of fiction, involves the construction of a narrative from elements that arose in a far less coherent and orderly manner. This is arguably a politeness towards the reader. Yet in the scientific literature it is not just that. While ‘displaying the work’ to the extent of revealing false leads or serendipitous turns is generally considered perfectly acceptable, in the end the scientific paper, ever since it was first conceived in the seventeenth century, marshals its rhetoric for the purpose of persuasion. There is nothing dishonest about this; it is simply a matter of presenting one's argument to best effect. However, there are casualties in this process, among them an unexamined conviction that any signs of subjectivity will undermine the authority of the conclusions. That was why James Watson was discouraged from voicing, in his famous 1953 paper with Francis Crick, his view that the structure of DNA was ‘beautiful’. It is why some researchers still insist that the passive voice is preferable, or at best an undifferentiated ‘we’ even if the paper's author is a lone individual. It is at this point that convention becomes subterfuge and dissembling. If researchers cannot face up to the fact that the work they report was theirs alone, and that they may have had feelings about it that went beyond cool and rational appraisal, they are arguably withholding (or at best disguising) relevant information. The passive voice has a role as elegant variation, but that is all. To impose it as a manner of approved conduct is to reveal a lack of conviction that one can make one's own case, or perhaps even a reluctance to take responsibility for it. It is to put form before content. And it is to collude in the creation of a bloodless literature.

Alan Blackwell. I often use first-person pronouns in my scientific writing, and encourage my students to do likewise. This is in contrast to the impersonal passive voice (‘a trigger was pulled…’) that is stylistically preferred by many of our colleagues, although deprecated by Strunk and White (1959) in their classic style manual. My own reasons are not stylistic, but grounded in concerns of agency, intention, and responsibility. First, as technologists, we are engaged in practice-based research. That is, we create artefacts as a mode of enquiry. The material world offers resistance to our efforts (‘a trigger was pulled…’), in an interplay of agency described by Pickering (1995) as a Mangle of Practice — common to all empirical science. If we failed to account for our own agency, it would be hard to identify the method in technology research. Second, to the extent that we technologists are also design researchers, we act with intention — to make interventions that modify the human condition (‘a trigger was pulled…’), as I have argued in this journal previously (Blackwell 2010). Thirdly, my work creating an ethics review process for the Schools of Technology and Physical Sciences in Cambridge has led to the conclusion that we must help young researchers explore, understand and take personal responsibility for the implications of their experimental work (‘a trigger was pulled…’). For these reasons, I encourage all those active in science and technology research to consider expressing their own agency, intention, and responsibility directly to their readers, and suggest that other editors might encourage likewise.

Steve Fuller. My reflections are informed by a review I recently wrote for The Literary Review of Michael Gordin's Scientific Babel: The language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English. There I learned that ninety-five per cent of the scientific literature today worldwide is published in English. And even if we assume that this figure does not include all of the social sciences and the humanities, it is still very large. Moreover, for the last seventy-five years at least half of published science has been in English. Add to that Derek de Solla Price's observation, already made in the 1960s, that 80–90 per cent of all the scientists who have ever lived live ‘now’.

What all this means is that English has an unprecedented linguistic hegemony in the world's knowledge production — and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. But this equally suggests that it is futile to approach the problem of scientific style from the standpoint of a legislator — as if ‘we’ (understood as native English speakers) were working with a blank slate. After all, English's unique global success has been as a working second language, given that Spanish is the most widely spoken European language. Thus, there are bound to be knock-on effects on what counts as appropriate or even desirable modes of English expression more generally.

In practice, this means that editors must find a way of coping with what might be called ‘mechanical English’. It may be correct at the level of grammar but it favours simple syntactic constructions and word use that rarely borrows from idiomatic heritage of English — something that would require a broader reading in the language than simply the literature of one's specialty. Whether one favours first-person active vis-à-vis third-person passive voice (as I normally do) seems not quite so important when seen against this larger backdrop.

Mark Hull. Journals’ stylistic conventions often prove to be accretions around the prejudices of editors and publishers. Technical conventions reflect those of the relevant community, yet the prescribed modes of presentation remain surprisingly diverse, within and between disciplines. Nevertheless, standardization arising from consolidation among publishers and the near-templated format of much of the growing ‘research output’, makes journals with distinctive, accommodating styles increasingly attractive to authors and readers.

Debate continues between supporters of the active voice — unambiguously attributing responsibility; favouring narrative — and the passive — emphasizing research over researcher; conveying ‘balance’. Halmos (1970) eschews personal pronouns entirely for the special case of mathematics. First-person pronouns began to disappear from US scientific writing in the 1920s (Moore 1991); by the age of Big Science, the third person was normative in much of science and engineering. The tide has since receded, reflecting changes in attitude to science and education, and in the speech communities of authors. (A high proportion of non-native English speakers, across many scientific disciplines, favour the first person.) Both Science and Nature now favour the active voice. Nevertheless, ‘we’ can be as slippery a concept as the impersonal voice, implying variously the writer, writer and reader, or a broader community — also the ‘editorial we’, too often a diffusion of responsibility that Orwell would deprecate. In an incremental high energy physics paper with several hundred authors, ‘we’ has a perhaps appropriate uncertainty as to agency. Added to which are diverse views on first person singular versus plural.

Brown (2003) describes how Michel Serres views the foundation of knowledge as twofold: humanities formulated in the first person singular, science as first person plural: ‘We think and know. I suffer.’ The third person, excluded from these conversations, reflects the difficulty of bridging human affairs and the natural world described by science: ‘… science is able to make authoritative statements about the world but only on the condition that the status of the scientist as an active narrator of the account, with [his or her] own very particular and relative position, is erased as the account is uttered’ (p. 191).

Martin Kemp. We are used to the idea that ‘style’ is a key element in the study of art, even if it seems less central than it used to be. Considered in its broadest sense, style speaks not only of the maker's mode of presentation but also about aspects of production, patronage, intended reception, visualization, and visual language — in short, about every aspect of the process of communication between the originators of the image and the viewers. Style is not normally taken as one of the prime criteria when we analyze a scientific activity. In the specific field of scientific illustration, it has been seen as having some limited degree of relevance, if only in relation to the era of the illuminated manuscript and earlier phases of the printed text, when the provision of lavish picture-books for noble patrons was one of the standard types of production. Considered from the standpoint of the prevailing orthodoxies in much nineteenth-century subsequent science, style is at best regarded as a rather irrelevant adornment to the business of communicating information and at worst as a positive liability. However, every made image of what is seen — every representation of nature or attempt to model some aspect of the world in visual terms — unavoidably has its own style, in as much as it has a visual ‘air’ or ‘aura’ through which its origins are recognizable. (From Kemp 1991)

The tendency to regard evident stylishness as an irrelevance or encumbrance in scientific illustration has arisen as the result of a concerted ambition in science and technology from about 1850 to achieve ‘style-less’ images in which there has been nothing more to the presentation than the direct communication of objective information in the most functional manner. This aspiration apparently contrasts markedly with the overt espousing of style in Renaissance and Baroque illustration, in which the production of a fine display through the visual equivalent of rhetoric was either an explicit or implicit goal. The ‘style-less’ manner is now amplified by the delegation of the making of images to computer programmes, which produce a high-tech rhetoric that hides the originator of the image and the means of its production. Would any scientific periodical accept an obviously hand-drawn illustration even if it did the same or even better job that a computer-generated image? There is a great deal of self-serving and unexamined conventions in most modern scientific illustration. (From Kemp 2010)

Jerome McGann. I think it would be a mistake to set house rules of style. The journal is already controlled — I hope not patrolled — by editorial oversight. This oversight comes from people, we the people, who have internalized complex discursive rules for effective expression. More than that, we are also the people (I trust) in whom those internalized rules lie open to judgments with respect to particular cases — i.e., submissions by persons who work from the same, very eclectic, toolbox. The best work comes from people who understand how to make stylistic and procedural choices from available alternatives. Darwin, we might want to recall, did not avoid the first person singular. Besides, ISR is not The New England Journal of Medicine, it is not even Science or Scientific American. As to that, the practice of medicine is as much an artistic as it is a scientific practice. As to that, the practice of any scholarship is as much a scientific as an artistic practice. Would anyone want Oliver Sacks to write differently than he does? ‘Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.’

Lost to us

The editorial must end here with sadness at the deaths of two Editorial Board members, Frank P. Davidson (1918–2014) and Carl Djerassi (1923–2015), both giants in their respective fields. Obituaries of both have appeared in several places online and offline, to which I can add only personal reminiscence.

In 2010 Frank invited me to his home in Concord, Massachusetts, where we spent a day in talk, mostly his, and mostly storytelling about his large projects. He told me that his inspiration for the Channel Tunnel Study Group, and so for the ‘Chunnel’ (his word) that came from it, was his wife Izaline's challenge to him as a macro-engineer to do something about the rough passage from Dover to Calais which they had to endure on one stormy occasion. There was ‘much of great idealism and accomplishment in Frank's life’, his friend Stephen White has written. ‘He saw in so many people compatible abilities and common spirit that could improve the world through large projects.’ For example, Frank spoke to me about a tunnel running from New York to London! He insisted it was eminently practical from an engineering point of view though admitted it would be rather expensive to build.

Carl, ‘Father of the Pill’, I came to know through his wife Diane, whom I met thanks to a shared love of Ovid's Metamorphoses (verses from which she had lettered on the walls of their flat in Little Venice, London). Carl was ever the teacher, giving me titles of his books to acquire and read, which I did — homework from every encounter with him — and assignments to attend his plays, which I did. There are some whose interests span more disciplines than Carl's did but very few capable of metamorphosis from ‘chemist’ (Diane's name for him) to novelist, poet, and playwright of the London and other stages.

Readers might wish to seek out the contributions of both Frank and Carl in ISR's online archive (www.maneyonline.com/isr). From both there is much to learn about changing the world. We are richer by far for what they did, poorer not to have them with us. Vale!