I enjoy the informal, free-form style that blogging allows. It’s so much more engaging than most other material I’m reading or writing in my professional life. In that regard, scientific publications are especially bad. Between the formal tone, the pretense of neutrality, and the technical language (not to mention the terrible figures), reading a scientific paper requires intense concentration and is often just plain boring.
Yet, many blogs manage to make technical content accessible and engaging while staying rigorous. So, why can’t scientific articles be written more like blog posts?
So I decided to experiment with my latest article, where I tried to spice it up a bit compared to traditional academic prose. You can read the result here:
Making sense of nonequilibrium current fluctuations: A molecular motor example
Throughout the paper I apply a series of stylistic tweaks that I believe make it a more engaging read overall:
Using a conversational tone. Writing in an informal tone and using the first person makes the text immediately feel more personal and relatable. And let’s face it, using “we” when you’re the only author of a paper feels weird and pretentious.
Taking the reader perspective. The default, deductive style of “from ABC it follows that XYX” is not only repetitive, but also confusing when the reader doesn’t have the same background or is less familiar with the topic that you are. For example, she might still have unanswered questions before moving on (“wait a minute, before looking at XYZ does it mean that W is not true anymore?”). I tried to mitigate this by (1) regularly recapping the progress so far and (2) literally writing the questions I was asking myself along my own journey (you can see an example at the start of section 3 in the paper).
Being open and vulnerable. In the paper I openly explain where I’m coming from and what I hope to achieve without trying to oversell anything (not depending on grants to do research is very liberating!). I also mention that a fairly straightforward observation had me confused in the past. That is fine: none of us are perfect, and I might not be the only one in that situation. And trying to make sense of it eventually led to these new results.
I’m curious to see what will be the reactions (if any) from my fellow scientists. I’m fairly new to blogging, and I cannot claim I completely succeeded at making my paper interesting to read. But I’ll certainly keep experimenting in that direction.
