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A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE WRITING

Ancient Greece and Rome
To the Middle Ages
The Renaissance to the first journals
Growth of the Journal
The Future
English Prose Style - A Brief History
Further Reading

It is helpful for writers to possess the fullest perspective on what they are doing. Along with our principles for effective science writing, SCITEXT accordingly presents the history of science writing. Science writing, like most non-fiction writing, is designed to be persuasive; and the history of persuasive writing, or rhetoric, is not the history of science.

ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME

The earliest systematic analysis of persuasive argument was made in ancient Greece, the same culture in which science itself originated. The original aim was to help citizens in the law courts, where they made their own speeches. The practice of democracy, notably The Parthenon, Athens in Athens when that city was at its cultural zenith in the fifth century BC, also placed a high priority on persuasive speaking. Freelance teachers, known as sophists, set up schools to propound their ideas, and in their wake sprang up professional speechwriters. Manuals of speechmaking were circulated, often insubstantial. We know of the sophists largely through Plato, who deplored them as users of any verbal trick to achieve their ends irrespective of truth. This tension persists in modern legal systems.

The definitive classical treatise is Aristotle's. This single-handed encyclopaedist spent twenty years in Plato's Academy until Plato's death in 348BC. He published his Art of Rhetoric - essentially lecture notes - some fifteen years later, soon after returning to Athens and founding his own school. His work went far beyond mere catalogues of empirically effective devices, into psychology (for the first time) and the nature of demonstration when deductive certainty is unavailable. Aristotle recognised three modes of persuasion: by logic (logos); by emotion (pathos); and by trust in the speaker (=ethos). Only the first is relevant to proper science writing - although every effective device should be deployed to make points of logic. The section on style in Aristotle distinguishes three important characteristics: clarity; elegance; appropriateness to the subject. We cannot do better today. In particular, Aristotle stresses and analyses the role of metaphor and its associated imagery.

The story moves next to Rome, which when it conquered the eastern mediterranean found itself taking up Greek culture. Rome's first great rhetorician was Cicero (106-43BC), a politician and great orator. In his work De Oratore [book II section 64] Cicero states that writing on history and on abstract subjects - modern science would be included - involves no rules from any rhetorical system, just easy language and a flowing style. The next great authority was Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria (AD88) continues Cicero's theme of the perfect man as the perfect orator. The Institutio Oratoria is unmatched in its depth of treatment of technical points.

TO THE MIDDLE AGES

Even as Augustine of Hippo wrote, some 300 years later, on rhetoric and the Christian sermon, the western half of the Roman empire was collapsing. For several centuries thereafter, human perspectives narrowed to little more than obtaining or holding on to shelter, land and food. Graeco-Roman knowledge was held elsewhere, in Constantinople, in the Islamic peoples, and in the libraries of the great monasteries. Where there was learning, it was in Latin. This was for two reasons. First, Latin was a developed language; the emerging tongues of Europe simply did not have the capacity to express subtler details. Second, Latin was the only universal language among the scholars of Europe. The need to maximise one's audience was as important then as it is today.

In the European Middle Ages, from the 11th century, trade increased and organised itself, and people identified themselves with progressively larger administrative units under more powerful rulers. The earliest universities were founded; working within a Christian framework they thought about the world, which in practice meant philosophy. Paper - a Chinese invention of a millennium before - was available, but all books were copied by hand. There was no such thing as a "definitive copy".

THE RENAISSANCE TO THE FIRST JOURNALS

The Middle Ages led to a further influx of the classical spirit known as the Renaissance. From this point the strands which were to become science, the study of order in nature - of what things do and how they relate, rather than what they are in themselves or what they are for - recognisably come together. Printing, an idea first known to the Chinese, was rediscovered using moveable metal type and found its time. In the 50 years from Gutenberg's first press to the year 1500, some 40 thousand separate editions of books were printed, typically in quantities of a few hundred each. In a single generation millions of books flooded Europe (though still only about one per square kilometre). In the next two centuries some 300 thousand more editions were added, and in the 18th century two million! Before Gutenberg, very few parishes had even had their own Christian bibles.

New learning was still mostly spread by the wandering scholars who passed between the universities. The printed book was limited as a channel for reporting new ideas, then and now, by the large amount of material it had to contain. From the 16th century postal services improved, so that letters between groups of scientists could be circulated; clearing houses were subsequently set up to further this. News digests also began to be published by well-connected men of learning. From this point it is a short step to the scientific journal. The first two, in 1665, were the French Journal des Sçavans [Savants], which was intended to cover all fields of knowledge; and shortly after the Philosophical Transactions which, by its association with the young Royal Society of London, was specifically scientific. (Science was then known as natural philosophy.) The Royal Society was one of the earliest of the learned academies into which scientists were now organising themselves, and the Philosophical Transactions published, each month, works by such names as Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Halley and van Leeuwenhoek.

GROWTH OF THE JOURNAL

In the early journals all depended on the skills of the editor and his team, who would publish not only original papers but digests of work done elsewhere, often taken from other journals. Henry Oldenburg, editor of Philosophical Transactions, was the head of a clearing house when he began publication. Journals also included accounts of newly published scientific books, which continued to be the medium for large bodies of research such as Isaac Newton's Principia. Multiple publication of a piece by an author was commonplace and accepted. Journals usually published in the national languages of Europe, not in Latin - an irony, since at this time a truly international community of corresponding scientists had become a reality.

Several dozen more scientific journals were published in the remainder of the 17th century, and hundreds more were launched in the next (especially in Germany); a survey has uncovered some 750 titles to 1800. Only fifty years further on there were (or had been, since few lasted long) several thousands, as the 19th century saw an explosion in their number. An impetus for expansion was the increasing interval between a paper's reading to a learned society, and its publication in that society's organ - up to five years later. Priority was always important. The new journals of the 18th century were often founded by individuals, and had to pay their way or go under; these commercial journals came to outnumber the publications of the learned societies. They led to a problem of access which has lasted to this day.

Specialisation of the subject matter of scientific journals began in the mid-18th century, the medical sciences leading the way. Also, some journals came to concentrate on reports of original research; others on reviews of books, which might be extended into essay reviews of a field; and still others on the printing of abstracts, for already in 1789 a reviewer had complained that "one should seek to limit the number [of periodicals] rather than to increase them, since there can also be too many". An abstract was not then a scientist's own summary, but was written for the journal by another. This custom lasted long enough for Einstein to write abstracts in his early career.

Periodicals which set out to explain science to the lay reader had a later start, because articles of this sort often appeared in the educated digests which were common in the 18th and 19th centuries. Part of this shift came about through the increasing professionalisation of science, which took place in the early 19th century in France and Germany, later in Great Britain and America, and which affected first those sciences - physics, chemistry, physiology - for which a laboratory is required. In journals the refereeing system sprang up to complement the expertise of the editor and board; Philosophical Transactions had it in its present form by the latter part of the 19th century. Papers now became more formally structured, and references to other work were given in fuller and more standardised detail. The biological sciences adopted the Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion format. A standard structure, with detailed section headings, is a great aid to the browsing which was becoming necessary. Today there are tens of thousands of journals and, although many can be ignored even by libraries, scientists must expect to encounter an enormous number; the Institute for Scientific Information lists the contents of some 5000 it regards as significant.

THE FUTURE

The printed journal grew because it was the best way of disseminating information. Today we have computer networks which can do that more quickly and cheaply. The purpose of primary research journals today is to act as a quality control on research, through the refereeing system. So the way forward, for primary research at least, is to create an electronic system while maintaining quality control. Such a system, properly set up, could be run for a fraction of the cost to the research community of journal subscriptions today.

ENGLISH PROSE STYLE - A BRIEF HISTORY

In the 17th and 18th centuries there were two contrasting English prose styles, one ornate and one simple. The ornate style, the language of diplomacy and the church, took after the manner of Cicero. The simpler style, commonly called anti-Ciceronian, concerned itself less with symmetry and was adopted by most of the prose writers of the time. It reflected an increasing flexibility and freedom of thought. The Royal Society, under the continuing influence of Francis Bacon's philosophy, was concerned with the English language, setting up in 1664 a committee for its improvement. Its intent was "to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words". One member of this committee was John Dryden, the poet and playwright who is often called the father of modern English prose style. He saw and condemned, 300 years ago, the tendency to overuse words deriving directly from Latin, a trend stemming from the desire to sound grand but which often merely creates jargon.

The same fact was observed in 1946 by George Orwell in a telling essay Politics and the English Language. Orwell also observes that the tendency of much modern prose is away from concreteness. With enough vague generality it is possible to construct whole passages which sound well and mean nothing. These can be constructed with little effort by (in Orwell's words) gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else: so that I think... becomes In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption to suppose that... Another trend is towards impersonal English which, though appropriate for science, blurs easily into blandness and denial of authorial responsibility for what is written. Science writing is prone to these faults and scientists should guard against them.

Because of the hybrid origins of modern English - in the Germanic, old English of the Anglo-Saxons, the Latin-derived tongue of the Norman invaders, and the Renaissance influx of "higher" words deriving directly from Latin - the language today provides a wide variety of synonyms for expressing a given idea. Each choice has its own distinct overtone. Also, English sentences can be constructed from their grammatical components, or from component clauses, in a host of ways. Greater care is therefore needed to avoid unintentional ambiguity. This is repaid, however, by the greater variety of overtones available. The role of punctuation in removing ambiguities by parsing - resolving sentences into their component parts - is correspondingly larger.