Writing Writing

Writing for Scientists and Mathematicians

 

Let's begin this "Science and Writing" class with a real-life fairy tale:

Once upon a time long, long ago, in a land far, far away, there lived a high-school mathematics teacher. His students ranged widely in their skills and their levels of motivation. At one end of the scale, and sitting in the back of the classroom, were kids who could barely count to one hundred, much less decipher the cryptic workings of the trigonometry tables he had to torture them with. There were some extremely bright kids too, and his favorite class was a group of serious students who wanted very much to go to university, which, they hoped fervently, would be their ticket out of dreary rural squalor. They were highly motivated to prepare themselves for a daunting set of examinations called the Cambridge O-Levels. They would have to perform well not only in math, but also in physics, in history, in English, in siSwati (their native language), and so on. The math teacher pushed the kids hard, and so did the other instructors.

One day he taught them a technique, sometimes called "distributive analysis," that allows complex, multi-step conversions to be computed with a single simple equation rather than a series of cumbersome proportions. For instance, a question like "how many milliliters are there in a 55-gallon drum?" can be answered easily by this method. The students nodded attentively and gravely, calculated the sample problems the teacher gave them, and started in on their homework. Most of the problems in the book they used had the kind of because-I-said-so uselessness familiar to math students everywhere. "How many sheets of paper would it take to make a stack that reached to the moon?" "How many times will your heart beat if you live eighty years?" As long as the problems had this other-worldly weirdness to them, the students stuck to the technique of distributive analysis. When they got to something a little more familiar and practical, though -- "How much will it cost, in dollars, to fuel such and such a car over such and such a distance, if the fuel is purchased in Rands?" -- some of them wanted to revert to the proportions method they had learned in physics class. They debated the matter amongst themselves, and then appointed a delegate to ask the teacher, "Sir, is this problem physics math, or math math?"

 

As a writing teacher, I face exactly the same kind of challenge. I teach a course called "Science and Writing" for science majors, and their notions of "writing" are just as fragmented as the math ideas that burdened those high-schoolers. Nobody has exactly come out and asked it yet, but when I give out an assignment I see the mental wheels turning around the question, "Is this science writing or writing writing?" It's a tough calculus: they want to know whether to stick to the safe, bloodless passive-voice prose of their lab reports, or to risk "English class" writing, with all those metaphors and fancy words and irony and stuff.

Here, then, is the answer to that question, and you don't need to put this in your notebook because it's the whole point of the course and I'll say it again and again throughout the semester: I want you to forget about science writing and history writing and even writing writing, if you have a mental bucket for that too. Those categories cannot and will not help you to write well, to produce the only category of writing worth learning about: good writing. It is certainly true that a good lab report is a different species of writing from a good short story or a good poem or a good literary analysis, but the virtues that make any of these kinds of writing good are always the same: clarity, insight, truth. Moreover, the means of achieving clarity, insight, and truth are always the same, regardless of the kind of writing at hand. Good writing results from a good writing process, a creative and methodical process that I want every student in this room to develop.

I'll bet some of you are thinking, Uh-oh, he wants creative writing, but I'm a scientist, I don't do creative writing -- that's writing-class stuff, that's writing writing. Yes? Did I catch you? All right, then, here's another theme of the course: all good writing is creative. Creativity for the writer isn't necessarily, or even usually, fanciful imagery and highfalutin language; rather, creativity is the understanding that every poem and every essay and, yes, every lab report has its own story to tell, and "creative" people are those who master the process of discovering this story.

There's that word again: process. Creativity is not passive, it does not mean waiting dumbly for "inspiration," whatever that is. Creativity is active: it is something you do, not something you wait to see happen. More, it is something you can easily learn to do, something that anybody can learn to do. You don't have to be born creative; you have to decide to become creative. That's it right there, so make the decision now: say to yourself, I can learn to do this, and I will learn to do this. By the end of the semester, I expect every one of you to understand that you are just as creative as you decide to be -- perfectly capable of producing writing that is clear, insightful, and true. I expect every one of you to understand that writing or any other creative task can, should, and must be approached as a step-by-step process of discovery.

I hope this sounds vaguely familiar to you scientists. If you hear a faint bell starting to ring, you're right -- the process of writing well, writing creatively, is just like something you already know, something, in fact, that defines your major course of study at this university: the scientific method. In both cases, you set yourself a task of discovery, and then you follow a methodical process that is guaranteed to teach you something. Real scientists know that there is no such thing as a "failed" experiment, because any well-conducted investigation yields useful knowledge, even if it's only knowledge of one more thing that doesn't work. And by this same logic, a "successful" experiment is usually the reward of a painstaking process of discovering one thing after another that didn't produce the desired result, each of these steps nevertheless taking the scientist a little further along in the course of her growing knowledge. The scientific method works -- that's all there is to it. It can be tedious, cumbersome, slow, and can yield many small disappointments, but all of that is necessary and useful and will eventually lead to discoveries that matter.

Yes, science is a creative process just like writing is a creative process. For the most part, neither science nor literature proceeds by sudden, quantum leaps, by "strokes of genius." Mostly, a good piece of writing or a good piece of science evolves gradually and methodically. Sometimes, of course, there are quantum leaps, and nearly always they occur in the context of a process that makes such leaps possible. You won't find someone waking up in the middle of the night shouting, "Hey, I know a cure for AIDS!" or "I just thought of a simple proof for Fermat's Last Theorem!" . . . unless that someone is either a lunatic, or a scientist who has immersed himself in the process of discovery, who has devoted himself to the scientific method, who has gradually and methodically brought his knowledge up to the critical point at which a "stroke of genius" becomes possible.

This is true for biologists and physicists and mathematicians: the scientific method is the process of discovery that unifies all the sciences. There is no meaningful distinction to be made between "biology science" and "chemistry science," any more than there is a meaningful distinction to be made between "physics math" and "math math," or between "science writing" and "writing writing." There is just good science on the one hand -- real science that follows the scientific method -- and, on the other hands, non-science, which sounds like "nonsense" and is nonsense. Have I said it enough times yet? Good science follows the scientific method. Good writing follows the writing process.

As a teacher, I'm convinced that we tend to burden our minds with distinctions as useless as "math math" and "writing writing," because institutions like this university encourage us to fragment our understanding of what should be seen as whole, as one. There is a chemistry department, and a physics department, and a biology department, and a computer science department, and a mathematics department . . . each in its own territory, with its own set of teachers and textbooks and classrooms and so forth. Each discipline speaks its own specialized language -- even develops its own culture -- and there is often real rivalry, sometimes friendly and sometimes not, between scientists of different disciplines. Students come into an environment like this and they are immediately confronted with the requirement to choose a major. They can be chem majors, or bio majors, or math majors . . . but they can't be simply "science" majors, or better yet, "knowledge" majors or "creativity" majors.

I think this is a shame. I think that every bio major or math major should start out with a thorough grounding in science -- that is, in the scientific method that is common to all the sciences. This method, and the way it developed throughout human history and is still developing today, is a fascinating story that every scientist should know and care about. Every science major should know that there is a culture of science with its own rich history and philosophy, no less rich and full of drama than the culture of art.

Ah, but I've just betrayed myself: if I say that there is a "culture of science" as though it is distinct from a "culture of art," I've set up another useless and ultimately false distinction. Really, there is just culture, and what could this "culture" be but the ongoing process of human curiosity and imagination and discovery? In fact, it's not that hard to imagine a world where biology is seen as a branch of poetry, or theology as a form of chemistry. The same processes of creativity are common to all human pursuits. Study these processes, master them, and you become a real scientist, a real writer, a real discoverer.

So, forget about coming here to learn "science writing" as though it is something different from what your friends who are English majors or history majors are learning. Science and writing and art are all the same methodical process of creativity and discovery. There is no "math math"; there is just the good math that uses the best method at the appropriate time. If you need to figure out how many times your heart has beat since you walked into this room, there is a way that will work for you. And there is no "writing writing" either; there is just the good writing that comes from cultivating a sound creative process. If you need to write a lab report, or a sonnet, or a philosophical essay, there is a way that will work for you.

For the next four months, we will learn that way, practice that way, trust that way, and come to know that way. You will master the art of "science writing" by killing the notion that there is such a thing. There is only the good writing that you will do in this class, and in your science classes, and in your arts classes, by knowing how.

 

© Michael Fleming

San Francisco, California

January, 1997

 

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