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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