You rightly contend that many people don’t know what Reynolds or Bond numbers are (which is what I feel Science writing should fix but lets put that aside for a moment).

Let’s rephrase that statement in a way that no-one will understand the words and see what it tells us as a reader.

“Yatro and Xesonic forces are negligible in determining column dynamics since the Thompson and Benderman numbers are large.”

Ok, so if I don’t know what Yatro and Xesonic forces are (which I don’t), I’m just being told they don’t matter in this case! So I don’t *need* to know what they are in order to follow the paper. The reason they don’t matter is to do with some stuff I also don’t understand. The Thompson and Benderman numbers are large. If for some reason I desire to know what makes the things I don’t know about irrelevant, google is only one tab away on my browser. Everything written today comes with a built in glossary.

However if by some chance I was thinking “what about the Yatro! they’ve forgotten that”, my question is answered. It adds something for the informed reader and subtracts nothing for the uninformed. That’s a win.

I think you’ve misunderstood what *I* was saying. http://xkcd.com/1028/

I chose Crime writing (*not* legal writing, which is to crime writing as Papers are to Science Writing) because it illustrates how complex issues of ethics, logic, evidence and process can be made interesting to a lay public *without* excluding every latin term. Perhaps even because those latin terms are not excluded. You point out that your children know what a Judge is. That’s not an accident, it’s because the term (which has a different meaning in normal English) *hasn’t* been excluded from fictionalised and news accounts of crime and punishment. By it’s very use, the public has, without any effort, internalised it’s meaning. That’s how language is transmitted from person to person; by use.

I think there is a basic difference in the goals of Science writing as you see them and as I see them (and as your students see them).

Your students probably want to communicate the excitement they feel for their subject.

You’re probably trying to get them to write in a way that will get through a sub editor and see the light of day.

I think that the overall goal of Science writing is or should be, to make Science as much a part of our culture as Crime writing is. To reach the point where words like Reynolds number are understood and people don’t say stupid things like “Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly”. (ok, a statement about excluding stupid statements from the language is itself a stupid statement, but maybe we can hope for people to stop repeating them?)

So our perceived goals are very different. I’m a consumer of Science writing. I don’t know or care how many articles fell to the sub editor’s red pen. I only see the ones that don’t and I make my judgements from them. They’re almost uniformly appalling. Not from excess jargon. That’s *not* a problem that needs you to solve it with a list. The main groups of appalling are that way because they’re:

Wrong (totally got the wrong end of the stick, completely wrong, not even internally consistent. See anything written about the higgs)

Out of Date (Often as much as 400 years out of date. See almost anything written about gravity.)

Simplified to the point of unintelligibility (virtually everything ever written about science)

Forced excitement (Google of: Science Fun, returned 2.9×10^9 hits while Sport Fun returned 1/10th of that. Which gets more column inches?)

The very best of this genre achieve all four. http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3323822.htm Check it out! This is from my national broadcaster. A segment from it’s flagship science programme. It carefully ticks all four, for a gem of appalling Science writing. I defy anyone who didn’t already understand the subject to come away with anything from that segment.

That’s the kind of Science writing I hate so much. Yes, that’s an extreme example, combining pointless special effects, with humiliation of innocent bystanders to achieve a content free zone but it’s indicative of the quality of what’s out there.

So there should be an example of great science writing then… Something to compare it with. That’s a little harder to find. To be truly great it must exclude all those normal failings of course, but also offer something extra special. Something phrased simply but without patronising the audience. Something about a really difficult subject, yet it holds the audience in rapt attention. Something that changes the way the listener looks at the world. I can’t find anything from this millennium. The most recent I know about is from 1979 and if you watch all of them it really will change the way you look at the world.

http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/45

Science writing in this culture is in disarray. The most important issues of our time that change the way we live our lives, treat our sick, fight our wars, feed our children, care for our homes and communicate with our loved ones are relegated to minor stories occasionally run in some magazines and never mentioned on the news, while the latest football results have a 32 page lift out in every paper and take up half of every news broadcast. There are more sports programmes intended for the informed and interested viewer broadcast every day than Science programmes for an informed and interested viewer created in human history. The University where my mother taught had a massive number of people applying for Forensic Science. Ten or twenty times more than they had places, but the Physics department was closing courses because there were no students. I’m sure that if Dexter mentions Bond Numbers when analysing blood spatter, it would enter the language on that day.

It’s for you and your students to step up to the plate (hey, sports jargon and I understand it…) and make Science writing what it can be, what it should be and thereby make a real difference. Go on, change the world, I *dare you*.