Delayed update - nomenclature is important
Well 2 days in a row followed by a long break isn't too bad. At least I remembered enough to feel guilty about not doing it.
Can't think of anything great to discuss at the moment. I'm finishing off my next paper to be published. It's a different kind of writing, significantly more restricted and a whole lot of editing to ensure the correct meaning comes across. I guess it's the same as any writing and communication though, you may have the ideas in your head, but unless you can communicate them clearly, efficiently they are worth nothing. Scientific writing requires one to be explicitly precise and at the same time, concise. This limitation poses significant challenges. Typically one could do the following for example.
The machine was left on overnight and there was a spill. It was fixed by turning it off in the morning.
With a sense of context, it is obvious the spill was not turned off. It, is referring to the machine. We could make this sentence more ambiguous by removing a part
The machine was left on overnight and there was a spill. It was fixed in the morning.
Here, we are left unsure if the machine being left on is the problem, or the spill is the problem, or both. Obviously avoiding ambiguity is what good writing should always aim to achieve. However, it can quickly become very verbose, especially when describing unnamed objects.
The brown machine was left on overnight and there was a spill that affected the black machine. The black machine was fixed, the brown machine was turned off and the spill was cleaned up in the morning.
In scientific writing however, items don't have simple or small names such as the brown machine or the black machine, they often have long, awkward names. This is partly due to the nomenclature used to describe molecules. It is insufficient to simply write glucose, there are two isomers, so we write D-glucose, but even then, there are two forms, so we write α-D-glucose. In regular writing, it would be sufficient to simply introduce it as α-D-glucose and then refer to it as glucose from that point on, only adding clarification if you later introduced a different form. As science papers are rarely read by scientists in order, it is a necessity to ensure that if a reader picks up the paper and starts reading from a given figure, that it remains unambiguous.
It is taking me a while to get used to writing in a style where each sentence I write must be able to stand on its own, such that a reader with some scientific knowledge can make sense of it without being confused by attempts to reduce the number of words on a page. Basically, nomenclature is really important. I'm definitely looking forward to being able to write freely
Tags: improvement, science, self, writing