Reviewing scientific papers would be much more fun if the actual science wasn't so often obscured by so many basic errors of grammar, communication and logic. It's often like marking 1st year UG projects.
No-one should be talking about scientists learning the skills to communicate with the public, policymakers etc until those scientists can actually communicate to start with.
And sloppy writing betrays sloppy thinking, so it matters.
@helenczerski
I’m a writer and editor, with some pretty high-profile work on my résumé. It always puzzles me that so few scientists, engineers, and senior technical people hire editors to improve their documents. It’s not like it costs a lot of money—writers are CHEAP, and the time saved is precious.
@helenczerski As a commercial researcher, my default reply to journal review requests is now to say that I prioritise paid work, and thus to refuse. It annoys me that journals run as commercial operations but don’t pay the experts on whom they depend. The issue you raise was a factor in driving me to this position. I’d enjoy reviewing well written papers and could be helpful to the editors, but it’s not good use of my time to try to make sense of badly written papers.
@helenczerski I used to proofread both mom and dad's papers and book chapters. The requirement was a 9th grader could understand it. The real fun part was breaking up the complex sentences so they were simple enough to be quickly understood and not change the meaning.
Dad once had an editor make numerous meaning changes by rearranging sentences and changing words in paragraphs. He had to tell that editor to take his name off the chapter before she understood how critical the order was.
@helenczerski I sincerely ask myself why these authors sometimes don't even seem to bother using freely available spell- and grammar checkers. I don't have an answer.
@helenczerski I worked for 5.5 years at a research institute as a publishing editor. I’d both proofread and do substantive editing, while explaining to the scientists why the changes were needed. They were always so grateful, because it made their work better, readable, logical. They would comment that they didn’t know a job like mine existed, that they were lucky I was there. Then I was fired because comms positions were deemed a waste, and they wanted to hire more scientists to write more.
@helenczerski Had those issues when proof-reading my much younger brother's PhD thesis (fluid mechanics). Hard to convince that failure to communicate effectively was a big deal.
@helenczerski I’m
nodding furiously in “grant writer receiving indecipherable text as LaTeX markup that is faster to just re-type because certain researchers never hit the bloody SHIFT KEY”.
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