The Cuttlefish Problem: Readability and “Science-ese” in Scientific Writing
Kelly Tucker · Science Editor · 2018
In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell’s famous essay on the ills of modern English writing, the 1984 author declared, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as if instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”1 As the essay title suggests, Orwell was mainly criticizing writing related to political matters, but the section on “pretentious diction” does call out scientific writing for that particular vice. The essay also contains Orwell’s legendary list of 6 writing rules, 1 of which calls for avoiding jargon as much as possible (but not if doing so results in “anything outright barbarous”). Orwell’s insistence on clear and accessible writing in the interest of the reader’s understanding is still a worthy standard for any written work. Unfortunately, much of modern scientific writing is as obscured with jargon and garbled language as if it had been splattered with cuttlefish ink. The most recent analysis of scientific writing’s cuttlefish problem was published in eLIFE on September 2, 2017.2 William Hedley Thompson and his colleagues from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden sought to answer a seemingly simple question: Has scientific writing become harder to understand over time? The authors used the Flesch reading ease (FRE) formula and the new Dale-Chall (NDC) readability formula to measure the readability of over 700 000 abstracts for biomedical research articles published from 1881 to 2015 in 122 high-impact journals. The FRE formula […]