This essay will concentrate on the three scientific passages, extracts from Micrographia by Robert Hooke (1665), Robert Boyle's New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of Air (1661), and a report in The Journal of Biological Chemistry by Alice Hudder and Rudolf Werner from November 2000. I intend to show and explain the main stylistic features of each text in turn, before considering how they illustrate the changing status of science across the centuries.
Micrographia
Robert Hooke's drawings and descriptions of objects seen through a microscope must have been astonishing to his seventeenth-century audience: the microscope was a new instrument, and only available to the very wealthy. The enormous number of details invisible to the naked eye clearly amazed Hooke himself, as this extract confirms.
His excitement is shown by the confusion of hypotactic clauses with which he piles details on top of one another until the sense of the sentence is almost lost. For Hooke, it is the particulars of description which are of most importance and the verb therefore gets relegated syntactically as well as semantically, often reduced to 'there are' or omitted altogether: 'Butterflies about Colworts...' His exact observations, like his exact pictures, are meant to give his readers the impression of seeing these magnified objects for themselves so they can marvel at them too. To this end Hooke makes use of as many of the faculties as possible; in this sentence he covers colour, touch and even aesthetic judgement: '...they are cover'd with strange kinds of threads or read hairs, which feel very soft, and look not unpleasantly.'
In order to achieve precision he also deploys some technical vocabulary; much of this is of classical origin as the native word-stock was believed to be too vague. Some of the terminology was very new when Hooke used it in 1665; 'excrescencies' dates from 1633; 'contrivance' in the sense, 'Applied to natural arrangements, or organs showing special adaptation to the performance of functions,' dates from 1664, and in the Oxford English Dictionary, Micrographia is the earliest quoted use of 'dispensations' in the sense, 'An arrangement or provision of Providence or of Nature.' This neophyte vocabulary would have lent Hooke's report credibility, but made it difficult for non-scientists to understand, which is probably why he uses it sparingly.
Hooke seems also to want to inspire in his readers the awe that he feels when examining these tiny organisms. Moreover, he attributes the creation of his subjects directly to God, and holds his discoveries up as a reason to praise Him. This sense of wonder can be seen in the way he emphasises the specialisation of each plant or creature: 'strange kinds of threads...suited and adapted...convenient nourishment.' Elsewhere he praises God directly: 'the All-wise Creator...the great care of the Creator...we cannot chuse but admire and adore him.' He tries to include the reader in this exultation by using the plural pronoun 'we,' and he also uses certain rhetorical devices. The final paragraph contains the word 'such' four times in two lines, which produces a very marked effect; immediately after this there is a series of parallel clauses, beginning, 'when we find...' However, these probably appear unconsciously, as the Royal Society frowned upon literary figures. Nonetheless, he is successful in inspiring amazement in the reader.
New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching the Spring of Air
Robert Boyle's experiments with an air-pump and a variety of chemical and physical phenomena were a source of great interest for the early Royal Society. The way in which Boyle wrote them up was also influential on the style of scientific reporting at the time, although his linguistic decisions were themselves affected by the status of the scientific community.
Boyle was at pains to prove his honesty and integrity to a sceptical audience. One way in which he does this to explain his reasoning for each step of the experiment: 'I thought fit to examine my conjecture by the following experiment...' He also scrupulously avoids all traces of rhetorical style: it was considered a mark of untrustworthiness since rhetoric could be used to deceive. Hence there are no parallelisms, tropes or figures to be found in this passage; the sentences are also extremely long, on which Boyle commented in his Proemial Essay, 'I have knowingly and purposely transgressed the laws of oratory.'
Also very unrhetorical is the report's extreme prolixity, which is part of Boyle's strategy of virtual witnessing. The scientific ideal is to witness the experimental event oneself; next best is to be able to stage a replication through the accuracy of the report's description. However, if neither of these is possible the writer should endeavour to facilitate,
...the production in a reader's mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either direct witness or replication.
(Schaffer and Shapin 1985: 60)
This technique can be seen in this extract, as Boyle includes a huge number of circumstantial details, such as the colour of the coral, the amount of pumping it took to empty the chamber, the number of times the experiment was repeated, and so on. The lengthy sentences made up of co-ordinated clauses are designed to allow for the maximum amount of detail without forcing anything on the reader as being most important. The credibility of an experiment was increased according to the number of respected people who witnessed it; the main purpose of this vicarious extension was therefore to make the results seem more reliable:
If that experience could be extended to many, and in principle to all men, then the result could be constituted as a matter of fact.
(Schaffer and Shapin 1985: 25)
For the Royal Society's inductive processes it was important to know not just how the world behaves but how it behaved in a particular instance. This is why the description of the method often tend towards the passive - 'Having then put about half a score sprigs of coral...' - but in the observations the first person pronouns and active verbs are stressed: '...if we desisted but one minute from pumping.' This style emphasises that one experiment alone cannot prove or disprove a theory: 'The procedure could always be repeated; the event never could be (Dear 1985: 153).'
Another way early scientists made themselves seem honest is by reporting their failures as well as their successes. In this extract from Experiments Physico-Mechanical Boyle mentions an accident with the bubbling liquid: 'the frothy liquor overflowed the glass and ran down the sides of it.' He also shows that he is interested in the advancement of science rather than personal glory by his willingness to knock down his own hypothesis in the final paragraph. Boyle stresses the difference between his theories and his concrete observations to make sure that readers do not feel that he is trying to deceive them. To do this he varies his epistemic modality, using modal verbs of doubt and hedges when putting forward a hypothesis: 'entertained a suspicion,' and, '... seemed to argue, that the removal of the pressure of the external air was the cause, or, at least, the occasion of this effervescence (emphasis added).'
Like Robert Hooke, Boyle found it necessary to use recently-coined technical terms in order to communicate effectively the details of his scientific theories; he was able to use more than Hooke because of his more specialised audience. Thirteen of the Latinate words in this extract were coined in the sixty years prior to the publication of Experiments Physico-Mechanical and some were invented by Boyle himself, including 'exsuction' and 'physico-mechanical.' He created new meanings for 'incumbent' in the sense, 'Of air, fluid, or other weight, with reference to the downward pressure exerted by it,' and for 'pressure' in the sense of, 'The force exerted by one body on another by its weight, or by the continued application of power,' whereas his use of 'effervescence' in the sense, 'The action of bubbling up as if boiling; the tumultuous rise of bubbles of gas from a fluid; especially as the result of chemical action, but without necessarily implying heat,' antedates the OED's earliest entry of 1684. All this new and precise terminology gives the report a very authoritative air, an effect that has been encouraged throughout the history of scientific writing.
' Analysis of a Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease Mutation Reveals an Essential Internal Ribosome Entry Site Element in the Connexin-32 Gene' in Journal of Biological Chemistry
Hudder and Werner's report is stylistically almost identical to the vast majority of scientific writing of recent years. The 'scientific style' has become institutionalised and so widely recognisable that it is often appropriated to lend gravitas to other texts. Rosemarie Gläser notes that most texts of this kind are very similar because, 'the freedom of an individual author's style is delimited by the register of scientific English (Gläser 1975: 194).' She also
identifies the most important features as being, 'objective information, the statement of facts, brevity and authority (Gläser 1975: 190).'
This extract displays most of the typical linguistic features of contemporary science, starting with its structure of 'ABSTRACT' followed by 'EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURES' and the lengthy title which is neutral about the results. Scientific writing famously uses the passive voice of the verb to avoid identifying the agent: '...was detected...was inserted...and transfected.' This habit extends even to clauses where there is no human intervention to conceal: in the clause, 'expression of the second gene was significantly increased,' the verb could easily be active. In the title the verb is active, but this is offset by the fact that the subject is a nominalisation: there is still no real agent.
Nominalisation - the substitution of a related noun for a verb - is a major feature of technical reports. Treating actions as objects allows the scientist to discuss them in more precise ways, as surmised by Locke:
It seems quite likely that this habit of thought - this concretising, this reification, of what is otherwise transient and variable - serves to focus the mind in ways that are scientifically rewarding.
(Locke 1992: 92)
Among the nominalisations in this passage are 'analysis,' 'translation' and 'amplification.' In one place the tendency to nominalise is so strong that a 'filler' verb has to be introduced: 'Screening of animals was done...' rather than, 'animals were screened...'
Noun phrases also tend to be long in order to make reference to all the background information that the scientist has acquired over their long period of training: 'The Quick Change site-directed mutagenesis kit (Stratagene),' and 'reverse primer (antisense luciferase coding region).' Nouns are both pre- and post-modified in order to divide the information and make it more easily absorbable. Nouns are often used in the adjectival positions in noun phrases as developing adjectives from some technical vocabulary is very awkward: 'Ribosome Entry Site Element.' The preference for nouns even extends to the high proportion of compound prepositions such as, 'in addition' and, 'in accordance with.'
The syntax is strongly hypotactic; Hudder and Werner place what they think is the most important information in the main clause, with a proliferation of subordinate clauses giving a selection of details. Scientific writing tends to start with the subordinate clauses, as in the first sentence of the abstract, where the first two clauses are centred on past participles.
Science is often accused of overusing jargon, that is, language specialised to its field. Although it can be useful 'shorthand' for the scientists, it makes the text impenetrable to outsiders. Many of the abbreviations in this article are not glossed, for example, 'mRNA' or, 'pgCx32-1.8.' There are a large number of Latinate words, many of which are very recent in origin: 'ribosome' dates from 1958, 'transgenic' from 1981 and 'splice' from 1975. These words have been coined as the field of genetics has developed; since DNA was only discovered in 1953 this explains the newness of most of them.
The intellectual climate and attitudes towards science have changed enormously over the centuries. For Boyle and Hooke, it was paramount to convince their audience that they were honest in character and in what they reported, whereas Hudder and Werner do not need to persuade anyone of the importance of their work.
However, the distinction is not always so clear-cut. Robert Hooke's insistence on an 'All-wise Creator' seems to conflict with his belief that the worms are performing, 'what they were designed by Nature to do.' Despite setting up his observations as an indirect form of worship, Hooke does not actually seem to mind who created his subjects; appealing to Christianity is just the quickest route to acceptance.
It is ironic that, for all Boyle's intentions to avoid rhetoric, he is actually using a rhetorical style called enargia, in which the writer includes a lot of circumstantial detail in order to persuade the reader that they are not being deceived. The extract from Experiments Physico-Mechanical contains several aspects which seem illogical, even for such an early stage of experimental science. For instance, why is the paragraph about letting the spirit of vinegar stand to release bubbles placed at the end, when it happened before the main experiment? The IMRAD structure of modern science was introduced to avoid the confusion that such non-temporally ordered reporting can produce. There is also a striking absence of mathematical terms in the passage; the figures that are given are usually accompanied by hedges: 'about half a score,' or, 'above an inch.' The Royal Society was less concerned with numerical proofs as they are not so easily demonstrable. The contrast with modern science is unmistakable: scientists are now expected to provide mathematical rather than observational results.
The IMRAD structure of scientific reports has been accused of encouraging scientists to fabricate the experimental process. However, including irrelevant details can make it difficult to pick out what is important or new, as can be seen in Boyle's writing. Contemporary science still considers itself to be transparent and unrhetorical, but this is not in fact the case. It is virtually incomprehensible to someone without scientific training; the highly technical vocabulary acts as a 'gatekeeper,' excluding people without the necessary qualifications. It also allows for unscientific subjectivity and imprecision: when Hudder and Werner say that 'expression of the second gene was significantly increased (emphasis added),' how are they measuring that significance? In fact, the style of science has become so recognised and trusted that it is now its own form of rhetoric, but, because it presents itself as the very antithesis of rhetoric, it is rarely questioned (Locke 1992: 90). Boyle and Hooke would probably be delighted by the current acceptance of modern scientific writing, but perhaps they would also be worried by its power.
Bibliography
Atkinson, D., 'The Evolution of Medical Research Writing from 1735 to 1985: The Case of the Edinburgh Medical Journal' in Applied Linguistics Vol. 13, 1992, pp. 337-374
Crystal, David, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1997
Dear, Peter, ' Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society' in Isis, Vol. 76, 1985, pp. 144-161
Gläser, Rosemarie, 'Emotive Features in Technical and Scientific English' in H. Ringbom (ed.), Style and Text: Studies presented to Nils Erik Enkvist, (Stockholm: Skriptor) 1975
Locke, David, Science as Writing, (Michigan: Yale University Press) 1992
Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, (Princeton University Press) 1985
Oxford English Dictionary online at http://dictionary.oed.com
