人们往往会模仿期刊上的现有论文以学习写作，并逐步增加复杂绕口的语言，误以为“深奥的行话和复杂的语句是科学写作的标志”。这显然不是科学写作的目的。那么，当前的写作有哪些问题，从哪里找到好的写作模式呢？ 看看菲利普·鲍尔是如何建议的。

本文采取了中英对照的模式，以便在翻译失真时，读者能找回原意

2015年的论文比19世纪的论文更难阅读了，问题不仅仅来源于文字本身。——菲利普·鲍尔

Papers from 2015 are a tougher read than some from the nineteenth century — and the problem isn't just about words, ——Philip Ball.

瑞典的一组研究人员表示，现代科学文本比一个多世纪前更加难以理解。很容易举出理由让人相信这一说法。Modern scientific texts are more impenetrable than they were over a century ago, suggests a team of researchers in Sweden. It’s easy to believe that.

例如，你可以确信，如果你随便拿起一本《自然》(长期以来，它一直以其论文的相对可及性而自豪)，你可能会在摘要中找到这样的（晦涩难懂的）句子: You can be confident, for example, that if you pick up a random copy of Nature (which has long prided itself on the relative accessibility of its papers), you may find sentences like this in the abstracts

这里我们指出，在小鼠中，DND1主要在基因的3’非翻译区结合一个解脲脲原体(A/U)三核苷酸基序，并通过直接募集CCR4-NOT去乙酰化酶复合物来破坏靶基因的稳定性。Here we show that in mice DND1 binds a UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif predominantly in the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA, and destabilizes target mRNAs through direct recruitment of the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex.

但是这种带有浓重专业术语的措辞并不是斯德哥尔摩卡罗林斯卡研究所的神经学家威廉·赫德利·汤普森和他的同事们在他们的分析报告中指出的唯一问题。他们搜索了1881年至2015年间发表在122种生物医学顶级期刊上的70多万篇英语摘要。他们的研究于3月28日发布在预印本服务器bioRxiv上【1】，该研究指出，不仅仅只有技术性行话的数目在增加。 But this type of jargon-heavy phrasing is not the only problem that neuroscientist William Hedley Thompson and his colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm are tackling in their analysis. They scoured more than 700,000 English-language abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 in 122 leading biomedical journals. Their study【1】, posted on the preprint server bioRxiv on 28 March, suggests that it’s not just the technical jargon that has been on the rise.

作者们指出，“一般性的科学术语”也有所增加。这些术语是指具有非技术含义但已成为科学论文标准词汇一部分的多音节词。这些词包括“鲁棒”、“重要”、“此外”和“潜在”——这些词在日常使用中很常见，但在科学文献中更为普遍。单词本身并不是不透明的，但是它们的积累增加了阅读文本所需要付出的脑力劳动。There has also, the authors say, been an increase in “general scientific jargon”: that is, multisyllable words that have non-technical meanings but have become part of the standard lexicon of the science paper. These words include ‘robust’, ‘significant’, ‘furthermore’ and ‘underlying’ — all familiar enough in daily use, but markedly more prevalent in the scientific literature. The words aren’t inherently opaque, but their accumulation adds to the mental effort involved in reading the text.

四年级的读者 Fourth-grade readers

汤普森和他的同事们使用阅读便利性的标准指标来检查这些文本，这些指标衡量的因素包括每个单词的音节数、一个句子中的单词数以及论文中未包含在预定义的常用单词列表(新戴尔-查尔或NDC列表)中的单词数。从这些指标来看，趋势似乎非常明显:自1881年以来，论文的可读性稳步地在显著下降。Thompson and his colleagues examined the texts using standard indicators of reading ease, which measure factors such as the number of syllables per word, the number of words in a sentence and the number of words in the paper not included in a predefined list of common words (the New Dale–Chall, or NDC, list). By these measures, the trends seem very clear: a steady and marked decline in readability since 1881.

你可以就这项研究的技术细节进行争论。《读者的大脑》(剑桥大学出版社，2015年)一书的作者、位于盖恩斯维尔的佛罗里达大学的耶洛利斯·道格拉斯(Yellowlees Douglas)指出，常用单词列表是根据美国四年级学生(九岁和十岁的孩子)的理解技能来衡量的，它对科学文献的适用性尚不清楚。更大的问题是，像音节计数这样的度量标准过于简单: 例如，它们将“orange”（橙色）和“praxis”（实践）这样的词视为等同物。You could argue over the technicalities of the study. The list of common words is measured against the comprehension skills of US fourth-graders — children aged nine and ten — and its applicability to the scientific literature is not clear, points out Yellowlees Douglas at the University of Florida in Gainesville, author of The Reader’s Brain (Cambridge University Press, 2015), a writing manual that bases its advice on neuroscience. More problematically, metrics such as syllable-counting are too simplistic: for example, they rate words such as ‘orange’ and ‘praxis’ as equivalent.

此外，研究了科学出版物的趋势的伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿西北大学的物理学家路易斯·阿马拉尔(Luis Amaral)说，（上述研究中，）1960年之前的数据过于稀疏和多变，不太可靠，1960年之后的数据趋势也不太清楚。What’s more, says physicist Luís Amaral of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has studied trends in scientific publications, the data from before 1960 are too sparse and variable to be very reliable, and the trends in the data from after 1960 are less clear.

此外，阿马拉尔说，区分技术术语和一般术语并不容易。技术术语的增加并不完全是一件坏事: 它可以反映科学中有用的概念和技术的出现。他说，“测序”在1980年以前可能不在科学词汇中，但现在谁会抱怨它的存在呢？Besides, Amaral says, distinguishing between technical and general jargon isn’t easy. And an increase in technical jargon is not wholly a bad thing: it can reflect the appearance of useful concepts and techniques in science. ‘Sequencing’ was probably not part of the scientific vocabulary before 1980, he says, but who would complain about its presence now?

然而，对专业术语的需求并不能完全解释现代科学文献越来越难以渗透的原因。However, the need for specialized terms cannot completely explain the increased impenetrability of modern scientific literature.

汤普森和他的同事们将这种不透明归咎于习惯性的、几乎是仪式性的“强力词汇”，比如“独特的”和“新奇的”，这可能是对的。但是对字数的关注可能会分散对好文章真正重要的东西的注意力。Thompson and his colleagues are probably right to pin some of that opacity on a habitual, almost ritualistic use of ‘power words’ such as ‘distinct’ and ‘novel’. But a focus on word-counting risks distracting from what really matters about good writing.

纠缠的句子 Tangled sentences

简短、普通的单词可以用来写非常难理解的句子，这仅仅是因为语法结构不好办。这就是道格拉斯的书的重点: 读者希望以特定的顺序来接触概念，而不必搜索合适的名词来搭配动词，或者通过解开中间的信息来填充从句。你可以随时查阅行话，但如果句子结构不好，你只能靠自己了。Short, common words can be used to write sentences that are awfully hard to understand, simply because of poor grammatical construction. This is the point of Douglas’s book: the reader expects to encounter concepts in a particular order, without having to search back for the right noun to go with a verb, or having to untangle intervening information-filled clauses. You can always look up jargon, but with a poorly constructed sentence you’re on your own.

可理解性不仅仅是关于一篇论文说了什么，也是关于它遗漏了什么。作为研究论文的常客，我经常被他们推理的跳跃或关键细节的遗漏所震惊，尤其是当我发现这些空白对专家来是如此显而易见的时候。And comprehensibility isn’t just about what a paper says, but also about what it leaves out. As a regular reader of research papers, I am often staggered by their leaps of reasoning or omission of key details, especially when I discover that these gaps are no less real to experts.

那么如何才能提高科技论文的可读性呢？首先，认识到好的写作不是靠魔法产生的。好的写作应该容易学习——虽然很少存在容易学习的写作。道格拉斯怀疑，许多论文的初稿是由一个研究团队的年轻成员写的，他们没有参考任何好的写作模式，而是从已经在期刊上的东西中学了些皮毛。她补充说，“他们将行话和复杂性视为科学写作的标志”。这种自我提高（写作水平）的模仿肯定可以解释为什么存在汤普森和他的同事们强调的（论文越来越难以读懂的）趋势。So how could the readability of scientific papers be improved? First, by recognizing that good writing doesn’t happen by magic. It can be taught — but rarely is. Douglas suspects that many first drafts of papers are written by junior members of a research team who, lacking any model for what good writing looks like, take their lead from what is already in the journals. And there “they see the jargon and complexity as markers of what passes as scientific writing”, she adds. Such self-reinforcing mimicry could certainly account for the trends highlighted by Thompson and his colleagues.

那么你从哪里找到好的写作模式呢？显然，出自优秀作家之手——不一定是在科学领域，而是在任何地方【2】。有确凿的证据表明，老练的读者会造就老练的作家【3】。为什么不鼓励学生放下《自然》，拿起达尔文、道金斯或者狄更斯（的文章去模仿）？So where do you find good models of writing? Obviously, from good writers — not necessarily in the sciences, but anywhere2. There is hard evidence that sophisticated readers make sophisticated writers【3】. Why not encourage students to put down Nature and pick up Darwin, Dawkins or Dickens?