One of the aspects of the scientific literature that I despise is the ubiquitous use of abbreviations, acronyms, and invented terms. Please stop.
Like many of my peers, I read a lot of science related work – student committee reports, abstracts, published papers, and grants. If you also fall into this situation, then you will often encounter these impenetrable blocks of text that are filled to the brim with three to five letter codes.
The goal of any written piece of work is to communicate. If your written document starts to tax the reader in unnecessary ways, you are making your work less accessible, especially for those who are not in your particular narrow field, and ultimately you decrease the value of your work.
So why do scientists write like this?
According to Steven Pinker’s excellent book on scientific writing, The Sense of Style, the human mind can only keep a hand full of ideas in active memory at any one given time. In an attempt to explain difficult concepts, scientific writing often describes how different bits of information are connected to one another. The more complicated the idea is, the greater number of bits of information need to be connected. So how do we achieve our goal of explaining things that require many bits to be strung together, especially given that we can only store five of fewer ideas in working memory?
We get around this problem by chunking. We first take a smaller group of ideas, smash them together, and give it a name or an abbreviation. Sometimes these are referred to as jargon. In principle, this procedure takes a limited number of bits and assembles them together into one chunk that can then serve as a single item in working memory. The chunks themselves need to have a name - either a noun, abbreviation or acronym. The names can take the form of hideous “zombie nouns” that end in “tion” or “ism” (i.e., “transcription”). Other times they are abbreviations or acronyms, and many scientists try their best to make them sound cute or at least relevant to the topic (i.e. the “HUSH complex” which is involved in silencing genes). Some chunks are standard in your field and are widely understood by your specialty. For example, “transcription” and “eCLIP” are standard in molecular biology circles but to anyone else these look like technobabble terms that at best pop up in your video player instruction pamphlet or at worst like a scoop of alphabet soup noodles. At other times the chunks may only be familiar to you the writer (as in, “the signal sequence, or SS”). In the end, they mostly serve the writer’s wishes and rarely the reader’s needs. You have managed to smash a fist full of ideas (i.e. “signal sequence”) into a nice little chunk (“SS”) that you can now link to other complicated concepts. But why stop there? Why not take those chunks and smash them together to make chunks of chunks! So an “SSCR” contains “signal sequences” (short 20 amino acid long peptide found at the N-terminus of a protein that directs it to the secretory system in cells) and “coding region” (a region of an mRNA that codes for a protein). Note that for non life scientists, they have to contend with definitions of each subchunk that itself contains chunks. Sure these smaller chunks are standard to my field (such as “peptide”, “secretory system”, “N-terminus”) but are themselves require further deconstruction for the lay reader. Like bloated babushka dolls, these chunks infest and permeate the scientific literature.
This is why reading outside of your discipline can be quite challenging. Most of your mental energy is mostly spent on remembering how the myriad of chunks were assembled. Because these chunks are “standard” within the field, they are rarely introduced in a comprehensive way within the given text. Even when you read within your field deciphering chunks can be challenging as many scientists have few inhibitions about assembling these monstrous babushkas on a moment’s notice. On top of all this, the assembly and explanation of these new monstrous chunks happens only once in the text. When the reader bumps into the monsters a dozen pages later (a common occurrence when reading a thesis), figuring out how a particular abbreviation was assembled (and what it means) can be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Many times I find myself reading 100+ page thesis only to encounter an acronym and spending 10 minutes hunting down its precise meaning (there it is on page 36!). This is even worse when reading grants (the reader is trying to convince me that they need funds, and all they give me is this alphabet soup???) Even if you the reader have a vague idea about what each chunk is, now you have to understand how you the writer connects the dozen or so monstrous babushka chunks together in complicated and grammatically challenging sentences.
Please. Don’t do this.
Chunking may help you the reader, but it is lazy and can over-complicate your text. Instead, figure out the simplest way of conveying your message in easy to understand building blocks, which use as few specialized chunks as possible. I realize that chunking is sometimes impossible to avoid. And when many of the chunks are well-know in your discipline, it may be preferable to use them. But realize that when your text is bloated with field-specific chunks, you prevent readers from outside your discipline from understanding what the hell you are trying to say. If your text is full of your own babushka monstrosities, they you are writing a horror script, not a scientific paper/grant/thesis/proposal.
—————
Addendum: David Shechner over on Twitter, pointed to this excellent rant on molecular biology technique-based acronyms by Stan Fields.