What does science writing look like in other languages?

March 13, 2021 2:24 PM

I teach science writing to undergraduate students. Most are native English speakers, and most of the non-native speakers are Chinese. I'd like to lead a discussion on what the key requirements of good scientific writing are (structure, precision, clarity, simplicity etc), and it would be really interesting to have some ideas about how writing varies in different languages, especially Chinese, to help put the discussion in perspective.

E.g. are there differences in how you structure a paragraph, or where you put important information? Are there different ideas about what science writing should look like? Does the passive/active voice debate exist in other languages? Are there different pitfalls in different languages? For instance, I'm wondering if the reason English students have an awful lot of trouble being precise and choosing the correct words is that English, proportionately, has an awfully large number of words with lots of near synonyms.

We are aiming here for academic science writing (theses, papers), rather than popular science writing, and for what it is worth we are not in the USA.

posted by neatsocks to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

You might find the term "contrastive rhetoric" useful when you are looking for information. I remember these sorts of issues coming up when I taught English language studies, but it's been a while and that context was academic but not focused specifically on scientific writing.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 4:18 PM on March 13, 2021

Could you bring in a bilingual Chinese scientist to give a lecture on this? Seems weird to teach it if you don’t know it yourself- puts pressure on the students to be the educator.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 4:26 PM on March 13, 2021 [4 favorites]

American students have difficulty with writing because they grow up learning spoken English, which has its own rhythms and registers, and relies heavily on extraverbal cues.

Non-native-speaker students don't have to unlearn these deeply-ingrained spoken patterns, but they will be working on acquiring grammar and vocabulary.

It's quite easy to write a basic subject-verb-object sentence. The challenge, really, is to vary the sentence structure, add verbal signposts, and make good segues and summaries.

As something akin to a "bilingual Chinese scientist", I am not aware of any deep insights to be applied from looking at this from the other side, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong. There are the common grammatical pitfalls, especially with indefinite and definite articles. You will spot the patterns quickly enough, and can provide crib sheets for them.

All in all, the fundamentals are the same. Provide good exemplars, then have them practice, receive good feedback, and practice some more. There are good writing center websites hosted at WUSTL and BYU.
posted by dum spiro spero at 4:44 PM on March 13, 2021 [2 favorites]

Are there differences in how you structure a paragraph, or where you put important information? Not really.

Are there different ideas about what science writing should look like? Not really, especially since a lot of universities in Asia use English textbooks for scientific subjects.

Does the passive/active voice debate exist in other languages? Aha, this is an interesting one. The funny thing is that scientific writing often demands the passive, pace Strunk and White. Chinese has a periphrastic passive quite similar to English, where any verb can be made passive in the same way, like "A x'd B -> B got x'ed by A."

Are there different pitfalls in different languages? In my experience, it's quite straightforward to achieve basic competency in a language, but the golden grail of "sounding like a native" takes immersive study and extensive practice. Every language has its syntactic shibboleths. They all have flourishes that give a certain "pop" to your discourse and give your audience a warm fuzzy feeling of fellowship. The great thing about scientific writing, thank goodness, is that it just has to be correct and intelligible.

The best thing you can do for your students is make them write a lot. It's a bit like teaching art. Give them incremental exercises and achievable goals, and give them really good feedback.
posted by dum spiro spero at 5:09 PM on March 13, 2021 [2 favorites]

Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. I just saw that you were looking to lead a one-time discussion, not structure an entire course, so much of what I wrote may not apply.
posted by dum spiro spero at 6:22 PM on March 13, 2021

I supervised / mentored a bunch of MSc theses in recent years, few from native English speakers. Beware Thesaurus! Several of my S.Asians had been advised to change up the language by using synonyms. I was cross-eyed, and cross, with a first draft until I twigged that Thesauromania had rendered the FDA The Nourishment and Medicine Bund. Maybe this problem is peculiar for ToEnglish rather that reduced-instruction-set languages with fewer origins in the weave.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:52 AM on March 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Just to clarify, I'm clear on how to teach science writing, and this course is (hopefully!) well designed to do that through lectures, examples, assessment and feedback. Here I'm interested, for one particular class discussion I have in mind, whether and how languages other than English structure or think about writing differently. In general, the class discussions are designed to get the students actually thinking about writing in a structured way, which many of them have never done before.

I've tried to ask colleagues from other language backgrounds, but most scientists have also never really thought about writing in a structured way, so I've got various versions of "yeah, it's a bit different", without any real details.

To give you one non-technical writing example, in Clear and Simple as the Truth, the authors contrast historical English and French prose and make a really interesting point that French has a centuries-long tradition of simple prose, whereas English prose has traditionally been more convoluted/ requires more work from the reader to generate understanding.

So if you are a writer of multiple languages (particularly a science writer), do you notice interesting differences in the writing from those languages?
posted by neatsocks at 1:47 AM on March 14, 2021

Best answer: As a German speaker, it took me a while to adapt my writing (and attitude) to the norms and expectations for scientific texts in English, on several levels. In German, the meaning of a sentence is revealed only at the end, as the determining verb often comes last. The same goes for paragraphs (and sentences can be as long as paragraphs in German). Similarly, on the level of the whole text, the way we were taught to write essays was to slowly build up from the introduction to the climax of the main insights and arguments, and then wind down for the conclusion.

Compared to German, it feels like in English you’re giving away everything at the beginning and then add details later, whereas in German you use the details to build upon. Top down vs. bottom up. Short sentences are perceived more as childlike writing, longer ones as more sophisticated in German. In English it seems to be perceived more as clear versus needlessly complicated. I now hold all these conflicting beliefs in my head and write in some sort of mishmash.
posted by meijusa at 3:08 AM on March 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

Best answer: Not a writer of multiple languages, but a translator of (usually scientific) French into English - I haven't read Clear and Simple as the Truth but it looks fascinating. In technical prose, I don't find that either language has the monopoly on clarity and simplicity. In Francophone countries there's a lot of emphasis put on elegant variation when learning to write (use of synonyms rather than repetition of terms), which means that even in highly technical texts there can be a lack of consistency in terminology. And a French-speaking author is just as likely to perpetrate an overly convoluted sentence as an English-speaking author.
posted by altolinguistic at 3:53 AM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I searched "Chinese rhetoric" and found some pertinent research. Here are some examples:

Chinese Rhetoric and Writing (2012)

The Rhetorical Organization of Chinese and American Students’ Expository Essays: A Contrastive Rhetoric Study (2008)
posted by toastedcheese at 7:35 AM on March 14, 2021