For better or for worse, we live in an age of mass technological advancement. Nine in 10 American adults own a cell phone while three in four use social media.
Our world is dominated by science, yet the general public shows an alarming scientific ignorance. Six percent of Americans personally think that vaccines cause autism while 52 percent are unsure; these rates are higher among younger and less-educated demographics. Forty percent of Americans attribute climate change to natural causes, despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that human pollution is the root cause.
Public scientists, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, often lament the lack of scientific literacy, pointing the finger at our floundering educational system. This critique does hold water but it has become trite from overuse.
It’s about time that the scientific community looks inward to figure out how to better engage with the general public. The classic scientific communication paradigm has used journalism as the intermediate between scientists and citizens; reporters distill down the messages of the experts and bring them to their readers in a more digestible form.
Anyone who has ever played the game of telephone knows just how easily a message can get misunderstood or distorted when it’s passed from person to person. Many times, the final form of this message is clickbait lacking at nuance; I’m looking at you, Popular Science.
More concerning, channeling information in this manner lets scientists perch in an Ivory Tower and deliver their research results from on high. An uninformed public will be less likely to rationally and critically consider these decrees thereby morphing science into a quasi-religion.
Science gains its clout from repeated experimentation and reflection; thus, to broaden audiences, scientists should prioritize raising accessibility to their work. While the surge in support for dismantling pay-walls and creating open source journals is a step in the right direction, the core of the problem is that scientific writing is boring to read.
Scientific papers are published in research journals aimed at the target audience of fellow scientists thereby creating a dialect with jargon: scientific slang. However, intangible writing dripping in complicated words creates a steep learning curve for greenhorns to the discipline. Even if someone is well-versed in one field, another sub-discipline might sound foreign to them.
Scientific style is not set in stone, however. As college students we are the next generation of researchers and can change the way that science writes. Jettisoning the passive voice (e.g., the ball was kicked) as a stylistic staple is a possible first step.
Proponents of the passive voice assert that it creates an air of objectivity. However, nobody talks, reads or thinks in passive voice. Not only is it awkward and clunky, but it obscures the inherent element of subjectivity in the practice of science. It can easily be replaced with the active voice (e.g., I kick the ball), which clears the fog of pomposity and ambiguity.
