A Professor of Microbiology on Language in Science

Dr. X of microbiology was kind enough to sit down with me for a few minutes to entertain my questions.

I asked her if she believes that her students now have a good grasp on grammar. "It varies," she said. "About half, yes." She went on to explain that some students are very good when it comes to grammar, however, there is about 5% who she worries about. For papers she will underline things if they are wrong, but won't necessarily spend a great deal of time correcting the grammar of the paper. For theses, however, she will spend more time going over writing, not just content.

She did her undergrad work at a smaller college so the concentration on writing was more needed. All of her exams were in essay format; if there were misspellings or incorrect grammar she would loose points. "We didn't have any scantron based exams," she said.

Now, the most common errors that she runs across are verb-tense and verb-number agreement, along with "...clauses that are just hanging around." The one thing that she expects of her students is that they proof read their papers. “Often if there aren’t any red underlined words, they think it is fine,” she said.

Switching gears and talking more about the role of language in the professional aspect of science, she told me that for journal articles they are usually so cut an dry that an author’s style never really gets in the way of understanding what they have written. There has, however, been a push in the last ten years towards active voice. It has been a slow process and the remnants of passive voice are still very obvious, mainly because a great deal of the scientists publishing now were taught that strict passive voice was how a scientific paper should be written. Even if a journal requires active voice, if the researcher is well known, then the journal will publish his/her article without asking for a change in voice. Even for Dr. X, it is difficult to write in active voice. “It was engrained into us that this is how a scientific paper is written. It is just habit,” She said.

Kevin Hockett