Writing in the Sciences: Scientists as Writers, Scientific Writing, and the Persuasive Story

Abstract

Writing in the sciences is often thought of as a sober, methodical presentation of evidence. But this perspective dismisses that writing, also in the sciences, involves a nexus of acts of selection, conceptualisation, translation, storytelling, and persuasion, among others. The meaning of writing, thus, transcends sober presentation or the idea of sticking to the data; writing is a complex transformation of chaotic research content into a specifically structured and formalised form of a legitimate research article. The persuasive story is the sacred achievement that represents this transformation, marking the dissolution of instances of information in a clear and persuasive narrative. Perceptions of skilled writing or great articles are mediated by the meaningfulness of the story told. Sticking to the data is a moral principle that becomes ambiguous in the acts of writing as the story requires a bending of the principle. In this article, we propose a cultural sociological reading of writing in the sciences. This provides a more nuanced appreciation of scientific writing, its competition, achievement, and myths of positivism. Our empirical evidence is based on a series of interviews with scientists and professional scientific writers (an as yet mostly unaccounted for actor in scholarly communication). We discuss our findings with conceptions of the late Durkheim and the strong programme of cultural sociology.

Science in Formation: The Indexed Scientist and the Inaccessibility of Scientific Information

“…From experimental data and contextual meta-data to practical instructions and methodical reconstructions, up to the in-between syntheses of note-taking and its collaborative processing in lab meetings: world is transformed into information in laboratory life (Latour and Woolgar 1986). But it is not information -the evidence of hard data -that is being communicated in a story; this materiality is mediated by writing practices, their conventions, traditions, and social structural shaping (Knöchelmann and Schendzielorz 2023). Any scientific information is bound by a story through the narrative acts of writing.…”

“…A believed disbalance of proximities results the pollution of this scientific fetish. Persuasion, thus, means that scientists draw on the ideals of sticking to the data and, at the same time, also talk about selecting experiments -and resulting evidence -so that it makes for a good story (Knöchelmann and Schendzielorz 2023). This highlights how persuasive storytelling is fitted within the (stretched) ethical confines of science; fraudulent fabrication is not.…”