A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE WRITING It is helpful for writers to possess the fullest perspective on what they are do ing.

Along with our principles for effective science writing, SCITEXT accordingl y presents the history of science writing. Science writing, like most non-fictio n writing, is designed to be persuasive; and the history of persuasive writing, or rhetoric, is not the history of science. ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME The earliest systematic analysis of persuasive argument was made in ancient Gree ce, the same culture in which science itself originated. The original aim was to help citizens in the law courts, where they made their own speeches. The practi ce of democracy, notablyThe Parthenon, Athens in Athens when that city was at it s cultural zenith in the fifth century BC, also placed a high priority on persua sive speaking. Freelance teachers, known as sophists, set up schools to propound their ideas, and in their wake sprang up professional speechwriters. Manuals of speechmaking were circulated, often insubstantial. We know of the sophists larg ely through Plato, who deplored them as users of any verbal trick to achieve the ir ends irrespective of truth. This tension persists in modern legal systems. The definitive classical treatise is Aristotle's. This single-handed encyclopaed ist spent twenty years in Plato's Academy until Plato's death in 348BC. He publi shed his Art of Rhetoric - essentially lecture notes - some fifteen years later, soon after returning to Athens and founding his own school. His work went far b eyond mere catalogues of empirically effective devices, into psychology (for the first time) and the nature of demonstration when deductive certainty is unavail able. Aristotle recognised three modes of persuasion: by logic (logos); by emoti on (pathos); and by trust in the speaker (=ethos). Only the first is relevant to proper science writing - although every effective device should be deployed to make points of logic. The section on style in Aristotle distinguishes three impo rtant characteristics: clarity; elegance; appropriateness to the subject. We can not do better today. In particular, Aristotle stresses and analyses the role of metaphor and its associated imagery. The story moves next to Rome, which when it conquered the eastern mediterranean found itself taking up Greek culture. Rome's first great rhetorician was Cicero (106-43BC), a politician and great orator. In his work De Oratore [book II secti on 64] Cicero states that writing on history and on abstract subjects - modern s cience would be included - involves no rules from any rhetorical system, just ea sy language and a flowing style. The next great authority was Quintilian, whose Institutio Oratoria (AD88) continues Cicero's theme of the perfect man as the pe rfect orator. The Institutio Oratoria is unmatched in its depth of treatment of technical points. TO THE MIDDLE AGES Even as Augustine of Hippo wrote, some 300 years later, on rhetoric and the Chri stian sermon, the western half of the Roman empire was collapsing. For several c enturies thereafter, human perspectives narrowed to little more than obtaining o r holding on to shelter, land and food. Graeco-Roman knowledge was held elsewher e, in Constantinople, in the Islamic peoples, and in the libraries of the great monasteries. Where there was learning, it was in Latin. This was for two reasons . First, Latin was a developed language; the emerging tongues of Europe simply d id not have the capacity to express subtler details. Second, Latin was the only universal language among the scholars of Europe. The need to maximise one's audi ence was as important then as it is today. In the European Middle Ages, from the 11th century, trade increased and organise

d itself, and people identified themselves with progressively larger administrat ive units under more powerful rulers. The earliest universities were founded; wo rking within a Christian framework they thought about the world, which in practi ce meant philosophy. Paper - a Chinese invention of a millennium before - was av ailable, but all books were copied by hand. There was no such thing as a "defini tive copy". THE RENAISSANCE TO THE FIRST JOURNALS The Middle Ages led to a further influx of the classical spirit known as the Ren aissance. From this point the strands which were to become science, the study of order in nature - of what things do and how they relate, rather than what they are in themselves or what they are for - recognisably come together. Printing, a n idea first known to the Chinese, was rediscovered using moveable metal type an d found its time. In the 50 years from Gutenberg's first press to the year 1500, some 40 thousand separate editions of books were printed, typically in quantiti es of a few hundred each. In a single generation millions of books flooded Europ e (though still only about one per square kilometre). In the next two centuries some 300 thousand more editions were added, and in the 18th century two million! Before Gutenberg, very few parishes had even had their own Christian bibles. New learning was still mostly spread by the wandering scholars who passed betwee n the universities. The printed book was limited as a channel for reporting new ideas, then and now, by the large amount of material it had to contain. From the 16th century postal services improved, so that letters between groups of scient ists could be circulated; clearing houses were subsequently set up to further th is. News digests also began to be published by well-connected men of learning. F rom this point it is a short step to the scientific journal. The first two, in 1 665, were the French Journal des Savans [Savants], which was intended to cover al l fields of knowledge; and shortly after the Philosophical Transactions which, b y its association with the young Royal Society of London, was specifically scien tific. (Science was then known as natural philosophy.) The Royal Society was one of the earliest of the learned academies into which scientists were now organis ing themselves, and the Philosophical Transactions published, each month, works by such names as Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Halley and van Leeuwenhoek. GROWTH OF THE JOURNAL In the early journals all depended on the skills of the editor and his team, who would publish not only original papers but digests of work done elsewhere, ofte n taken from other journals. Henry Oldenburg, editor of Philosophical Transactio ns, was the head of a clearing house when he began publication. Journals also in cluded accounts of newly published scientific books, which continued to be the m edium for large bodies of research such as Isaac Newton's Principia. Multiple pu blication of a piece by an author was commonplace and accepted. Journals usually published in the national languages of Europe, not in Latin - an irony, since a t this time a truly international community of corresponding scientists had beco me a reality. Several dozen more scientific journals were published in the remainder of the 17 th century, and hundreds more were launched in the next (especially in Germany); a survey has uncovered some 750 titles to 1800. Only fifty years further on the re were (or had been, since few lasted long) several thousands, as the 19th cent ury saw an explosion in their number. An impetus for expansion was the increasin g interval between a paper's reading to a learned society, and its publication i n that society's organ - up to five years later. Priority was always important. The new journals of the 18th century were often founded by individuals, and had to pay their way or go under; these commercial journals came to outnumber the pu blications of the learned societies. They led to a problem of access which has l asted to this day.

Specialisation of the subject matter of scientific journals began in the mid-18t h century, the medical sciences leading the way. Also, some journals came to con centrate on reports of original research; others on reviews of books, which migh t be extended into essay reviews of a field; and still others on the printing of abstracts, for already in 1789 a reviewer had complained that "one should seek to limit the number [of periodicals] rather than to increase them, since there c an also be too many". An abstract was not then a scientist's own summary, but wa s written for the journal by another. This custom lasted long enough for Einstei n to write abstracts in his early career. Periodicals which set out to explain science to the lay reader had a later start , because articles of this sort often appeared in the educated digests which wer e common in the 18th and 19th centuries. Part of this shift came about through t he increasing professionalisation of science, which took place in the early 19th century in France and Germany, later in Great Britain and America, and which af fected first those sciences - physics, chemistry, physiology - for which a labor atory is required. In journals the refereeing system sprang up to complement the expertise of the editor and board; Philosophical Transactions had it in its pre sent form by the latter part of the 19th century. Papers now became more formall y structured, and references to other work were given in fuller and more standar dised detail. The biological sciences adopted the Introduction-Methods-Results-D iscussion format. A standard structure, with detailed section headings, is a gre at aid to the browsing which was becoming necessary. Today there are tens of tho usands of journals and, although many can be ignored even by libraries, scientis ts must expect to encounter an enormous number; the Institute for Scientific Inf ormation lists the contents of some 5000 it regards as significant. THE FUTURE The printed journal grew because it was the best way of disseminating informatio n. Today we have computer networks which can do that more quickly and cheaply. T he purpose of primary research journals today is to act as a quality control on research, through the refereeing system. So the way forward, for primary researc h at least, is to create an electronic system while maintaining quality control. Such a system, properly set up, could be run for a fraction of the cost to the research community of journal subscriptions today. ENGLISH PROSE STYLE - A BRIEF HISTORY In the 17th and 18th centuries there were two contrasting English prose styles, one ornate and one simple. The ornate style, the language of diplomacy and the c hurch, took after the manner of Cicero. The simpler style, commonly called antiCiceronian, concerned itself less with symmetry and was adopted by most of the p rose writers of the time. It reflected an increasing flexibility and freedom of thought. The Royal Society, under the continuing influence of Francis Bacon's ph ilosophy, was concerned with the English language, setting up in 1664 a committe e for its improvement. Its intent was "to reject all the amplifications, digress ions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortn ess, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words". One member of this committee was John Dryden, the poet and playwright who is often called the father of modern English prose style. He saw and condemned, 300 years ago, the tendency to overuse words deriving directly from Latin, a trend stemmi ng from the desire to sound grand but which often merely creates jargon. The same fact was observed in 1946 by George Orwell in a telling essay Politics and the English Language. Orwell also observes that the tendency of much modern prose is away from concreteness. With enough vague generality it is possible to construct whole passages which sound well and mean nothing. These can be constru cted with little effort by (in Orwell's words) gumming together long strips of w

ords which have already been set in order by someone else: so that I think... be comes In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption to suppose that... Anot her trend is towards impersonal English which, though appropriate for science, b lurs easily into blandness and denial of authorial responsibility for what is wr itten. Science writing is prone to these faults and scientists should guard agai nst them. Because of the hybrid origins of modern English - in the Germanic, old English o f the Anglo-Saxons, the Latin-derived tongue of the Norman invaders, and the Ren aissance influx of "higher" words deriving directly from Latin - the language to day provides a wide variety of synonyms for expressing a given idea. Each choice has its own distinct overtone. Also, English sentences can be constructed from their grammatical components, or from component clauses, in a host of ways. Grea ter care is therefore needed to avoid unintentional ambiguity. This is repaid, h owever, by the greater variety of overtones available. The role of punctuation i n removing ambiguities by parsing - resolving sentences into their component par ts - is correspondingly larger. FURTHER READING Several sources have already been mentioned in the text. An excellent modern boo k which sets out rhetorical devices, including those useful for making points of logic, is Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by E.P.J. Corbett, listed i n the bibliography of our principles for effective science writing. On publishin g, there is Development of Scientific Publishing in Europe, edited by A.J. Meado ws (Elsevier publishing, 1980), especially its first article, Development of Eur opean Scientific Journal Publishing Before 1850 by A.A. Manten. A fuller survey is David Kronick's book, History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals: The Or igins and Development of Scientific and Technical Press, 1665-1790 (Scarecrow pr ess, 1976).