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T. R. Girill
Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired)
[email protected]
Technical Writing: Heeding the Science Words
One key way that science text--articles, reports, even safety
documents--differs from literary or history prose is that is that
science text features certain terms--'epistemic markers'--that uniquely
signal that the intellectual work of scientific research is underway.
Some epistemic markers for science are famous--'experiment' or
'hypothesis' for example--yet many others may be more important but
also more subtle, so overlooked by student readers or writers
approaching technical text from the outside.
To shed empirical light on the usage of such science signal words
in real technical text, two Canadian researchers recently analyzed
thousands of biology journals to reveal 'the place that key
epistemic concepts actually occupy in the practice of science'
(p. 169 in Christophe Malaterre and Martin Leonard, 'Epistemic
markers in the scientific discourse,' Philosophy of Science,
January, 2024, 91:151-174, doi: 10.1017/psa.2023.97).
The Search
Biomed Central offers a searchable database of 73,000 English-language
biology research journals. Scientists often look there for technical
work--for instance about 'blood' or 'tumor' research--related to their
own current projects. Malaterre and Leonard, however, searched these
biology articles for the epistemic markers of strategic and
characteristically 'scientific' intellectual work, such as 'detect'
or 'analogy'. They wanted to discover which epistemic markers were
most helpful to actual researchers in communicating their work and
how closely those terms integrated with the topical terms that
signaled technical research progress.
Missing Famous Terms
Some epistemic terms often mentioned in other people's 'external'
discussions of science hardly ever appeared within the text of
genuine biology research papers written by working scientists for
one another. Malaterre and Leonard found almost no biology-article
occurrences of
theory
explain/explanation
understand
law.
Frame Terms
Instead, when working scientists wanted to frame their current
investigation for an audience of (mostly) other biologists, they
usually used epistemic markers such as
confirm
support
predict.
Progress Signals
As their projects progressed, working biologists would most often
signal their epistemic actions and accomplishments to their peers
by including words such as
analysis
experiment
accuracy
test.
Goal Markers
As interesting lines of lab work revealed preliminary results and
promising research directions, biologists usually characterized
their advances for each other by using such epistemic markers as
mechanism
structure
pattern
process.
Result Keys
When research culminated in an intellectual accomplishment worth
calling to the attention of other working/competing biologists,
the favored markers turned out to be
data
estimate
model
parameter.
Reading to Write
For students just learning to read and then write about science
themselves, the lesson from this deep dive into the biology
literature is that the words that really communicate seeking and
building technical knowledge to other scientists--the characteristic
epistemic markers used--are more diverse than superficial readers
realize. Noting (and maybe underlining) those special but more
subtle words when they read will better prepare students to
deploy the same terms appropriately later, when they draft their
own notes and reports.
[For a big-picture overview of effective technical text, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/handbooktoc
For more on designing text usable for others, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/usability]
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