Scientists are good communicators

One of the clichés of science communication is that scientists are poor communicators – and it is nonsense.

In general scientists are actually pretty well trained on communicating their ideas clearly, and precisely to their target audience – which is generally other scientists, but the same basic principles apply.

Those principles are that what you write should be simple enough to be understood, precise enough to be useful.

One of the issues that scientists are arguing about right now is that with peer reviewed papers, the publishers don’t generally pay reviewers, and some journals even require the people submitting to them to do the type-setting – yet the journal articles cost a fortune.

When you consider The Times pays its journalists, hires sub-editors and type-setters to get the work into style, and a copy costs about R2.20 you see the disconnect a lot of scientists feel with journals where individual articles can cost $31.50 - or about R244.13.

But that aside, with all of these non-communications specialists involved in the production of them, the articles are generally of a standard where people of different countries, cultures and languages can understand each other enough to do useful work based on each other’s writing. 

Scientists write for clarity and precision, and the jargon that they employ is used for specificity. While reading them requires a dictionary, your average journal article is pretty straightforward.

Science professors, the people who spend their lives teaching science, are in fact trained primarily in the sciences and do a good enough job in explaining their fields to complete neophytes as to also be able to do ground breaking research at the same time.

Scientists, in other words, are awesome communicators.

There are two big problems here. The first is the classic Dunning Kruger issue, just a different side of it. People who are competent are often not particularly confident in their abilities, and a lot of scientists seem to think they are a lot worse at putting their ideas across than they really are.

Maybe it is because of how science is treated like something arcane and beyond the ken of mortal men by the same people who thought Cavemen, a sitcom about bit characters in a deodorant ad, was a good idea but a lot of scientists feel more unconfident in this than they really should be.

This however is minor; the real problem is that all too often journalists aren’t such hot listeners. Thus you end up with someone thinking of how their article can generate punch, rather than the important qualifications that article needs in order to make sense.

The result is that a lot of what the public thinks of as “These scientists don’t know what they are talking about” – amounts to a journalist misreporting the original research.

The qualification in a study that is cut for space isn’t such a serious problem; it is the qualification that is cut because the journalist reading the study missed it. And it isn’t a matter of the original work being unclear; it is simply a matter of not reading closely enough because when a qualification is included, it is included with a reason explaining why it had to be there.

And that is there that we in the media have a responsibility to our audience, to understand what we are writing about before we try to communicate it to others. In the game of broken telephone that is reporting on academia, it is all too often we who warp the line.

It is not that scientists are communicating unclearly and using terms beyond us - those issues can be solved simply by asking questions - it is that we aren't listening properly.