Writing for Science

What follows here is based loosely on the book 'Language and Literacy in Science Education' by Jerry Wellington and Jonathan Osborne (Open University Press, 2001).

To begin, a table showing types of writing in different subjects:

(From Davies & Green, 1984)

• Transactional writing: the language of formal reports, e.g. reports on experiments.
• Expressive writing: the language of narrative, story-telling: and then... and then...
• Poetic: the language of poetry.

Most writing in Science, therefore, as in Geography and presumably other subjects such as History and Technology, is transactional.

The audience for this writing is predominantly the teacher:

This suggests that the pupil does not develop a sense of any other audience other than the teacher-examiner. Also, science is predominantly written in the passive voice while narrative is more typically in the indicative: the water was heated by the spirit burner; the boy kicked the ball.

Pupils can write science in narrative style (I heated the water...) but this is not, strictly speaking, the approved style. Not writing in the approved style of science deprives pupils of the experience of writing in the generally recognised way.

The Three Stages of Learning to Write

Patricia Rowell (1998) suggests:

• First stage: writing is a means of capturing experience in order to construct an understanding. This would typically be done in everyday language, but this does not work well in science.
• Second stage: taking pupils beyond the representation of experience, specifically to represent knowledge (non-fiction). This is much closer to the scientific approach to writing.
• Third stage: pupils become competent users of the rules and conventions of writing for science and aware of the need to transform their personal understandings into the discourse of science.

The purpose of writing in science is to learn it so writing must go beyond the first stage. Also, non-fiction writing of a type similar to that learned in science is the mainstay in professional, administrative and managerial work, so pupils do need to develop this ability. The scientific style of writing will also come in handy in the later stages of education when essays have to be written in, for example, Economics. Science (along with certain other subjects) provides good opportunities to develop non-fiction writing skills in general, which will have significant paybacks in other areas of the curriculum and personal development.

Scientific writing should not be regarded as too hard, it just needs support in order to develop it.

Much of the writing which takes place in science is, unfortunately, of a low-level type, copying from various sources, even at the loss of understanding. Much of this takes place so that the teacher can 'transmit' knowledge to the pupils. This will not develop pupils' writing skills.

'Scientific literacy' must mean that pupils learn how to read and write science, even if only in a relatively unsophisticated way. 

Writing in the Passive Voice

Writing in science takes place mainly in the passive voice, this is the strictly correct way of writing science. Pupils are familiar and comfortable with narrative writing from lessons going back to their early childhood but they will have had little experience, before secondary school, of the non-fiction style of science. Reports or explanations in science tend to remove the agents, the scene, the motives and any sense of time. While narrative tends to provide a subjective account of experiences, science aims to provide an objective account of knowledge. One is not expected to respond to a science experiment in the same way that one responds to a landscape, a war or a bullfight.

Should pupils, therefore, write their reports in the first person (I/we), rather than in the impersonal passive? Probably not, because they should learn the characteristic style of science, though for some it may be better to write in the first person than with difficulty in the passive voice. Learning to write in science requires opportunities to use that language and to write science in its standard forms.

According to Jay Lemke, science:

• avoids colloquial forms, it strives for coolness and precision
• uses unfamiliar terms (e.g. mitosis)
• uses familiar terms in unfamiliar contexts (e.g. energy, force, power)
• avoids personification and use of metaphors and figurative language (like...)
• involves the use of graphs, charts, diagrams, symbols, equations & pictures

In learning to read and write the language of science one is essentially doing and learning science. Experiments and practical work play some part in the learning of science but knowledge is language and language is knowledge ('the limits of my language are the limits of my world' - Wittgenstein). Learning science is as much learning to use its language as it is learning facts and doing experiments. Pupils should be exposed to real scientific writing, not just to filling in blanks and writing short sentences (GCSE course work serves this purpose very well).

Scientific writing is often very dense, no words are wasted, things are the way they are described. A piece of scientific writing may be hard to read or write because there is no room for excess words and technical words follow each other in rapid succession.

Also, scientific writing includes substitutions of one type of phrase for another. For example, 'how fast a car speeds up' is replaced with 'a car's acceleration' (substitution of a verb by a noun), or 'how quickly cress grows' becomes 'cress growth rate' (noun used as adjective). In this way science strives to communicate complex ideas in an economic and efficient manner.

To help pupils teachers should provide 'frames' or 'scaffolds' around which the pupils can build their own writing.

A key part of writing in science is the use of the 'logical connective' or conjunction: because, therefore, thus, since, so, as, so as.