{"id":14,"date":"2010-06-27T05:32:44","date_gmt":"2010-06-27T09:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/poseidonsciences.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=14"},"modified":"2011-07-15T17:47:21","modified_gmt":"2011-07-15T17:47:21","slug":"the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-why-science-writing-is-like-learning-tango-and-chinese-brush-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/poseidonsciences\/14\/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-why-science-writing-is-like-learning-tango-and-chinese-brush-painting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Agony and the Ecstasy: Why science writing is like learning tango and Chinese brush painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an odd title and I am stuck with it.\u00a0 Worse, I am compelled to explain why this is so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Today, I am at a loss what to choose for my next blog entry and trying to find motivation to write about scientific topics of interest to me \u2013 malaria, repellents, arsenic poisoning, the oil spill in the Gulf, etc.\u00a0 Not finding the right mood for any of those, I began to read the comments left by readers of my first two blog entries.\u00a0 Then it came to, the inspiration to write, but not on any of those topics.\u00a0 The inspiration is to write about the subject of writing itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I asked myself many questions. How come the readers liked those articles?\u00a0 What makes them read them?\u00a0 Is it because I write about things that have personal interest to me?\u00a0 Or, could it be the writing style?<\/p>\n

Scientific writing to me, and I started a very long time ago, reminds me of the 1961 movie \u201cThe Agony and the Ecstasy.\u201d\u00a0 For those younger folks who regard movies before 1980 as ancient classics, the movie, adapted from Irving Stone\u2019s novel, was about the period when Michelangelo Buonarroti struggled with Pope Julius II on the subject of the painting for the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican.\u00a0 The character of Michelangelo was played by Charlton Heston and that of the Pope by Rex Harrison, two of my favorite actors from the \u201cancient period.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the painting of the Sistine Chapel, writing my first scientific paper was indeed sheer agony.\u00a0 It really was because the language and style of scientific writing are too precise, too impersonal and too alien.\u00a0 There was none of the flair, the colorful, expressive words that went to writing a history essay, for example.\u00a0 \u00a0The scientific writing I meant refers to writing for a scientific journal, where your \u2018peers\u201d review your research data and render a judgment as to whether you are either wasting their time or have really something unique, worthy of publication in their illustrious journal.\u00a0 It has a language all of its own, propagated through the scientific journals by folks that also seem to be able to\u00a0write exactly the same way.\u00a0 It seemed to me like these people caught a virus during graduate school that stayed dormant and then get\u00a0activated only when they start writing for a scientific journal.\u00a0 These are the same folks, who seemed normal and talk normal most times, but suddenly \u201csings a different tune\u2019, figuratively speaking, when made to write a scientific paper.<\/p>\n

It is never the great papers that one writes as the most memorable.\u00a0 It is the ones that gave you the most agony that becomes indelibly imprinted in one\u2019s thoughts.\u00a0 Like in business, the most memorable event is usually not when you made bucket loads of money, but the agony when you lost a big chunk of dough.\u00a0 My first paper, which was on the embryonic development of annual fishes, was one such event.\u00a0 It was based on the work that I did with Jules Markofsky while I was an intern at the Orentreich Foundation in those early days.\u00a0 \u00a0That was two years of work, mostly repetitive microscopy, looking at fish eggs as they develop.\u00a0 It was worse than watching grass growing in your front lawn. \u00a0It was the sort of work one gives as punishment (like KP\u2014kitchen police- duty in the army) or for someone to go through during hazing initiation rites in a fraternity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then one day, after many very long months, Jules had his Eureka<\/em>moment.\u00a0 The numbers began to make sense.\u00a0 For years we were puzzled by the behavior of the developing eggs of the annual fish (You have to read my first blog to make sense of this one).\u00a0 One month they hibernate and in other months they didn\u2019t.\u00a0 But when you line up the data chronologically according to months, then it made sense (see the graph).\u00a0 During summer months, we had no hibernation or diapause in the eggs.\u00a0 But in winter months, there they were.\u00a0 All the animal research facilities were in light-controlled, temperature- controlled environments– so we thought.\u00a0 But we were keeping fishes not in the same animal holding areas, but in our work rooms\u2014with one window not fully covered, open to indirect sunshine. The fish must have sensed the changing photoperiod and that was the reason for the variability in the incidence of diapause.\u00a0 Shorter days in winter meant higher percentage of diapause, despite incubating the eggs at constant 25 o<\/sup>C.<\/p>\n

Excited, we wrote the paper, painfully and arduously.\u00a0 But the writing style was just so alien to my nature.\u00a0 Months of revisions go by and finally off it went to the Journal of Experimental Biology<\/em>, the premier journal at the time and still is today.\u00a0 Then months passed until we received the reviewer\u2019s comments (by snail mail, internet not invented yet).\u00a0 More agony.\u00a0 The most memorable comment was something that goes like this (writing from my memory), \u201cThis is the worst paper I had the great misfortune of reviewing.\u00a0 However, the data are so compelling that if the authors can learn how to rewrite it in proper English, the editor should consider publishing it!\u201d That was heartbreaking.\u00a0 My only consolation was that I keep telling myself that the reviewer did not know I was only 17.\u00a0 \u00a0Again, more agony, more months of rewrite.\u00a0 A year more and it was accepted and one more year of waiting before it finally got its turn on that coveted journal.\u00a0 Two years of work and two years of writing it; then followed by the sheer ecstasy of seeing one\u2019s name in print for the very first time. \u00a0Thank God there were no online reader comments in those days.\u00a0 Otherwise I would have gone the way of the first captain of HMS Beagle<\/em> (You will have to read my next blog post to understand that one).\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

These last two years, I had this habit of re-reading that JEZ paper.\u00a0 The reviewer was right.\u00a0 The paper was atrociously written and still hard to read even now.\u00a0 But, he did recognize that it was a unique explanation for a unique developmental biology of a unique group of fishes.\u00a0 For those masochistic few who desire to read it, please check the first referenced paper below.\u00a0 Don\u2019t blame me if you get a headache.<\/p>\n

Ever since then, I get a little better each year.\u00a0 It was an incremental improvement, less agonizing and a little more ecstasy when a paper got printed.\u00a0 Yet, it was\u00a0never really satisfying.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I always say that scientific writing is like learning tango.\u00a0 No one is born knowing how to dance like that; it is something one has to learn, memorize the moves while trying to avoid your partner\u2019s toes in the process.\u00a0 Then one day, it just happens, you are swinging effortlessly in precise movements in synchrony with the Latin music and you did not step on your partner\u2019s toes, not even once.\u00a0 I never learned tango right, my dance partners did not appreciate their toes getting squashed.\u00a0 But I did try; so at least I can make this analogy with some personal knowledge.<\/p>\n

I also say it is like learning Chinese brush painting.\u00a0 I know because I spent half a decade learning the process, so it deserves a little prologue here to show my qualification to make that statement.\u00a0 After my short adventure in the army and while in graduate school, I needed a challenge without having to carry a backpack or rifle all day long.\u00a0 Jules managed to get me a meeting with a prominent Chinese painter, Master Chung-hsiang Chao, who was already 80+ at the time.\u00a0 I was told that he was the only surviving son of the last court painter of Imperial China.\u00a0 The rest of the families were shot when the communists entered Beijing.\u00a0 I never asked him about that episode in his early life.\u00a0\u00a0 And after much persuasion, he agreed to take me in as a student.\u00a0 I was working full time at the Foundation during the day, taking full time graduate courses on most week\u00a0nights and my thesis research on weekends.\u00a0 I could only come on Thursday night.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On our first night\u2019s trial lesson at his home\/studio on the Upper East Side, I shared his dinner and we painted together.\u00a0 At the end of that session an hour later he said I can come back every Thursday night.\u00a0\u00a0 I had to ask, reluctantly and agonizingly, how much it will cost for him to teach me.\u00a0 I dreaded the answer because this nice old man sells his painting for $20,000 a piece, me being his only student and, given my position in life then, any amount would have been beyond my means.\u00a0 He smiled and said $7 every Thursday night.\u00a0 I was a bit confused by the offer.\u00a0 He said, \u201c$4 for your share of the cost of dinner that I will make for us and $3 for the ink and paper you use.\u201d\u00a0 And so it was, $7 for each Thursday of those five years until he went back to Taiwan to live the remainder of his years.\u00a0 This experience\u00a0therefore qualifies me to make this analogy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The annual incidence of diapause in the annual fish, N. guentheri, maintained at 25 C under ambient photoperiod in New York City.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Mountain lily growing on top of a rock, 1980, artist: JR Matias<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I say it is like Chinese brush painting (and Japanese paintings too)\u00a0because like scientific writing, Chinese painting is precision and pure thought.\u00a0\u00a0 Each brush stroke must be pre-planned; a master painter sees the entire scene of the painting about to be played out on the stretch of rice paper all in advance.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Each stroke to create a leaf of a bamboo or a lily plant is planned in his mind, the direction of the leaf, the color of the ink, the amount of ink one needs at the tip, in the middle and at the base of the brush.\u00a0 In one master stroke of the brush, in a single fluid motion, like tango, he creates the bamboo leaf, starting from the dark part of the stem, to the shades of gray of the middle leaf and the dark point of the tip. There is no room for error, unlike in Western painting or pencil sketches, where one may go back to cover up or erase a misguided stroke of the brush or pen. \u00a0It is agonizing, yet it is also pure ecstasy when one does it perfectly.\u00a0 I must say though that most of those 5 years was just agony, but the short moment\u2019s perfection was ecstasy, making it all worthwhile\u2014just like scientific writing.<\/p>\n

But writing this and my previous blog entries are not at all like writing a scientific paper.\u00a0 Here again, something changed in me.\u00a0 Writing for this blog is an entirely different animal.\u00a0 Here, one needs to write about a topic in science with some accuracy, yet make it enjoyable to read for the not so scientifically inclined.\u00a0 It is like a different art form; a different master gene that seems to turn on my other repressed blog science writing genes that had been in hibernation for decades in my brain cells.<\/p>\n

This writing style happened just recently.\u00a0 It started when I wrote articles for our company newsletters only last year.\u00a0 But, it did seem to me that this writing style seems so natural, as if I had done it before or perhaps have read something like it before.\u00a0 I had to think hard where I remember such style.\u00a0 This same night, as I was writing this blog entry, it dawned on me.\u00a0 The year was 1978.\u00a0 That was the year when I had my first rare personal meetings with Dr. Norman Orentreich, chairman of the Orentreich Foundation, where I worked by then as a research technician.\u00a0 After a brief meeting about some research topics I can barely recollect now, he gave me as a gift an autographed copy of a book, The Lives of a Cell<\/em>, by Dr. Lewis Thomas, his friend.\u00a0 I kept that book in my bag for a few weeks, not particularly anxious to read another book on cell biology.\u00a0 But, when I opened it finally on my way to work on the A train, the book that I thought was just another text book was so engrossing that I forgot about my subway stop, \u00a0ending up in the Bronx instead of Manhattan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher<\/em> won a National Book Award in 1974.\u00a0 Lewis Thomas was a physician, poet, scientist, essayist and educator.\u00a0 He was a highly regarded scientist who became the dean of Yale Medical School, NYU School of Medicine and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute.\u00a0 Normally a book on biology would have sent a non-science reader scurrying to find something else to read or make a science person start yawning.\u00a0 But this one belonged to a different class altogether. \u00a0It was science, but it was also a personal look at what science is all about, how the bits of technical information can be woven into a readable, understandable prose about the meaning of it all, integrated into a more global understanding of biology.\u00a0 It was funny at times, factual, yet so insightful.\u00a0 It was also a revelation to me that science need not be boring when placed in the context that can be made understandable to a non-science reader.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But, through my years of the typical challenges of life, I forgot all about Lewis Thomas.\u00a0 I did not realize until now that it was the way Lewis Thomas wrote that made that difference.\u00a0 His writing was an art form on its own.\u00a0 It was not the usual agony of reading a scientific paper and it also was not like reading the latest news in the NY Times either.\u00a0 It was something new, for me at least.\u00a0 New enough and compelling enough to miss my subway stop and arrive late for work.\u00a0 \u00a0And it was worth it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I had since lost the autographed book.\u00a0 I had lent it to so many other people and lost track who got it last.\u00a0 I suppose it was not really lost because I know somebody read it, enjoyed it, probably missed a train stop too and lent it to someone else who never returned it either.\u00a0 It continues to live in other people.\u00a0 But, I wish I had that book with me today as I write this article because I can only recall from memory his style that changed my way of writing today.<\/p>\n

So, excuse me for turning to this entry in Wikipedia to give you a sampling of his writing style:<\/p>\n

I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way.\u00a0 It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections.\u00a0 The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like?\u00a0 Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 from: \u00a0 The Lives of a Cell,\u00a0<\/em>Lewis Thomas, MD<\/p>\n

I must have subconsciously followed the same path to writing.\u00a0 Or, both Lewis Thomas and I had our blog writing genes turned on at the same point in our life history.\u00a0 For those who love to read science and those who do science for work, I suggest you go find a copy of the Lives of a Cell<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And for those who enjoyed my style of writing about the sciences, you can thank, as I do now, Dr. Norman Orentreich and Dr. Lewis Thomas for opening up that new world for me.<\/p>\n

Jonathan R. Matias<\/div>\n

Poseidon Sciences<\/p>\n

June 27, 2010, New York, NY<\/p>\n

Reading list<\/p>\n

Markofsky J and Matias JR (1977). Journal of Experimental Zoology, 202:49-56.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lewis_Thomas<\/a><\/p>\n

www.poseidonsciences.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an odd title and I am stuck with it.\u00a0 Worse, I am compelled to explain why this is so.\u00a0 Today, I am at a loss what to choose for my next blog entry and trying to find motivation to write about scientific topics of interest to me \u2013 malaria, repellents, arsenic poisoning, the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[28,47,48,59,74,126,129,131,162,177,191,207],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-annual-fish","tag-biology","tag-blog-writing","tag-chinese-painting","tag-diapause","tag-jonathan-r-matias","tag-lewis-thomas","tag-lives-of-the-cell","tag-norman-orentreich","tag-poseidon-sciences","tag-scientific-writing","tag-tango"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Agony and the Ecstasy: Why science writing is like learning tango and Chinese brush painting - Poseidon Sciences<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/poseidonsciences\/14\/the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-why-science-writing-is-like-learning-tango-and-chinese-brush-painting\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Agony and the Ecstasy: Why science writing is like learning tango and Chinese brush painting\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This is an odd title and I am stuck with it.\u00a0 Worse, I am compelled to explain why this is so.\u00a0 Today, I am at a loss what to choose for my next blog entry and trying to find motivation to write about scientific topics of interest to me \u2013 malaria, repellents, arsenic poisoning, the ... 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