Across the academic literature, an unspoken and long-standing convention has set the writing tone firmly at “dull”. Somewhere between hypothesis and conclusion, the life drains out of the prose. This dryness isn’t a universal failing of scientific authors; it is simply tradition. As Doubleday and Connell observe, academic writing calcified decades ago into The Official Style: impenetrable, stuffed with abstraction, and strangely divorced from the humans who produce it [1]. Scientists inherit this voice much as they inherit an old lab coat.
Back in 2004, the editor of the British Medical Journal, Richard Smith, noted that “scientific articles have hardly changed in 50 years” and asked whether this reflected “the robustness of the form or a failure of imagination”. He suspected the latter [2]. More than twenty years have passed since then—a period in which the wider world of communication has transformed beyond recognition—yet the status quo in academic journals largely prevails. Another journal editor, Harvey Marcovitch, once remarked that “most scientific journals are a struggle to read”, suggesting that a “private language may function as a way of excluding outsiders from the sacred art of a medical specialty” [3].
And yet, no one enters science on this basis, or because they aspire to write like a malfunctioning instruction manual. Research is driven by curiosity, discovery, frustration, and insight. Sara ElShafie’s work on storytelling in science captures something both obvious and profound: our minds are built for narrative. When people listen to a story, their neural activity synchronises with the storyteller’s, as though both brains were briefly solving the same puzzle together [4]. Even a modest sense of narrative—an obstacle, a turning point, a question left hanging—creates connection. None of this implies that a scientific paper should read like a novel. But what might happen if we allowed a little more life back in?
One of the prevailing anxieties in academia is that if writing becomes too warm or too human, it will be mistaken for sensationalism. Yet Doubleday and Connell argue that good scientific prose has room for what they call Ingredient X: a blend of concreteness and creativity that makes writing absorbable without compromising accuracy [1]. Ingredient X does not sell the science; it illuminates it. It recognises that readers—often time-poor and cognitively stretched—deserve writing that makes understanding easier, not harder, and that brings the core idea into clear view.
Scientific articles should not be neutral vessels for data; they should be channels through which accumulating knowledge becomes meaningful. Consider Watson and Crick’s seminal 1953 Nature paper. After presenting the double-helix structure, they allowed themselves a single line of interpretive generosity: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material” [5]. On the page, this reads as cautious understatement. In life, it was anything but. Historical accounts describe the pair bursting into the Eagle pub in Cambridge to announce that they had “discovered the secret of life”. That level of exuberance could never have appeared in the paper, and still could not. But more than three-quarters of a century later, it may be time for such papers, and indeed for scientific writing more broadly, to be written with a greater sense of moment, meaning, and human presence.
[1] Doubleday ZA, Connell SD. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 2017; 32(11): 803–805.
[2] Smith R. BMJ 2004;328:1533.
[3] Marcovitch H. Mens Sana Monogr 2008;6(1):237–243.
[4] ElShafie SJ. Integrative and Comparative Biology 2018; 58(6): 1213–1223.
[5] Watson JD, Crick FHC. Nature 1953; 171: 737–738.
