In a recent issue of Science, Cary Moskovitz and David Kellogg consider the way students are taught science and science writing in laboratory courses, and whether current approaches really provide the best tools for the job. They conclude that inquiry-based writing might be better than the current approaches—writing to learn (WTL) and writing as professionalization (WAP)—at developing students' skills of scientific inquiry.

WTL treats writing as a tool to enhance learning about science, and it's a teaching method that I don't think was a part of my own undergraduate education. Students are asked to "address thought-provoking questions such as 'What can I claim?' and 'How do I know?'" As the authors point out, this isn't that helpful for developing the writing skills that are expected further down the career path.

The writing assignments I remember, especially those related to lab work, would be classified as WAP, which is an extension of the kind of lab report that was standard fare in high school. WAP has the students write in the same formats they would encounter professionally; an experimental research paper, conference poster, or literature review.

Moskovitz and Kellogg point to some problems with this method, though. The introduction of a research article is used by its authors to highlight a gap in the current understanding of a topic, but undergrads lack the breadth of knowledge to do this effectively. Even the methods section is problematic, they suggest, as this mainly involves the students paraphrasing the protocols they've been given.

Inquiry-based writing builds on WAP by changing the relationship between the student and the instructor grading their work. The example the authors give turns a standard titration lab into a double-blind experiment. The students are randomly assigned contaminated or uncontaminated reagents without being told this has happened. The person(s) grading the lab reports is also in the dark as to which student received what reagent. This changes their relationship with the written work; instead of approaching it merely as a grader looking to check off specific elements, they have to read the reports the same way they would read the latest paper in the Journal of Whatever, with the expectation that the students make convincing scientific arguments to support their data.

Moskovitz and Kellogg acknowledge that this would involve a good deal of work for the teaching staff, but that's important enough that universities should at least consider it as an approach, either introducing it gradually or across the board. It seems like a good idea from where I'm sitting, but then I don't have to do any teaching currently, so have little vested interest other than my desire to fix lots of the problems we currently face with the training of young scientists.

I do have real concerns about the current state of science writing, and the way that young scientists "learn" how to do it, although not really in the way Moskovitz and Kellogg discuss it. Simply put, scientists really need to be taught how to write well, and that probably means they should be taught by someone other than their fellow scientists. Being able to explain your work clearly ought to be one of the most vital skills scientists develop, but reading an average journal article provides scant evidence of that being a common ability.

As with many specialist fields, science suffers from a strong tendency towards the use of impenetrable jargon, and passive run-on sentences are very much the rule, not the exception. The rare occasions when one runs into a paper that's well written and accessible are a joy. Sadly, I think there's a bias away from making papers accessible to a wider audience, which is a real mistake given the terrible state of science literacy among the public that funds the bulk of our science.

The problem as I see it is that writing is a skill that requires practice like any other. I know I'm a much better writer now than I was before I'd written 600+ articles for Ars Technica; working with good editors is also a huge factor in that. Unfortunately, most scientists don't get the opportunity to write that often, and rarely see their work edited by anyone other than their fellow researchers.

Science, 2011 DOI: 10.1126/science.1200353