So, let's talk about communicating science for a moment - it's something people will need to consider as people figure out whether moving to Mastodon is worth it.
Firstly, #science already has a communication problem. And I don't mean #SciComm.
#SciComm and the idea of communicating science are NOT the same. One is a field of study and work, one is an essential for every single scientist.
We're once again seeing a post ✨elsewhere✨ going a bit viral for asking if you build humour into your talks or presentations.
We can't keep having this conversation. That we do is part of why science is incredibly inaccessible - even to scientists!
If your poster, paper, talk, and book all look the same - you are fundamentally failing all four audiences. And they are four separate audiences!
What gets published in Computational Biostatistics may be the thing you want to bring to a conference and give a paper on - but if you don't add in a VOICE to that published work?
You're just going to be reading something that most people likely skimmed anyway.
Presenting is an art, communication is an art, and part of the devaluing of the humanities by far too many in #STEM has resulted in this idea that this skill isn't necessary or is 'extra'. It isn't.
@tinysapien a not small problem with this is that a lot of editors, for either house style reasons or clarity, remove a lot of the voice, especially from scientific articles. We've often been trained as scientists to write passively, to be objective, to put our points across 'plainly'. Which are all great advice! But too often, people take this to mean blandly, or are scared of using their own voices, especially early in their careers...
@minimammoth @tinysapien I completely agree. In science we like to avoid the human that does the science. Whatever you write needs to be bland and cold. Journals gate keep this and pushes people to fit in.
@minimammoth I GENUINELY do not understand why we decided being boring and impersonal somehow made science more valid but it was literally the worst idea we ever had within academia.
@tinysapien it’s also strange because it’s a fairly recent development! Darwin didn’t write like that, and neither do, say, descriptive embryologists in the 30s.
@minimammoth It's directly and systemically tied to the way certain parts of science (regardless of the fact that many scientists also work in the humanities!) have decided the humanities are nonsense and that STEM does not require the basic skills humanities research does (writing and communication abilities being big ones).
@tinysapien @gaymanifold It’s a strange state of affairs. I work on writing and editing lay summaries for scientific articles and let me tell you: most scientists are beautiful writers and/or extremely happy with the summaries we write, but they won’t use the same style for their articles. So often, they get told to use the passive voice, to be impersonal, to take the scientist out of the science. And it’s a bad idea: it makes science less readable and less accessible.