scintific writing

[muriel lederman]

I respond to Nina Dudnik's post -

Basically, you're right. The fault lies with the editors of the journals.
There's someone in my field whose writing is uncomprehensible - sometimes
it's that way to sweep things under the rug, e.g., the present results
don't agree with what was predicted earlier.

Don't necessarily expect the experiments to be presented in chronological
order - a paper is a reconstruction of what happened in the lab and
sometime it makes more sense to present the results in a different order
than they were obtained.

I suggest that part of the reason that Barbara McClintock's work was
under-appreciated was that she was a terrible writer. I read her paper with
Harriet Crieghton that localized genes to chromosomes - four pages in PNAS.
I knew what the paper was going to say, and yet it took me 45 min to get
throught it! Muriel

Muriel Lederman           lederman at vt.edu     540.231.5702 (phone)
Department of Biology                         540.231.9307 (fax)
Interim Coordinator, Biological Sciences
   Initiative
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg VA 24061-0406