Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and this is the Thursday show where we talk with people doing interesting things with language. I am so excited because I'm here today with Anne Green, author of Writing Science in Plain English from the University of Chicago Press. This is, one, a fabulous book. And two,

it doesn't matter if you're writing about science because the advice in here, it is applicable

to all kinds of nonfiction writing. It's just, it's wonderful. I can't wait for you to hear

all about it. Anne Green, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you very much, Mignon. I'm glad to be here.

You bet. Well, you know, one of the things that you pointed out in the introduction to the book that really hit home with me is that in science, we actually have citation data to show that good writing actually matters.

Yes. In the second edition, I reviewed some of the literature on scientific writing and what

researchers have been doing. It's very interesting. It was different than it had been before.

When I wrote the first edition.

It seems like scientists are taking this issue about poor scientific writing seriously,

and they are analyzing vast amounts of papers to find out, for instance, if there's a benefit to writing clearly and concisely.

And in fact, there is.

One study of 700 papers in the scientific literature showed that the number of acronyms, for instance,

has been increasing dramatically, and that papers that have acronyms

in them are, seem to be harder to remember and therefore are cited less often than papers

without so many acronyms. Especially acronyms appear, as we all know, in titles and in the abstract.

But in papers that have very few or no acronyms or few, these papers seem to be, you know,

readers seem to be able to remember them and cite them more often than papers with.

And the same goes for jargon as well.

But it's interesting that, you know, when I first wrote the, when I wrote the first

edition in 2013, that kind of research wasn't happening.

And it's interesting that scientists are now taking it seriously enough and finding out that,

hey, this is really impeding my ability to work with other scientists, my writing style, for instance, my ability to work with scientists

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