Blog From A Hermit Dot Com

While doing a little fact check for my last post, I ran into this poetic gem in a NOAA document:

“Considerable evidence indicates that climate in the Puget Sound region is cyclical, with maxima (warm, dry periods) and minima (cold, wet periods) occurring at decadal intervals[....] Mantua et al. (1997) and Hare and Mantua (2000) evaluated relationships between interdecadal climate variability and fluctuations in the abundance and distribution of marine biota.”

Maxima?… Minima?…Biota? Can’t decide if these sound more like feminine hygiene products or dance moves. I’ll forgive the author if he speaks English as a second or third language. Just so much easier to say:

Puget Sound climate alternates between warm, dry periods and cold wet periods at about 10-year cycles. The cycles impact the abundance and distribution of marine life.

(Footnotes are always great for crediting the researchers.)

In the mid-1980′s, I worked briefly for a firm which held a large editorial contract for NOAA. The task was to clean-up and translate the written work of a number of federally-funded “principal investigators” who were out roaming the Arctic, assessing the environmental impact of developing natural resources (OIL) on Alaska’s outer continental shelf. The original intention of the editorial project was good – compile the research for public consumption and produce a readable book.

I suppose the sub-text was to demonstrate “whatever we do up there, we looked into it carefully.”

The “Reports from Principal Investigators” arrived in boxes of loose pages, some typed, some handwritten, with labeled photographs and charts and sounding a lot like the first climate paragraph I quoted above.  The  editorial task was daunting.

I actually have a lot of admiration for those scientists (principal investigators) who were out braving the elements to watch polar bears and other Arctic mammals and birds. I have even more admiration for the ones that braved the same elements to watch algae grow. However, I sincerely hope we are now producing generations of better communicators in the scientific community – presuming, of course, generations X and Y can break their acronym/abbreviation addictions.

I’ve been out of academic, environmental and editorial loops for awhile. Please – someone tell me the writing has improved! In the mid-1980′s personal computers weren’t very portable or fast, so back then; we were probably lucky to get what we got. Even now,  I suppose there’s only so much you can do electronically in sub-zero temperatures. But in our culture of rapid written communication – e-mails, text messaging, social networking – surely our connected, young scientists are getting better at using written words effectively. And if not, why not?

I departed the NOAA editorial job before the project was finished. My reasons were more idealistic than practical - based on my insider knowledge that the contracting  firm’s president quadrupled the contract costs because he was going through a divorce and needed the bucks, rather than because it was actually costing more to produce the book. (I admit my idealism was bolstered by the knowledge that Griz had a good job at the time.) But some of my colleagues who hung-in informed me later the ultimate sale-price of the book would have to be $350 per copy to cover the editorial work. (Are taken-for-granted cost overruns still written into Federal contracts? I hope not.) Don’t know if anyone ever read that book. It’s probably in a library somewhere.

I have a best buddy who’s a professor at a large university. She periodically contemplates retiring (until this year). She loves to teach, but her recurring complaint always comes down to “Sometimes I just don’t know if I can read another dissertation.” So maybe it’s too early for the better communicators to have hit grad school. Of course, the eternal trail of pedantic academic-speak may be perpetuated by older academicians. Kind of like the 72-hour hospital shifts medical students endure even though it’s been proven hazardous to students and patients. Another one of those  ”We had to do it, so they have to do it” rites of passage.

But there’s still some good news. With electronic publishing, all that bad writing can be made available to the hard-core researchers without ever producing more than one paper copy. And maybe now,  with all the government cut-backs, we just won’t have dollars available for all those unnecessary words.