Reply to comment

I'm in the same biochemistry lab as Moira and I remember the discussion our class had. I thought one interesting thing that our professor mentioned was how the scientific writing style has changed in the last 50 years. She described how in the 50s and 60s science articles where written in a more informal, accessible manner. In particular she cited Watson's and Crick's original article on DNA as a easy to read paper for biology majors. Now it is difficult to fully comprehend a science paper unless that it your specific field. One major change has been the use of jargon that didn't exist 50 years ago. There's so much jargon and terminology now, as a result the scientific advances of the last 50 years. However, I think science articles would be much more fun to read and more interesting if the writers tried to scale back the amount of jargon and focus of the explaining the results in an accessible manner.