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In a history lecture a while back the teacher spoke about a person who wrote something that (to me) sounded like an instruction manual on how to write "good science". The basic point was that the scientific texts shouldn't include flowery language and should only include the facts.

I thought I remembered it being Robert Boyle, but for him I can only find things about his chemistry, so I'm likely mistaken about him.

Does anyone know who that might have been?

Thanks!

Prior research: I've done extensive web searches about this, but as one might expect, it's difficult to find a person's name (and one that far back at that) if one only has such vague ideas like having written a manual on "good science". That said, I can say with relative certainty that it was not Robert Boyle.

I've also been reading the basics (see below) to see if anything rings a bell, but so far I've not found anything:

  • Morus, Iwan Rhys. 2010. “Placing Performance.” Isis 101 (4): 775–78. https://doi.org/10.1086/657476. Shapin, Steven. 2003. “The Image of the Man of Science.” In The Cambridge History of Science, edited by Roy Porter, 1st ed., 159–83. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.008. ———. 2010.

  • Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

  • Sleigh, Charlotte. 2011. Literature and Science. Outlining Literature. Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

ReaderGuy42
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  • Maybe Bacon's Novum Organum? – Conifold Jan 20 '24 at 20:36
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    Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London, 3rd ed., London: S. Chapman 1722, p. 113: "They have therefore been more rigorous in putting in Execution the only Remedy, that can be found for this Extravagance; and that has been a constant Resolution, to reject all the Amplifications, Digressions and Swellings of Style; to return back to the primitive Purity and Shortness, when Men deliver'd so many Things, almost in an equal Number of Words." – njuffa Jan 21 '24 at 00:08
  • Obviously Sprat only describes the style of scientific writing promoted or demanded by the Royal Society, but it seems like a useful bookend to a search for anyone prescribing such a style. The first edition of Sprat's work dates to 1667. – njuffa Jan 21 '24 at 00:11

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As already noted in the comments, the Royal Society is often given credit for advocating and requiring plain clear scientific writing, but if your teacher was referring to an individual then it was most likely Francis Bacon.

According to Zappen (1975):

Bacon is frequently hailed as the father of modern scientific prose. … The fullest and most coherent exposition of Bacon's view of communication appears in the The Advancement of Learning, published in 1605.

In this work, Bacon complained about flowery writers who:

… began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention or depth of judgment.

Bacon continued in this vein in "Novum Organum: True Suggestions for the Interpretation of Nature" (1620), where he emphasized the primacy of facts over words:

… the great and solemn disputes of learned men often terminate in controversies about words and names, …

We must instead

… necessarily have recourse to particular instances, and their regular series and arrangement …

To learn more, Panayotova (2023) is an (unpaywalled) recent review of the development of scientific writing in the 17th Century.

David Bailey
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