A
common form of writing in academia is known as the official style which is
highly different from plain style or creative style. Characteristics used
within the official style include, but are not limited to, euphemistic wording,
passive voice, complex sentences, prepositional phrases, and Latinate diction.
Authors Barbara R. Lyon and Thomas Mock published their article in a
peer-review, research journal called, “Polar Microalgae: New Approaches towards
Understanding Adaptations to an Extreme and Changing Environment,” in January
of 2014 in Polar Microbiology. This article is written in the official style
and discusses the newly discovered insights in polar microalgae and the
benefits associated with them.
Dissecting Lyon and
Mock’s article can be problematic if you are unfamiliar with environmental
terms such as polar microalgae, ephemeral nature, or oscillating polar
environmental gradients. To fully comprehend the article you have to be able to
clearly understand what each word or phrase means. More often than not, the
average person will be unable to decipher what the above terms mean let alone
put them into context. For example, the sentence, “Polar microalgae, which form
the base of a largely bottom-up controlled polar food web [1] have successfully
adapted to the extreme and oscillating polar environmental gradients,” would be
difficult for anyone to understand unless they have a background in field
specific scientific studies. The previously
mentioned terms show how the authors identified a target audience which is
limited to scientific officials with a scientific understanding of the issue
and excludes the people who only have a social understanding of the issue. A
study conducted by the National Adult Literacy Study showed that the average
adult only reads at the seventh grade reading level. The difference between an
average adult’s reading level and this article is 10.9 years of schooling! This
is a drastic difference.
Another way in which
Lyon and Mock targeted scientists was through their general syntax (which is
not in fact general at all). After putting the first paragraph of the article
into the readability calculator, I found a few interesting facts about the
piece. First of all, the official style is typically written in long, complex
sentences which have one or more subordinate clauses (a subject and verb that
cannot stand alone like a dependent clause). The readability calculator’s text
statistics show a few alarming numbers that demonstrate complex sentences. The average
words per sentence in the article are measured at 25.2! After researching the
official style I was able to come to the conclusion that the longer the
sentences, the less inclined people are to read them. In addition to that
observation though I discovered that even when some sentences are long people
prefer reading them to shorter sentences if they flow smooth and are
comprehensible. This statement prevails true to the first observation of the
article on microalgae because the average words per sentence were 25.2 in a
single paragraph. In addition to word count, the sentences contain strategies
known such as relative clause and slow sentence opening. These strategies are
often used with transitions which increase sentence length. Two specific
relative clauses appear in the first paragraph. The first one states (relative
clause in bold), “Polar microalgae, which form the base of a largely bottom-up
controlled polar food web [1] have successfully adapted to the extreme and
oscillating polar environmental gradients,” in which the bolded portion of the
sentence is extra information and unneeded for the audience to understand the
rest of the text. Relative clause is used again in the same format as, “…which
have been well described in previous reviews…” In this case, additional
information should not be necessary to understand the sentence in its entirety.
Another way in which the official style is used is to provide extra words to
the beginning of a sentence to increase the word length and draw out the emphasized
portion of the sentence. The article has one slow sentence opening that stuck
out to me in particular. It is written as (slow sentence opening in bold), “And
only through advances in our understanding…” The beginning of this sentence is
wordy and contains too many words. The sentence could easily have begun at
“advances” rather than at “and only through.”
Transitions were also
used in the article to increase sentence length and provide some clarity
between details and explanations. These three transitions were words such as,
in addition, thus, and however. These three transitions are broken up into
further categories of transitions. “In addition” falls under the amplification
category which means the author uses it to develop worth and understandability
for a science audience. “Thus,” on the other hand is the relationship between
cause and effect while “however,” belongs in the category of compare and
contrast. In this particular situation “however” fits precisely in the contrast
category because it is comparing the dangers of global warming to the new
advances of “resource for identification of new species, new physiological
mechanisms of adaptation and new genes.”
An easy way in which
this article could have been written for the general public would be to explain
what and how the issue relates to daily life. A short excerpt is written as,
“Polar microalgae, which form the base of a largely bottom-up controlled polar
food web [1] have successfully adapted to the extreme and oscillating polar
environmental gradients,” could have been written as, “Polar microalgae, or
algae found in sea-ice, is the base of a the food chain in polar regions. This
type of algae has successfully adapted to the extreme changes in the Polar
Regions. These changes can be caused from altitude, temperature, depth, etc.” The
changes I made from the single sentence to my version is three times longer
than that of the original sentence; however, my three sentences is written at
an average grade level of 8.7 rather than the original sentence written an
average grade level of 18.6. One struggle that comes from converting something
with “high” official standing to something more plainly is that the material
will be longer which could, in itself, deter people from reading it. In my
experience though, I would prefer to read something at an easier grade level
where I understand the material than try to read something in the official
style that may as well be written in a foreign language.
Scientific pieces should be published in multiple venues at
numerous reading levels to ensure all individuals have the right and ability to
understand what is going on the environment. This article caters to a select
group of people in a complex way to establish credibility. However, even though
these two authors are given credit for the piece and it was published in Polar
Microbiology I can only find information on Thomas Mock whereas information
background information on Barbara Lyon is limited if not impossible to find. I
also found it peculiar the article is labeled under “open access” which means
it is open to the public. I am curious as to why an article written at this
level without including a basic explanation of the topic would be open to the
public at all. I think this is another important aspect of the article because
the use of the official style in the article has a specific audience of
scientists. This could make the general public feel unintelligent after
attempting to read the article since they would not have an understanding of
the topic. I understand that the scientific community is constantly at odds
with one another but excluding the general public from valuable information
will deter the general public from putting in an effort when the issue is too
advanced to come back from.
By: Shelby Jacobson
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