National Geographic: Quasi-Scientific Writing?

By Draza Kolpack

It may come as no surprise that National Geographic is one of the most prolific and consumed magazines in the United States; whether one reads Nat Geo Kids at a young age or comes across a National Geographic article through research, millions of Americans are familiar with the name and content of these quasi-academic articles. But to what is their success due? After reading my chosen article, Climate-resilient coral gives hope to the world’s reefs, I would argue that their success rests in the author’s (in this instance Sarah Gibbens’) well-practiced ability to apply the plain style to information that is largely academic in nature. While one would expect information that would otherwise be found in scientific journals and studies to be dense and hidden behind a veil of jargon and flowery language, National Geographic seems to have found the balance necessary to ascribe to their large readership. However, this balance is invariably a difficult one to maintain; what are the implications of speaking too plainly or using too academic a tone in a piece such as this? In this piece I plan to illustrate how the writing style employed by the author fits the context of the article, as a piece of scientific literature made accessible to the public, and highlight how these styles work within the multiple spheres of human activity this information may find itself in.

To contextualize the context of the article, as well as the spheres of influence I referenced above, I think it is best to also have a greater understanding of the official and plain styles used by the author of this article in a broader sense. The official style, often found in academic and bureaucratic writing, is characterized by the use of passive or impersonal voice, complex sentences, slow sentence openings, shapeless or ‘unspeakable’ form, excessive use of jargon, a bureaucratic tone, and higher levels of abstraction alongside a number of other nuances. This lays in juxtaposition to the plain style, a style of writing that utilizes an active voice, simpler sentences, an informal tone/diction, and clear subjects with the intention of producing writing that is clear and concise to a large majority of readers in the target audience. To provide further context as to how these strategies are employed and how elements of both the official and plain styles were balanced by Gibbens in this piece, I will provide passages from the text with analyses as well as readability statistics that may grant a better frame of reference for the difficulty of the text.

Passage One:

““We found hope,” says Rowan McLachlan, a coral expert at Oregon State University and lead author of the study published today in Nature Scientific Reports.  Hope has been a scarce thing lately on coral reefs. As a result of human-made greenhouse gas emissions, they face chronically warmer water, more intense marine heat waves, and an increasingly acidic ocean. That’s in addition to local stresses from pollution and overfishing.  The world has so far warmed by 1.1°C (1.98°F), and coral reefs have already suffered mass fatalities.”

            Most notably this passage utilizes some active voice and shorter, less complex sentences; this lends itself to being easier to understand while also presenting the information in a more personal/personable tone. Furthermore, while there is still jargon scattered throughout this piece, the salient nature of the issue at hand (climate change) means that the terms the readers face are widely known or easily inferred.

Passage Two:

“Oceans absorb some of the heat building up in the atmosphere. Heat waves amplified by climate change prompt corals to expel the symbiotic algae that nourish them—an effect called coral bleaching, which can ultimately kill them. Meanwhile, oceans also absorb some of the atmosphere’s excess carbon dioxide, making seawater more acidic, which weakens coral skeletons.”

Once again there are examples of jargon in this passage, but here we see the author’s choice to preemptively provide an explanation to terminology which may be confusing to readers. I think that this is one glaring difference between this piece and your average academic paper, where jargon is thrown around under the assumption the reader is well aware of what it means and how it should be applied to the circumstance.

Readability Statistics: (From the article as a whole) 

(Gunning Fog Index: estimated grade level required to understand text / Flesch Reading Ease: scale from 1-100, 1 being most difficult to read and 100 being the easiest)

            With the content of these passages in mind, we can now discuss the implications of writing scientific information plainly as the author of this article chose to do. It could be argued that distilling academic articles into plain writing only serves to water-down the content and that meaning is lost in translation, but I think that upon closer inspection that the author of the article in question walks the knifes-edge exceptionally well; I feel it would be quite reasonable to assume that readers with no background knowledge on the subject as well as readers well-versed in the field could consume this media with no complaints. By writing scientific findings plainly the author is able to circumvent the gatekeeping of information that is prevalent in academia due to use of the official style; this makes the information presented easily digestible (subjectively I suppose) to the average high school-educated individual and subsequently allows for National Geographic to appropriately reach larger audiences. Furthermore, it is important to note that while the official style is often used to present the author as credible or intelligent, distilling jargonistic and other wise difficult concepts into readable material demonstrates a certain level of expertise as well. I feel that in an age where ‘fake news’ and scientific denial are prevalent that recognizing this talent for making previously inaccessible data more readable, and the credibility borne of it, is increasingly important. This said, some will never read or trust National Geographic regardless of it’s use of plain writing to discuss complicated subjects, though it is difficult to claim that this phenomenon is a consequence of the stylistic choices made or the result of distrust in media due to widespread misinformation. Though this is undoubtably a limiting factor for this particular work, I find that there is very little change the author could have made to improve the situation at hand- no magazine has the entire world as members of its readership but the stylistic choices employed by Gibbens could set the stage for dissuading apprehension in regards to scientific literature which in turn can only lead to more acceptance of works in this genre. While many facets of the official style are not plausible to change, for example legal writing often requires the flowery language that the official style provides in order to cover any and all loopholes in a statement, but I feel much of today’s bureaucratic would be drastically improved by following in the footsteps of those at National Geographic; writing complicated things plainly could be one of many answers that solves the growing concern that is distrust in elite sources.