Science & Significance—A Star-Crossed Synthesis?

 

            What drew me to writing in the first place was the freedom. Unique amongst all the other tools of demonstrating academic understanding, writing allowed me to truly inject my own voice into what I was learning or explaining—I had the power to shape and frame my arguments in a way that was reflective of who I was and how I truly thought about an issue. This aspect made me certain that I wanted writing to be a foundation for my career as an undergraduate student and led me to pursue the Minor in Writing. However, as I began to get deeper into the upper-level classes for my major in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and my ultimate career intentions in medicine, it became evident that successful writing in the natural sciences more or less discouraged the injection of individual voice into its formal writing pieces. This finding has troubled me ever since and cast doubt into my perception of my ability as a writer, but at long last I believe I’ve developed enough to find a solution to this issue—and in doing so, to reconnect with why I grew to love writing from the outset.

 

            Back in my freshman year, as I began to immerse myself into the college experience, I thought of myself as an idealist in terms of my writing style. I was aware that scientific writing typically favored short, to-the-point papers but I was convinced that my ability to contextualize concepts in a way that left a serious impression upon readers would prove so effective that I would represent an exception to this “rule.” I saw the status quo as a challenge, and I was determined that I would not let the oppressive blandness have a severe influence over my future as a writer. As a result, I approached the first scientific writing assignment of my college career with my idealist guns blazing, as can be seen through the following quote from the conclusion of a journalistic piece from my freshman seminar in the environment. The prompt for this assignment called for a journalistic analysis of a current environmental issue facing the world:

 

“While the fiscal risks pointed out by Republicans are certainly nothing to scoff at, a greater misery than 11% unemployment will befall the globe if immediate steps are not taken to halt or reverse the effects of carbon emissions. While the prospect of being jobless may seem the worst possible fate for any American, the thought of future generations not being able to breathe the earth’s air without aid should be much more frightening. If the price of cleaning up the way the world produces energy is economic uncertainty, the common man must be willing to sacrifice for a short amount of time in order to allow for the world to break its dependence on oil by allowing the renewable industries to take root… It’s time for the leaders of the world to take true responsibility by shedding their concerns for personal stability and instead focusing on how to make the world a livable place for centuries to come.  As President Carter advised in the same speech, ‘We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and our grandchildren.’” [1]

 

While I took care to accurately chronicle the rising atmospheric carbon levels in a relatively impartial way prior to the conclusion, I simply couldn’t help injecting a deeper moral implication at the very end to leave a quizzical taste in the mouths of my readers. That was what I saw as my style, and I just didn’t feel content concluding an analysis about something I was so interested in without giving it my own personal touch. My professor didn’t see it the same way, and I ended up losing points on the paper due to this philosophical “outburst.”

 

            Discouraged, but not defeated, I kept trying to make my free spirit as a writer relevant in the cold, unforgiving world of scientific literature. The first experience had shown me that I needed to tweak the style with which I injected my voice into my papers. My ultimate goal was to seek a way to write a scientific essay that I could actually be satisfied with while simultaneously maintaining the rigorous standards required for this type of writing—in other words, I sought to trick my audience into actually digesting my deeper analysis of the subject. I had another chance the following semester, when my introductory biology class was assigned to complete a research paper summarizing a contemporary study related to ecosystem science and to discuss the larger implications of the research. This was exactly the type of assignment I had been hoping for, as I now had a chance to perform real science writing and be content with my work. I approached it more guardedly, however, wanting to keep an appropriate balance, and therefore slightly tempered the implicative tone in both the introduction:

 

“Each year, an expanse of forest the size of Panama, full of trees whose roots probably vastly outdate the age of anyone chopping them down, is wiped from the face of the earth. The direct negative effects that large-scale deforestation has on an ecosystem are well documented and, by this point, almost common knowledge…”

 

As well as the conclusion:

 

“While this proposed action and Schmitz’ study are extremely specific and limited to a miniscule geographic area, the symbolic value of the two can have global impacts; deforestation has been a pandemic for a large portion of man’s civilized history, and it has taken centuries for a full-on counter-movement to take hold and begin limiting the consequences of this practice.  Now, many governments are convinced that their policies of simply “limiting tree-cutting” will be all encompassing to stop the negative effects of deforestation…”[2]

 

Finally, I was sure that I had found the appropriate equilibrium; I felt as though my analysis of the science in question was solid and to-the-point, and I was satisfied that the creative, dramatic elements I had inserted around the actual science was enough to make the reader care about the topic but not too much to distract him or her from what I was actually discussing. Alas, my grader once again disagreed, informing me that I went too far off-topic, and I received one of the worst grades on this paper as I had for any assignment I had done in my life.

 

            Now I was really at a critical point in my academic career. It truly seemed that I had only two mutually exclusive options to work with: either surrender my love for creativity in an effort to master the natural sciences and pursue the career path I had wanted my entire life, or truly embrace it and try to battle my way through Organic Chemistry and Evolution as an idealist—a path that could very easily result in me having to settle on an entirely different career track. In the end, I decided that I had too much already invested in the former option to abandon it; I would have to find another outlet through which to funnel my creative expression, which is partly why I elected the Minor in Writing. Still, no matter how many pieces I wrote for minor-specific courses that allotted me nearly unlimited freedom, I nevertheless felt an unshakable sense of dissatisfaction and confinement with every scientific paper I wrote after my freshman year.

 

            This experiment with “robotic” writing, as I felt it, culminated this past semester as I finished the last required courses for my undergraduate science career. With applications to medical schools pending and competition from other advanced science students pressing in on me from all sides, I felt more restricted in what I was able to write than I ever had before. One of my senior writing classes, an upper-level political science course centered on social and natural sciences related to energy production, required a substantial final research project on an energy policy topic of our choice. In keeping with the theme of my studies up to that point, I elected to examine state-level legislation on renewable energies within the United States—a very similar topic to the one I wrote about in my freshman-level environmental seminar, but the conclusions could not have more contrasting tones. From the senior year class:

 

“Inter-state diversity is one of the greatest features of the United States, but it can also make the passage of broad, over-arching legislation quite difficult at times. If the adoption of an all-encompassing renewable energy plan is ever seriously considered at the national level, legislators may need to take this unavoidable diversity into account as well as the general expected consequences outlined in detail in this study in order to develop a plan that will effectively be able to transition the nation into a state of energy sustainability.” [3]

 

When writing about climate change and renewable energy as a freshman, I invoked arguments about moral responsibility to future generations and personal sacrifice as a way to wrap up my essay; here, I simply discuss the difficulties of passing legislation in the United States at the present time. Reading this “larger implication” actually makes me less interested in the research preceding it, as it doesn’t appear as though it truly means anything in the bigger picture. Despite this, I received an A on the assignment, as the concluding remarks succinctly sum up for my readers the practical relevance of what I was writing about.

 

            A similar transformation can be observed in my strictly natural-science-based pieces of writing. I spent the second half of the past summer at the University of Michigan’s Biological Station, where we were required to immerse ourselves in two-month long research projects that would supplement the classes we were taking. The degree of intensity of these projects was something I had never seen before; countless hours of data collection in the field coupled with countless more of organization, analysis, and background research meant that our whole lives were centered on this undertaking for the time we spent there. I was fully immersing myself in a substantial research project of a topic of my choosing while simultaneously becoming educated about the importance of ecological interactions on the future of human prosperity—if ever there was a time to include a passionate, stirring discussion of deeper implications of the research, this would seem to be it. However, I still felt the familiar academic pressures weighing down on me, and so this is what I came up with to conclude my paper regarding the changing role of fungi in differently aged forests:

 

“Despite these encouraging results, the main conclusion reached by our group is that our method of data collection may have been too limiting to properly assess fungal dynamics in a successive forest.  We focused entirely on classifying above-ground fungal activity, which may not always be representative of the total fungal community in a particular area and thus may not be an accurate assessment of the dominant functional group present (Gardes & Bruns 1995).  Additionally, many species of fungi are not so easily classified into simple functional groups; some classes, especially ectomycorrhizae, can perform nitrogen-fixation services as well as some decomposition services for their ecosystem, a quality which may add confusion as to the primary function of such a specimen” [4]

 

Asleep yet? After months of researching and experiencing how important and mysterious the functions of fungi are to the health and stability of entire ecosystems, my inspiring final few sentences merely highlight our lack of understanding regarding how to classify them. After presenting this “conclusion” at the end-of-semester symposium event at UMBS, I decided that enough was enough—I was simply tired of feeling unsatisfied with papers and projects that I had invested so much time and effort into. Something needed to be changed.

 

            For four years now I have been under the intense selective pressure of a pre-medical education, and this form of “academic selection” has shaped me into an entirely new species of writer. Gone are my days of total freedom, the thing that drew me towards this discipline in the first place; I am now a perfectly well adapted scientific writer, streamlined to convey concepts and findings in a concise and objective manner. Don’t get me wrong—there is without a doubt value in this type of writing. It has historically been a necessity to write this way in science in an effort to convince skeptical readers that your findings are based on truth rather than opinion. However, I believe that even more societal value can be drawn from scientific truths by conveying them in a way that draws on the passion of the audience, not just the rationality. As I have learned though, such an endeavor must be undertaken carefully and subtly so as not to distract from the empirical evidence, and I believe that I have now accumulated the syntactical tools required to achieve it. Additionally, as this is my last semester in college, I feel as though that academic pressure has finally been lifted off of my pen, and as a result I am now free to radiate in any direction in terms of my growth as a writer.

 

The Capstone Project will represent my first true attempt at addressing this growth. I believe that, after all this time keeping my scientific and abstract pieces separate, I have gathered enough experience in both to be able to effectively synthesize them in a way that will be pleasing to both creative and deductive audiences. As a result, this final project will be centered on a specific natural scientific topic—the evolution of human conceptions of self and purpose—but will be analyzed and discussed through “deeper” lenses as well, specifically in terms of theoretical physics and the philosophy of identity. My goal will be to provide the audience with a thorough examination of contemporary scientific theories regarding this topic while also managing to convince them of the true, practical implications of what the science is saying. The task will be robust but, after years of being molded into a one-dimensional scientific writing machine, I feel as though I’ve accomplished enough to finally be able to effectively revisit the style that made me want to write in the first place.

 

References

[1] Anderson, Sean. Briefing on Carbon Emissions. Environment 139. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. November 2011.

 

[2] Anderson, Sean. The Quiet Effects of Deforestation. Biology 171. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. April 2012.

 

[3] Anderson, Sean. Exploring the Indirect Effects of State-Level Intervention in the Renewable Energy Sector. Political Science 336. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. December 2014.

 

[4] Anderson, Sean. Fungal Diversity and Function in Secondary Forest Succession.  Ecology & Evolutionary Biology 381. University of Michigan Biological Station, Pellston, MI. August 2014.