Your last ARC WM News Blog featured an article by me on good scientific writing.[1] My friend and colleague, Andrew Stevens, asked how I could possibly tackle such a subject without drawing on Steven Pinker’s ‘The Sense of Style’.

Andrew was quite right; it is a superb book, and I recommend it. Like me, Pinker has no time for postmodernists, and he also intensely dislikes the use of quotation marks to distance the writer from a concept or idea that does not fit the prevailing paradigm. Pinker produces a lovely piece of irony as follows: “Post modernism rejects the possibility that any word can refer to anything or that there is an objectively existing world for words to refer to. Hence the headline in a satirical newspaper on the death of the postmodernist: “Jacques Derrida ‘dies’.”

Richard Lilford, ARC WM Director

Reference:

1. Lilford RJ. Scientific Writing. ARC WM News Blog. 2019; 1(1): 1-3.