The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science by Scott L. Montgomery, University of Chicago Press, £10.50/$15, ISBN 0226534855 Reviewed by James Kingsland
“WE WISH to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). The structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest…”
Thus began James Watson and Francis Crick’s shocking paper in 1953: “shocking” not because it revealed to the world the double-helix structure of DNA, but because it broke nearly every rule of cold, dispassionate scientific discourse. It didn’t follow the IMRAD format of Introduction, Methods, Results, Analysis, Discussion; it was cheeky, almost cocky; and it was littered with grammatical…
