Richard Dawkins On Science Writing

otee writes "Richard Dawkins asks the question: Why hasn't a Nobel Prize been awarded to a scientist for literary work? He suspects that it simply hasn't occurred to the judges. Read the well written article at The Edge Website for information about good (science) writing."

Comments

Are scientific articles really literature?

[neglige]

I, for one, welcome our well-written scientific article overlords, but do these articles really fall into the same category as, for example, poems? The aims are very different. Scientific publications are there to make a statement, to get a point across, to share knowledge. Literature on the other hand is more emotional and less bound to "rules" (for lack of a better word), it has more freedom.

Or to put it differently: a play by Shakespeare may make you cry, because of the emotions the play has stirred in you. If you cry over a scientific article, it is mostly because of the bad writing or obvious mistakes.

The article also comments on the subject of readability of scientific publications, but this is IMHO another debate ;)

Russel got one

[chippo]

IIRC,

Bertrand Russel got the Nobel prize for literature. But I guess he counts as a mathematician.

Re:Russel got one

[daeley]

I guess he counts as a mathematician.

How else would he? ;)

Re:Read Nodel's Will . . . .

[Finuvir]

Literature is about style rather than content, so the prize would surely go to whoever brings tha style of writing in an ideal direction. Yet the works that win their writers literature prizes rarely display the necessary element of style called simplification. That's Dawkins' point. There's a whole area of literature going unnoticed because it's too diferent from the previous winners.