Sir

In your News Feature on unclear writing, ”Clear as mud“ (Nature 423, 376–378; 2003), a passage is cited from the abstract of a paper of which I am first author: ”A somitic compartment of tendon progenitors“ (Cell 113, 235–248; 2003). The passage reads: ”We demonstrate that the tendons associated with the axial skeleton derive from a heretofore unappreciated, fourth compartment of the somites. Scleraxis (Scx), a bHLH transcription factor, marks this somitic tendon progenitor population at its inception, and is continuously expressed through differentiation into the mature tendons.“ The News Feature points out that my second sentence begins with a ”brand new term“, Scleraxis, and quotes writing instructor Judith Swan as suggesting the following rewrite: ”This somitic tendon progenitor population is marked at its inception by the gene Scleraxis (Scx)...“ — reasoning that by first recapping the content of the previous sentence, the writer forms a ”bridge“ or transition that will better prepare readers to take in the new information.

I would first point out that while my second sentence indeed begins with a new term, it makes the transition, just five words later, back to the content of the previous sentence. More importantly, however, my decision to place Scleraxis at the start of the second sentence, and to make it the subject of the sentence followed by an active verb, was to emphasize that it is only because of this marker and its continuous expression that identification of a somitic tendon progenitor population has become possible. Placing this information later in the sentence obscures the gene's importance to the research and cheats the reader of the excitement of discovery — of Scleraxis as well as the somitic tendon progenitor population it marks. In short, Swan's preferences, and mine, come down to a question of nuance and style.

While I agree that science writers should strive for clarity, they must be given the same latitude as writers in other disciplines to temper traditional rules of usage with individual stylistic choices that enhance what they want to communicate. Judging papers by methods such as LEX scores, which measure the ratio of everyday words to jargon, is, in my opinion, underestimating the capacity of science readers to creatively and flexibly handle the jargon, stylistic variations, and idiosyncrasies of interesting science writers. In fact, a bit of stylistic license and rule-bending, and a few new terms sprinkled here and there, might even keep the reader curious, challenged and awake. Clarity, yes; but clarity should not be synonymous with absence of style.