Writing science: the abstract is poetry, the paper is prose.

EXPRESSIONISM I’m going to suggest that the four-part, quatrain model of the scientific abstract or IQ has served its term. What’s been missing all these years was an important, fifth subsection: The CONTROLS, the obvious, the critical, the perfect CONTROLS! Time’s come to expand the microcosm of the abstract: The cosmos according to Hubble Expands like the soap of a bubble. Let’s hope it’s not closed, It would then be disposed To shrink to a point, and that’s trouble. Harvard Physics Dept., 2007 (9) I’ve spent the last couple of years closely reading over 4,000 abstracts, and the bulk of those shot down by one or another editor or referee, have failed either to construct, or to spell out, the controls for their PROCEDURES or FINDINGS. I’d argue that there can be no overt CONCLUSIONS to an abstract absent the CONTROLS. Making the fifth subsection mandatory would, I believe, not only strengthen the intellectual, but also the emotive power of the abstract as a form of poetry. Adding a CONTROL requirement to the abstract would lead us to a short, five-member composition which would work like a limerick which has five lines in a metrical rhyming formula of aabba. So, if we use the limerick as a model, we now have room to insert those critical CONTROLS. THE SUBVERSIVE LIMERICK But there’s another reason to turn to the limerick as our example. Ever since Galileo, we’ve learned that good science can be subversive: it gives us news we didn’t know, didn’t want to know, or didn’t want others to know. Often, the discoveries that scientists publish are like banana peels that trip the credulous: the world is round, man and monkey share a common ancestor, glucosamine is no good for arthritis. Science subverts belief. The limerick is also subversive. The form was popularized by an eccentric, peripatetic Victorian versifier, Edward Lear (1812–1888). Lear’s poetical writings, ranging from “The Owl and the Pussycat” to his hundred or so limericks, have lately been reinterpreted as carrying far darker meanings than their witty, upbeat surface would suggest (10). Be that as it may, Lear became not only a celebrated literary gent, but also a professional landscape painter of the Grand Tour. His first paid jobs were as an illustrator for large folios of natural history, of which the plates in Sowerbys’ Tortoises, Terrapins and Turtles, (illustrated above) are perhaps the most powerful. His continuing interest in natural history led to his election as an Associate of the Linnaean Society. But the verses remain his chief legacy and the limericks he published in A Book of Nonsense in 1846 (11) had undertones as dark as any Jungian would wish: There was an Old Man who supposed, That the street door was partially closed; But some very large rats, Ate his coats and his hats, While that futile old gentleman dozed. There was an Old Person of Cromer, Who stood on one leg to read Homer; When he found he grew stiff, He jumped over the cliff, Which concluded that Person of Cromer. 1 The FASEB Journal, similarly, requests that the abstract contain: “the PURPOSE(S) of the study or investigation, basic PROCEDURES [selection of study subjects or laboratory animals; observational and analytic method(s)], main FINDINGS, and the principal CONCLUSIONS (7).” 2602 Vol. 22 August 2008 WEISSMAN The FASEB Journal After Lear, most limericks followed suit: they are generally composed of three metrical feet in the first, second, and fifth lines, with two metrical feet in the third and fourth, but deviations from the pattern can be diverting, as in: There was a young man from Japan Whose limericks never would scan When they said it was so He replied, “Yes, I know, But I always try to get as many words into the last line as ever I possibly can.”