Abstract
The central purpose of science is to explain. However, who is that explanation for, and how is this explanation communicated once it has been deduced? Scientific research is typically communicated via papers in journals, with an abstract presented as a summary of that explanation. However, in many instances they may be written in a manner which is non-communicatory to a lay reader. This study begins to investigate if poetry could be used as an alternative form of communication, by first assessing if poetic verse is an effective form of communication to other scientists. In order to assess this suitability, a survey was conducted in which two different groups of participants were asked questions based on a scientific abstract. One group of participants was given the original scientific abstract, whilst the second group was instead given a poem written about the scientific study. Quantitative analysis found that whilst a scientific audience found a poetic interpretation of a scientific abstract to be no less interesting or inspiring than the original prose, they did find it to be less accessible. However, further qualitative analysis suggested that the poem did a good job in conveying a similar meaning to that presented in the original abstract. The results of this study indicate that whilst for a scientific audience poetry should not replace the prose abstract, it could be used alongside the original format to inspire the reader to find out more about the topic. Further research is needed to investigate the effectiveness of this approach for a general audience.
Highlights
The central purpose of science is to explain (Purtill, 1970)
Who is that explanation for, and how is this explanation communicated once it has been deduced? Scientific research is typically communicated via papers in journals, but whilst to an insider these papers and journals represent an efficient and effective way of communicating research, to an outsider what they represent and report on may not be at all clear (Meadows, 1985), and in many instances they may be written with a lexical density that makes them inaccessible to a lay reader (Halliday & Martin, 2003)
These are the responses to the survey that was used in this study to assess the effectiveness of poetry as a form of scientific abstract
Summary
Orasan (2001) observed that many authors of scientific papers do not consider the abstract to be important, arguing that in many cases it is written as a necessity just before the paper is submitted. Is it the case, that rather than being an effective and economical method of communicating the research, that the abstract instead represents a rushed précis of the research findings, with an even higher lexical density than that of the main body of the text? Is it the case, that rather than being an effective and economical method of communicating the research, that the abstract instead represents a rushed précis of the research findings, with an even higher lexical density than that of the main body of the text? If so, are they useful to anyone who might consider themselves, or be considered an outsider? And if non-experts are unable to fully grasp the summary of the explanation, what hope do they have of being able to fully understand the research and its potential relevance to them?
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