being the 200th anniversary of the birth of THIS Thomas Jefferson, we do not want to let it pass without calling attention to the fact that he had something to do with the development of chemistry in this country. The explanatory note by Dr. C . A. Browne, followed by Jefferson's "Report on the method for obtaining fresh water from salt," which will be found in this number, should be important contributions to the history of chemistry in America.
"
that pass in the night," in our November SLIPS number, and "The importance of technical writ-
ing in chemical education," in the present one, offer an opportunity for our own two-bits' worth of editorial comment and regret. Once a year the JOURNAL publishes its "Suggestions to authors." But these are trivial and unimportant, compared to the suggestions which should have been made t o them long ago--suggestions which might have enabled them now to write more understandably, more interestingly. Very likely it is too late now; a t their present age most of our authors write either well or poorly-as they are either bald or hairy. It would be nice if there were something we could do about it. There seems to be something about putting one's thoughts down for publication which makes many a man lose his sense of proportion and values; makes h i want to dress up so as to be unrecognizable; makes h i change his native tongue into a completely foreign jargon. He shuns the simple words; must make simple ideas appear highbrow by long words and complicated grammar. To use a fifty-cent word to express a twofor-a-nickel idea is as much out of place as for a chemist to use a thermometer for a stirring rod-although both practices are unfortunately too common. A recent article on this general subject1 quotes Archer E. Knowlton, of Electrical World, as saying: "Writing an article should be no more difficult than tell in^- your . ' TaoMPsoN. "How can we improve engineering books?" J.
-
Eng. Education, 34, 193 (1943).
favorite story-if you will write i t as naturally as you would tell the story. What is equally important, i t will be interesting to others." Arthur P. Chew, of the United States Department of Agriculture, has expressed the unfortunate situation very well: "What is ehietly wrong in scientific writing, and thoroughly destructive of its purpose, is the use of esoteric jargon where common words would serve as well or better. This fatal sickness, which is highly resistant t o mere warnings, deserves careful diagnosis. Everyone knows the symptoms. When the victim has a choice of words or terms, he chooses the rarer or more pretentious ones, either because he thinks them more impressive or because he has forgotten their common synonyms. He turns away from English and uses a dialect known only to a few. Essentially, the user of excess jargon hopes to communicate his meanine hv a sort of teleoathv. .. which will save him the trouble of spelling hi; meaning out. He knows that ezsy reading is hard writing and he does not llke hard writing."
-.
.
A prize example of the roundabout way of saying a simple thing came t o us some time ago in a submitted manuscript : "The handling of caustics, acids, po*onous substances, and other chemicals is the processing of the mind t o an almost autamatical respect for dangers which accompany the storage and use of the many household chemicals which much too often are placed in position to he of painful consequence.''
This didn't get into print-as far as we know. But the following did, in a prospectus which reached our office, describing a book which "has been written by a man whose unshakable conviction that the sheer articulation of his tremendous theme is rhetoric enough. entailed the disinclination t o add one pinch of belletristic seasoning, lest some prime savor he blunted or submerged thereby. The result is a hook that compacts within small compass what the commonalty of authors, had they been similarly gifted, would have expanded into a dozen tomes. Add the fact that the theme has neither ideologically nor structurally anything in common with the scientific or literacy orientations of the day, and you have an offering that exacts an intensity of application that goes against the grain of a generation inured t o a shallow and precipitous practicality."
