Spartan Profiles: Robert Goldbort
WRITING FOR SCIENCE
Writing for science has surged in importance in this era of multiple breakthroughs. Few people are more qualified to talk about it than Robert Goldbort, M.A. ’81, Ph. D. ’89, an English professor at Indiana State University who boasts two degrees in biology and two degrees in English, and whose doctoral thesis at MSU was titled Scientific Writing and the College Curriculum. And, in fact, Goldbort has just published Writing For Science (Yale University Press, 2006), which is receiving worldwide distribution.
“The key to scientific writing is that you need absolute objectivity along with utmost clarity and simplicity,” he explains from his office in Terre Haute, IN. “You cannot afford to be somewhat unclear in conveying scientific fact. Ambiguity can enrich literature, but not scientific writing.”
Robert says that today’s scientist needs to do a better job writing. “Many find writing a bother,” he notes. “Scientists prefer to be in a lab. But they need to communicate what goes on in the lab because much of today’s research is funded by the taxpayer.”
A native of New York, Robert became enamored of scientific writing at MSU when he had to teach a freshman sequence as a graduate assistant. “I found that, first, that the field existed, and two, that it was an exploding field,” he says. “I fell in love with the whole area.”
He touts his MSU advisor Stephen Tchudi (formerly Judy) for having encouraged him. “I can’t give you enough superlatives about him,” he says. “He continues to be a model for me today.”
Robert is now working on a book about “Third Culture Rhetoric,” dealing with works of fiction by scientists. “There will be a chapter about (the late MSU molecular biologist) Leonard Isaacs, who taught in Lyman-Briggs,” says Robert. “He was involved in the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop and was very much into the use of fiction to teach basic biology.”
