Has scientific writing ruined my creative mind?
In fifth grade, I used to write wild stories about people who rode giant rats and trees that talked to children. My imagination ran rampant trying to impress my classmates with stories they never could have dreamed up. But after six and a half years in college studying science, those stories, and the mind that created them, are long gone.
I was told scientific writing is nothing like what you were taught in high school. There’s no room for stories, colorful descriptions, or opinions — only facts and evidence. And that’s how I wrote. Just the facts. I removed unnecessary asides, adjectives, and stripped the emotion from my writing. Stories and anecdotes were replaced with p-values and confidence intervals. My mind was hard-wired into a logical assembly line, where everything must be explained with numbers, and that’s how my mind has functioned ever since.
Just last week I saw a satirical essay that was written so poorly it was funny, and I thought it would be fun to try to emulate that style. However, in my attempt at using “poor grammar”, I caught myself using full sentences with commas and semicolons, and words like “furthermore” and “moreover”. That’s when I realized the years I spent reading and writing exclusively scientific papers might have ruined my creative mind. Twelve-year-old me used to take pride in coming up with the most outrageous stories to tell my classmates, but now I might as well be a textbook.
So, has scientific writing ruined my creative mind? Probably. I can’t even call a flower beautiful unless its beauty is proven to be statistically significant with a p-value < 0.05.
Is this really a bad thing though? My writing has changed, but so have my reasons for writing. All I worried about when I was younger was making my friends laugh and getting A’s on my papers. Now, I deal with climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and microplastics in everything I eat.
Even with that being said, I don’t think I should ditch my creative mind and preach data and doom all the time. I know there’s balance to be found, somewhere between a Journal of Science submission and talking trees in the forest. The ideal situation would be to combine the storytelling I enjoyed as a child with the scientific mind I developed as an adult. Then I could tell stories that throw the reader into situations where record-breaking fires destroy their homes and glaciers melt in front of them instead of thousands of miles away. These stories could make distant problems feel real and relatable, and scientific data gives them credibility. Stories make people feel, and data makes them believe.
Ultimately, I don’t think my creative mind is completely gone, I just lost it for a bit. Now I’m working towards finding it again, reshaping it, and learning to use it for my new passions. I hope to use storytelling and science to protect nature. If I can find out how to do that, I’d call it a success.
