TALK about dry. Have you ever thought that reading biomedical journals is like “a long journey through a colourless, flat terrain devoid of prominent features”?
That’s the conclusion of a linguistic study by Raul Rodriguez-Esteban of Columbia University in New York and Andrey Rzhetsky at the University of Chicago. They compared the occurrence of sensory words – such as those for colours and textures – in 78 journals with language used by Reuters news service, Wikipedia, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman.
Whitman and Reuters came top, while the journals only managed about one-fifth of their score (The EMBO Journal…
