I fell asleep while watching the movie Helvetica last week. Like the font it describes, the film seems simple and empty. But it also sets the letters in context. Helvetica is a product of the reconstruction of Europe during the 1950s, when architects and designers idealized the possibility of creating a better, more modern, more democratic society.
Science writing and Helvetica often reflect the same ideals – readability, transparency and user-friendliness. When science writing isn’t stylistic, it blends into the page. The focus is on content, not verbal flourishes. There is an element of storytelling in news stories, but the value of clarity crosses genres. Technical writers strive to make their prose sound like Helvetica. It takes a huge amount of work to unravel scientific information and shape it into this seemingly simple form.
Although I value transparency, I’ve realized efficient writing isn’t the goal I want to pursue. I think we should go beyond putting human interest into stories and start writing expressively. We should put the curlicues and flourishes back into our writing. (That would make it more difficult for The Guardian to satirize the “formula” for BBC science stories, too.)
As a person in a creative field, I don’t want to wear gray every day. Why should my writing be gray, then? Why do we continue making our writing styles uniform when we are really a diverse group of people?
Although “gray” writing styles are user-friendly, they erase the diversity of people’s ideas and visual tastes and create a culture where clarity matters more than personality. I think it’s time to reverse that trend. Let’s be clear, but let’s write in our own voices for a change.
Kat Friedrich 