Humor Writing 101 - a course for all first year scientists

Potential caption: Dog approaches mad scientist. Source: Julie Hecht

For the last year, I called Edinburgh and Budapest my home. I resided in both countries with the purpose of getting my Masters degree in Applied Animal Behavior and Animal Welfare. My research, as you can tell from the above photo, focused on dogs and the dog-human relationship.

In August 2010, I waved goodbye to that side of the world and returned to the land of New York City. That was over 5 months ago. It is now January 2011, and I can count on my hands (fine, two hands and one foot) the number of friends I have interacted with in the past 5 months. 

This is an unusual fact. By nature, I am a socializing freak. Not a party freak, but a socializing freak -- old friends, new acquaintances, whatever. Interacting with members of my own species lights up my heart. So why have I been slow on the uptake? Why the lag? The lag is simple - the lag is science. 

The Land of Science is about constant absorption. You can never learn enough, read enough, write enough or think enough about a research topic. If I could have worn a straight jacket and stared at a screen that fed "science" into my brain a la Clockwork Orange, I would have paid oodles for that device. When I wasn’t sitting on my butt reading paper after paper, I was sitting on my butt trying to dissect what I’d read and discern if it applied to my research question. 

My point: through dedication and an almost absurd interest in the area of dog behavior and cognition, I found science, but I misplaced a couple of other things. 


Things I misplaced:

• Humor 
• Socializing techniques
• The ability to write in a way that others enjoy reading

Things I found:

• Not doing laundry
• Showering only on occasion
• Never unpacking when out of the country 
• Eating the same food for six months straight (lentils with paprika sauce, the extra-spicy kind)

I didn’t misplace these things because I am unique. If you examine scientific journal articles, humor does not abound. Convolution, yes, but humor, not so much. There are a few notable papers where I read the first paragraph or an opening quote and got to chuckle. I regale in that chuckle! THANK YOU FOR A CHUCKLE!

But all kidding aside, making science palatable is incredibly important, especially when it comes to writing about dogs.

I’ll show you why:

If I were to hand you the paper titled, Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs*, you might glance at it, think to yourself, "Too many words," and then use the paper to store old gum, build a giant paper doghouse, make paper handcuffs, or best of all, use it to cover a giant hula hoop and then burst through it like they do at football games when players run from the locker room. Point being, you probably wouldn’t read much past the first sentence which reads:

“It has been suggested that the study of the domestic dog might help to explain the evolution of human communicative skills, because the dog has been selected for living in a human environment and engaging in communicative interactions with humans for more than 10,000 years.”

ARE YOU STILL WITH ME? COME BACK! I'M STILL HERE! WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER! 

Science doesn’t make itself easy to digest. Sentences are not fun to read, meaning is detected after the third run-through and even then, it remains unclear why one word sits beside another. 

I’m not one for doing research so that it remains holed up in a journal or holed up in convoluted language. Research into dogs -- more specifically their behavior and cognition -- should be out and about, running beside us!

I am here because the long sentence begins an extremely interesting paper that you should know about!** Until Humor Writing 101 becomes a mandatory course for science students, I’ll be here, translating.

* Gácsi et al., 2009. Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs. Behavioral and Brain Functions.
** I’ll tell you about the study in the near future