Cut Out the Poetry, Watson

A great advance in astronomy that we rarely notice is the steady improvement in the quality of writing on the subject. We are fortunate in being able to turn to straightforward, no-nonsense prose for reports of the latest phenomena and the location of celestial objects. It was very difficult in the early decades of the century when writers felt obliged to patronise their readers. Their work was so cloying that one feels embarrassed to read it. A book published in 1910 contained this passage: ``Glittering, swift-footed heralds of immensity, these comets with golden wings glide lightly through space, shedding a momentary illumination by their presence. Whence do they come? Whither are they bound?" Suppose you wanted to find a particular star. You might have to wade through this verbiage written in 1907:

``When the trees are bare and the berries are wrapped in ice and snow, so that winter birds greedily gather what in your bounty you throw to them, you will find Capella shining almost directly overhead early in the evening." The same writer had this to say about the constellation of Taurus: Below the tips of the horns there are also rich clusters of stars, as if the Bull were flaunting shreds of sparkling raiment torn from some celestial victim of his fury.’’ Nor, to judge from another popular astronomy book, had standards improved by 1925: ``What more gracious day's progress in beauty could there be than to travel with the eye from the cheerful hepaticas to the round, white, silent blossoms of the dogwood and thence to the bright yet gentle light of Arcturus?" It was like the writer of 1890 who similarly ``talked down" to his readers, making it plain that he considered their intelligence inferior to his own. ``1 recollect discovering the colour of this star with my field-glass, and exclaiming to myself, `Why, the little one is as blue as a bluebell!'" The problem was not just birds and flowers. Even political propaganda crept into discussion of astronomy. The following amazing sentence once appeared in a Russian newspaper. ``Venus will be especially bright this month, thanks to Comrade Stalin." It has fortunately dawned on writers that astronomy is just another subject like finance, sport or law, whose readers want to be told the facts, plainly and simply, unadorned by references to wholly irrelevant matters. Doing otherwise does not charm or fascinate. It merely confuses and infuriates. There is nothing wrong with telling people when to feed birds or reporting that dogwood blossoms are ``silent", but reports on stars and comets should be segregated from such announcements. One of the best pieces of guidance for technical writers appears in the Sherlock Holmes story ``The Retired Colourman'': Amidst this street [says Watson] ``lies this old home, surrounded by a high sunbaked wall mottled with lichens and topped with moss, the sort of wall - '' ``Cut out the poetry," says Holmes severely, ``I note that it was a high brick wall."