How scientists really ought to write

© iStockphoto.com/Marco Rosario Venturini Autieri

© iStockphoto.com/Marco Rosario Venturini Autieri

Here's everything we suspected all along, collected by someone not dull enough for the laboratory. "Using the first person in your writing humanizes your work," Adam Ruben writes in, of all places, Science magazine's ScienceCareers site. "If possible, therefore, you should avoid using the first person in your writing. Science succeeds in spite of human beings, not because of us, so you want to make it look like your results magically discovered themselves."