*This first appeared in Lit Hub’s *Craft of Writing* newsletter—sign up here.* In 1954, Florence Moog, a biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, published a paper in the prestigious journal *Science* titled “Can Scientists Write for the General Public?” She was responding to an earlier report “that a batch of ‘science writers’ have come to the conclusion that ‘scientists do not write well enough to communicate their work to the general public.’” Moog took umbrage. “A mere unlettered scientist myself, I do not presume to question this bit of crystallized journalistic wisdom, especially since the report offers the comforting assurance that journalists themselves ‘constitute the best possible (sic) link between scientist and layman.’ The difficulty is only that, lacking the insight of a science writer, I find these unqualified assertions hard to understand.” She goes on to claim, “‘Science writers’ do have an essential role to play in reporting the facts of science; but interpreting science is…