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When I first started editing technical papers at SME, I was surprised that the only style guide I was given was the AP Stylebook, the basic reference for journalists at the Associated Press. AP style is preferred when the purpose is to communicate to a general audience and is the style of choice for most U.S. newspapers, PR firms, magazines and broadcast news agencies. For Mining Engineering, SME’s flagship magazine, AP makes sense. For its technical journal, Minerals & Metallurgical Processing, where specialists talk to specialists, it seemed less useful, or worse.

To an editor of peer-reviewed papers on mineral processing, the AP guide offered a tsunami (new entry 2009) of advice I was unlikely to ever need: primers on covering mergers and acquisitions, the proper spelling and usage of terms from African-American and bobblehead to Girl Scout Cookies and water sports, a special section on media law. Meanwhile, the things I did need to know – how to properly write the Latin name of a bacterial subspecies or how to correctly reference a patent application, for example – were  completely absent. Add to these injuries to the insult of insisting I write “Internet” and “E-mail,” and I wanted to chuck the Stylebook out of the window.

In fact, the AP style guide started to feel like every kind of slight against technical writing personified. It was the brand-name journal editor who preferred an exciting article over a good science, the Yahoo news hacks that parroted a shaky paper’s claims without looking at methods or sample size, the CEO who wanted ad revenues from his publishing department instead of quality information. The AP goals were in the opposite direction of good science, I railed. Journalism and science could never mix.

And then I started to come back to reality. For one thing, I myself am a journalist. I may not be an especially good one, and I certainly don’t write the kinds of exciting stories that editors dream about at night, but I’m a better journalist than I am a scientist.

Furthermore: my journalistic abilities are what make my editing work. They enhance my editing, and not just because they help me puzzle through a sentence with three subjects and eight verbs, five of them in the wrong tense. They help me vet the quality of a paper and edit it to make it stronger. They help me see where there’s a point that needs to be better emphasized. They help me separate a great paper that deserves editorial prominence from one that is merely solid.

It’s a fact of the business that scientists do a lot of their communication using the medium of published words. This means that most scientists communicate with each other through a journalist middleman, or through someone who sat next to that journalist in college. Scientists use words, and therefore they rely on word specialists, and not just to remind whether affect or effect is the right word to use. A word specialist can help scientists make their writing stronger, clearer and more effective – often by using the same techniques that make newspaper writing strong and effective.

So it’s true: AP style probably isn’t the best guide to crafting meticulous science writing. But it can offer something else, something that scientists value as much as journalists: relevance, and an ability to be heard.

Emily Wortman-Wunder is the managing editor of the Society of Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration’s premier peer-reviewed journal, Minerals & Metallurgical Processing. Her column appears on the SME community page every other Monday.