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Investigating the Complexity of Academic Writing (theatlantic.com)
biohack writes: While the general public might expect that researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work, academic writing tends to follow an opaque style permeated with professional jargon and complex syntax. Proposed explanations for the emergence of this style range from experts generally finding it difficult to be simple when writing about their expertise to more complex social and cultural theories: "Cynics charge ... that academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers. Others say that academics have traditionally been forced to write in an opaque style to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers—academic journal editors, for example."
We have people here who like to either omit comments in their code, write obfuscated code, etc.
Fight for your bitcoins!
Publushing in high-ranking journals is often subject to various limits, i.e. 2500 words for an article, or 120 words for the summary etc. Having a conplex but interesting story to tell can then be quite challenging. Intricate language, with peer jargon, is often very compact. It's very rewarding to use it... :-)
How many know what a torus is? For those that do, should writers dumb it down to "donut-shaped object"?
Journal articles are written to get past reviewers in prestigious journals. Blame the publish or perish system.
Well no shit.
1. Writing well is hard. These are people who have devoted their lives to science not writing. Expecting them to be good at both is common, but silly.
2. Jargon gets a bad rap, unecessarily so. Yes it makes it harder for outsiders, but with it aids communication because you don't have to have long winded and inaccurate descriptions of commonly used things every time.
For example, I can talk about corner detection and most people in computer vision would immediately know what I'm talking about wit hme using only two words. Space is imited, and verbosity is also harmful.
3. Many many scientists do not have English as a first language, yet it is the language of almost all journals of any repute.
4. Deadlines These things happen.
5. No one pays them to write better. Your job security is based on the amount of science done. If scientists put more time into writing and less into doing science then they risk falling behind and losing a job in a brutally competitie market.
So: if you want scientists to write better, you have to allocate money for it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
We use jargon so that we don't have to re-explain basic concepts over and over again. There's an art to knowing when it's a good idea to re-explain a concept anyway, to knowing the difference between concise and terse. Few technical folks possess that artistry.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Writing for a technical audience requires precision. There's often a trade-off between properly (and responsibly) covering your bases and Hemingway-esque clarity.
He took a sip of Champagne from the glass in front of him.
vs.
He consumed approximately 1.5cc's of sparking fermented beverage produced in Spain from the container resting at a semi-oblique angle from his anterior axial line.
Or just maybe - research tends to be focused on highly complex topics that require extremely specific definitions afforded only by obscure terminology. Often the ability express these concepts in a manner graspable by an average level vocabulary is difficult - bordering on impossible. Not to mention that the time required to come up with an adequately simple representation is often not given due to the pressure to publish the next idea.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" - A. Einstein
"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time" B. Pascal
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Complex syntax may be an affectation driven by cultural norms, but professional jargon is generally necessary. Jargon compresses large amounts of previously-understood knowledge into a word or a phrase. For example, in a paper I'm writing I just mentioned "counting bloom filter" and IND-CPA. Either of those concepts requires many pages of words to explain, and in turn references many more concepts that the layperson will not know. The full background required to fully understand each of those concepts, starting from zero, could easily fill a book.
Even where jargon does have a common-language synonym, it's often the case that the jargon has many additional nuances to its meaning which aren't adequately captured by the common word. I'm sure there are some cases where jargon could be replaced by something more accessible without losing relevant meaning (e.g. I found myself tempted to use "semantic content" rather than "meaning", but other than being slightly less ambiguous, it wouldn't add much), but I doubt that using the more-accessible terms would significantly increase the accessibility of the paper.
I think one of the clearest examples of this is Randall Munroe's various comics where he explains complex concepts with simple words. He does a good job, but I still strongly suspect that the only people who can really understand his "simple" explanations are those who already understand the bulk of the concepts being explained. He's writing a book that uses this same method throughout; we'll see if he manages any counterexamples.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Writing for a technical audience requires precision. There's often a trade-off between properly (and responsibly) covering your bases and Hemingway-esque clarity.
He took a sip of Champagne from the glass in front of him.
vs.
He consumed approximately 1.5cc's of sparking fermented beverage produced in Spain from the container resting at a semi-oblique angle from his anterior axial line.
When you write an academic paper or an article for an academic journal, your audience is other academics, with a certain baseline knowledge. So of course you're more inclined to use jargon and complex language.
When you're writing for a general audience, you're more likely to forgo the jargon and use more simplified language and explanations.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I wrote a college term paper on mathematic functions for a German-born English instructor who had a reputation of being a hard ass. I checked out a half-dozen mathematic books from the library to get a better idea on how to describe the process step-by-step. The descriptions were nearly identical. So I wrote mine the same way. The instructor accused me plagiarism because my description wasn't original. I pushed back, pulled out the photocopies that I made from each book, and challenged her to write a better description. She couldn't and gave me a C for the course, which was the highest grade she gave for A work.
While the general public might expect that researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work, academic writing tends to follow an opaque style permeated with professional jargon and complex syntax. Proposed explanations for the emergence of this style range from experts generally finding it difficult to be simple when writing about their expertise to more complex social and cultural theories: "Cynics charge ... that academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers.
This is a joke, right? I plugged this text into http://readability-score.com/ and got a rough grade level of 16 for understandability.
Maybe researchers expect and support magazines such as Popular Science, Psychology Today, Discover, JAMA-Kids, etc. to interpret and rewrite their research to a specific audience, from high-school student through peers in unrelated fields. I bet most writers would tell you that it's not one-size-fits-all. Heck, maybe they wouldn't mind if they get called for an interview to explain their research in more detail.
How to deconstruct almost anything
When I saw that Steven Pinker was one of the people complaining about academic language. Did he even read his own article about "the dress"? This should be example #1, but at least it was about science, unlike that Flaubert stuff that was provided as the first example.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
One man's PhD dissertation is another man's sniglet
While I agree that academic writing is often too opaque - in particular the use of the passive voice in scientific papers is too slavishly followed - I think academics should be cut some slack here. They are very well aware of the review process and how their papers will be cited. That makes them generally cautious about their claims, not wanting to be accused of making claims that their research does not support, while at the same time not hiding the light of their research under a bushel. That tightrope, and the space constraint referred to above, can generate densely-argued and sesquipedalian prose.
Any particular impenetrable paper may result from one of these causes or any combination.
It is fair to say that if an informed layperson (someone with an ongoing interest in the field, not a specialized degree) cannot get the gist of the argument, then the paper is poorly written and shouldn't have been published.
The reason scientific writing reads like gibberish for the untrained, is not that scientists are elitist snobs or that they're forced to do so. It's because the writing only uses a subset of a language that is just enough to get the business done. The scientist are usually not well-trained in style, and after they've poured themselves over their research jobs, they have little spare intelligence left for the literary elements. In fact, my feeling is that scientific text has much less complexity as compared with daily language or literature. It's much more "wooden", or let's say, "machine-parseable".
Also, the need for advanced language command is reduced by the use of symbols, formulae, diagrams or photos. These non-linguistic objects "speak" much better and very often you'll find the text reduced to the auxiliary function of serving them.
The "complex syntax" (mostly very long sentences with embedded clauses) is the result of optimizing for silent reading rather than for loud reading. We don't read out a science paper aloud frequently, so we take advantage of this and cram more information into the long and winding sentences, trying not to partition a "block" of information too often. I'm not saying this is good style -- actually I try to enforce against it -- but languages adapt to the society's needs. In the society of scientists, what usually happens is that the results speak for themselves by logic and data, thus obviating the need of good style (or lowering its priority).
The article raised an important point about scientific writing. However, as an early career academic I can tell you that my writing training so far has not been targeted towards writing for public reading. Why do scientists write? We write to get our results published in scientific journals which is the basis for an academic career, and we write grant applications to funding bodies so that we can get money to do research. Otherwise, I believe the majority of scientists would prefer research over writing. Anyways, in both of the above context, we are taught to target our writing to intelligent peers who may not be in the exact same field of research but can judge the significance of the scientific content and its contribution. There is no incentives at all to a scientist's career to target our writing towards the public. This is not to say that scientists should not improve on our writing style. I'm still learning.
The real reason we write this way is that the ideas are complex, and the nuances important.
I research and write about development. I write about trajectories of age-related differences in performance on a task. Why age-related differences, and not changes in performance with age? Because unless I am collecting repeated measurements in the same individual, I am not measuring change, but cross-sectional differences associated with age..these nuances are important to be clear about what can be concluded by the data.
Often in research the subject of sentence is a complex, which needs to be described with a compound set of words. This can lead to truly difficult phrasing (i.e. when we talk about one compound word process modifying another compound word subject. Often we compromise to enhance readability with a loss in conceptual precision.
Next from Congress: The Fairness in Academic Writing Act (FAWA) which will require academics to only use words with three syllables or less so people in Red States can understand their high-falootin' publications.
Also known as "No Moron Left Behind".
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why should scientist write for the common people?
If you ever want to dispel the perception that scientists have become deceitful manipulators, you'll need to support the idea of communicating clearly. And not just your conclusions, you need to be able to clearly communicate the theory, the way the evidence was gathered, and be able to face inquiry.
In too many fields of science, the advocates use the scientific dialect to talk down to the people they are trying to manipulate. The argument "do this because it's for your own good and we're smarter than you are" has lost its worth. Advocates citing scientific papers have been aggressively destroying what trust remains in scientific integrity.
Regaining trust is extremely difficult and sometimes impossible, but the blatant refusal by many in the scientific communities to recognize their own part of the responsibility for the distrust of their profession shows a malignant narcissism that must be purged before progress can continue.
2. Jargon gets a bad rap, unecessarily so. Yes it makes it harder for outsiders, but with it aids communication because you don't have to have long winded and inaccurate descriptions of commonly used things every time.
For example, I can talk about corner detection and most people in computer vision would immediately know what I'm talking about wit hme using only two words. Space is imited, and verbosity is also harmful.
There's a Star Trek episode about Tamarians, a race who speak entirely in jargon. Their language uses cultural references instead of words of meaning: "Darmok on the ocean" means loneliness, isolation, "Sokath, his eyes uncovered/opened" means understanding/realization, and so on.
As an AI researcher concerned with techniques of learning (and indirectly, teaching) I've come to realize that our science is the Tamarian language.
The vast majority of ideas in academia is named after a person or event. The German Tank problem, Gauss's law, Einstein's famous equation, Planck's constant, Jenson's inequality, the Method of Frobenius, the Archimedes principle, Lou Gehrig's disease... the list is endless.
There are some intuitive ideas, such as: speed of light, triangle inequality, law of large numbers, no free lunch, principle of least action... but there are very few of these.
No one takes the time to come up with intuitive or meaningful names for things any more. It's a land-grab for esteem by having something named after the researcher.
It's really, *really* difficult for a student to learn about a field, because they also need to associate some random name with the concept. We can't just say "convex inequality", it has to be "Jensen's inequality".
Feynman once quipped that about 30% of physics is learning to do unit conversions.
I might add that another 40% is learning how to associate random, meaningless names to fundamental principles.
Opacity of jargon has various advantages, depending on the field.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
More than any other language English is a hybrid, so it has more words for the same thing. This goes way back. English's roots are Germanic, but even then it was mixed from Anglo, Saxon, Norse, and Frisian. Then you have the influx of Latin, twice: first by Roman conquest in early A.D., then by academic fashion in the Middle Ages. Between those two, in 1066, you have the Norman Conquest. That's why the words for the animals in the field are chicken and cow, which are Old English, the language of common folk. But the words for the same animals as food are poultry and beef, which are Norman French, the language of the rich rulers. English's heavy borrowing, as we all know, goes on to this day.
While sometimes one synonym is more precise than another, more often it's like saying gato has a different shade of meaning than cat, when really it's just the same idea from two different lands. A writer trying to help his reader can exploit English's large vocabulary to be clear, precise, and quick to understand. A writer trying to hold onto his job with the least effort can abuse English to hide mediocre thoughts in a thicket of long, important-sounding, often Latinate words.
What you've written is both insane and ignorant at the same time. Congratulations.
It's not really a word limit such as we are writing for a particular audience, namely other researchers in the field. Arguing that this is exclusionary is just stupid. Indeed if we were to apply this logic then the most exclusionary thing about papers is that they are generally written in English which excludes the entire non-english speaking world from understanding them.
The point of any written work is to communicate effectively with the reader. To do that you have to target it to your audience starting foremost with the choice of language and then with the material you include. Going over things the audience already know is a waste of time and boring so fewer people will read it, writing so that this preamble is not required limits the depth and detail which you can communicate making the entire paper a waste of time for an expert to read. Instead, if you do not want to spend the time to understand papers pick up a popular science magazine, website or even TV channel and read or watch something which is targeted at the general public.
And when they're thinking about their work, they think in terms of jargon. Just like how a veteran coder is going to think programatically.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
My personal philosophy is that the point of writing is to convey information. Consequently, I try to write as clearly and simply as possible to make what I'm saying easy to understand. I gave the first draft of my thesis to my advisor and... he told me my writing was too simple. I had to use more complex words and sentences, and excess repetition (his exact words were "say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you just said").
Along the same lines, my thesis work was dependent on another researcher's work so I had to follow the papers he was putting out. His writing was incredibly dense with very complex sentence structures which sometimes took several minutes to unravel. From his name, I could tell he was Indian so I figured he wasn't fluent in English or something. I finally got to meet him and... his English was perfect and when he spoke about his work it was incredibly easy to follow. I asked him why his writing was so inscrutable. He said he wrote like that because it was expected of him when publishing, and because it made him sound more intelligent.
No thank you. One of the best papers I came across during my research was Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication. It is easy to read and understand, yet concise and detailed. It's so easy to follow I've given copies of it to co-workers who were attempting to solve problems related to or similar to information theory, but who weren't trained in information theory. And they've all been able to digest it in one or two nights of bedtime reading. That is how knowledge should be passed.
Try the test yourself:
http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/
Sometimes three is just an inherent smarty-pants style to writing academic papers. I lose track of how many times I instinctively try to write something like "utilize" or "make use of" when a simple "use" will work.
But, at least in scientific writing, you use complicated language in order to be absolutely precise about your method and findings (as opposed in particular to scientific journalism...). As an example, I work in the field of direct experimental searches for evidence of interactions between particle dark matter and nuclei. That's a huge mouthful, but every single word in that phrase carries distinct meaning, and if you take any of them out, it is not a correct description of what I do, and may refer to another field entirely.
Now take that kind of precision and discuss an experimental result. "We find that, at 90% confidence level, there is no statistically significant evidence for X". Again, it sounds like buzzwords and jargon, but there is simply no way to turn that statement into "common" English.
My favorite discussion of this topic is The Science of Scientific Writing. The authors' basic argument is that most people think science is hard to read because the ideas are complex; but instead, scientists can convey their ideas clearly by meeting the structural expectations of the reader.
For example, readers expect the subject of the sentence to be the subject of the story you're telling. They expect old information to come before new information. They expect the end of the sentence to be the "stress position", and for information there to be emphasized.
It is not overstating matters to say that this article has forever changed the way I write scientific prose. Highly, highly recommended.
Oh, and the other takeaway? It's not that science writing is opaque by necessity -- it's just that many scientists write poorly.
I'm commenting to express approval for your comment, and to counteract the useless negative comment that an AC already posted to it.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
.don't use a period as a list bullet.
Your advisor was mis-applying the philosophy behind "say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you just said." It's valid in certain contexts, primarily when you are writing to educate, which is different than conveying information. In education, you have to repeat yourself because your audience might have trouble keeping up, or their attention might drift. A big challenge with educational writing and speaking is the reality that at least part of your audience doesn't care or want to be reading/hearing what you have to say, so you have to emphasize and re-emphasize the most important points.
By contrast, academic papers are about, as you said, conveying information. People read them because they want to understand what you are saying. If they miss it the first time, they will read it again. The burden should not be on the writer to make sure that the reader stays focused.
Of course, none of that matters to someone that hasn't learned anything about writing since their high school teacher told them the formula for a five-paragraph essay.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
There's always a trick to writing poorly. I use this for my content marketing.
Don't say "Try and X", if you want to sound like you finished college.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The reason for the passive tense is that academic writers tend to take academic disputes personally. Suppose a Nobel prize winner's graduate student wrote a paper where he said "we did this and found this", and someone realized the error in the experiment, then wrote "you did this, missed this, and you didn't actually find this." The professor's ego's would be massively bruised, and a massive rift formed in the research community.
If the passive voice is used, then it's the experiment's fault for being wrong. Using the passive voice is the equivalent of the "always address the chair" rule in Robert's rules of order. If everyone addresses the chair, then it is more difficult to meetings degenerate into personal name-calling. It doesn't always work, but it keeps things civil.
Specificity
Jargon may be obfuscating to anyone not in the field, but it's concise and, more importantly, precise. We could all do the "use only the n most common words" thing, but we'd lose all of the nuance that the rest of written language can provide. Enjoyment and entertainment are less important in academic writing that getting your point across in a way that minimizes obfuscation to others in your own field, which means using the language common to your damn field.
The closest analogy I can think of is legalese that you will find in official documents such as contracts or court documents.
The reason it has a 'flavor' is to differentiate them from common language. This is extremely important because common language varies widely, from Appalachia, West Coast, Deep South, East Coast, UK English and so on. Having super-set (legalese) helps to differentiate and disambiguate from common language.
This applies in the same way to formal science journal articles.
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you ever want to dispel the perception that scientists have become deceitful manipulators, you'll need to support the idea of communicating clearly.
What is clear for "the average person" would be needlessly redundant and boring for the scientists working in the same field. What is clear to the other scientists is, unfortunately, opaque to the average person. "Good writing" considers not only good grammar and spelling and punctuation, but an appreciation for the intended audience and their shared backgrounds. That means that "good writing" for the New York Times Science page is a lot different than good writing for PhysRev A.
Complaining that articles in PhysRev A are not understandable to the average person is like complaining that your car doesn't understand the molecular formula for gasoline. They aren't written for the average person.
The hallmark of a good science journalist is the ability to take the things the scientists tells her and then write it in a way her intended audience can understand. Some scientists can write at that level. The example given in a previous comment using Einstein's paper "ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES" fails. For example: "Let us take a system of co-ordinates in which the equations of Newtonian mechanics hold good." If you don't know what is meant by "Newtonian mechanics" you are lost in the first sentence. If you think the "common people" know who Newton was or what "Newtonian mechanics" means, you're wrong.
Advocates citing scientific papers have been aggressively destroying what trust remains in scientific integrity.
Those advocates are most often NOT the people writing the papers. It is the advocates' fault that the arrogance reaches the common person, not the fault of the people writing the papers intended for other scientists to read.
You're right, public communication is an important part of academia, and an often ignored one. But there is a time and place to communicate to the public, and a scientific publication is neither. Inevitably, invariably, when communicating to the public a scientist must make simplifications and take shortcuts which diminish or destroy the scientific usefulness of what it is they are communicating. There is a great deal of loss of information content when translating a text intended for consumption by other professionals to make it adequate for public consumption, and academia simply wouldn't work if researchers didn't communicate to each other with full technical precision. Now, you might say that it's possible to expand a piece of technical writing to include both the technically rigorous content and a simplified explanation, but what's the point in marrying the two? For one thing, the vast majority of scientific publications are so esoteric that it is neither possible nor useful to do that, and also it would be much easier and less cumbersome for everyone involved to put the public communication in its own space, be it a university's press page, or a researchers website, or a popular science publication, or literally anything other than the original scientific publication itself. So yes, communication is a problem, but it is not one that needs to be addressed by means of changing academic writing.
weinersmith
People want simple answers yet they don't understand that complex issues or problems often require complex answers as that is the only way to give a true answer.
of this type. "When studying foo, objects with property A must fall into class B {reference]."
You then say to yourself "Gee I have a hard time believing that." You then go read the referenced paper, and low and behold. It describes one or more of: foo theory, property A or class B. What it does not do is prove the claim in the sentence.
I don't think jargon in scientific writing is always a bad thing. It's important to be precise. When I conduct an experiment, I need to be precise about my procedure. If I'm precise, readers can identify caveats in my methods that would affect the outcome of my work. It also means someone else can duplicate my experiment. It's important for scientific experiments to be repeatable. It's also important to be precise about conclusions. I work in meteorology, a field that's next of kin to climatology. A lot of research about global warming is misunderstood or exaggerated when the general public hears about it. If I write a paper about global warming, I need to be precise in my conclusions so I don't contribute to this problem. If jargon helps me be precise, it's a good thing. If jargon exaggerates the importance of my work or obfuscates its meaning, it's a problem.
I think scientific writing is difficult to understand because so much is written in the passive voice. It was once acceptable to use first person pronouns, so writing has more active voice. First person pronouns fell out of favor in scientific writing about a century ago. Writers should be free to use first person pronouns if they make the writing easier to understand.
I also don't like how so many papers try to exaggerate their importance in the introduction. The first paragraph describes a very important problem while the rest of the paper only addresses a tiny part of that problem. It's done to persuade editors that a paper is of interest to more of their journal's audience. But it also contributes to misunderstanding.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
But a couple papers I wrote for journals my supervisor specifically helped me make it more terse. He made it sound as that was a big factor in successfully getting papers published (at least in the field in question, condensed matter physics). I took it to mean that being longer winded/more explanatory was considered a waste of everyone's time and potentially hiding any original findings/justification for the thing to get published in the first place.
I think (to a more limited extent) science could learn from preaching a bit. Foundational reasoning for how you got to where you are going shouldn't be left as as an excercise for the reader. "Because we need to minimize the line integral over the Lagrangian" er "Jesus saves".
Explain the syntheses of 2-(1H-benzotriazol-1-yl)-1,1,3,3-tetramethyluronium hexauorophosphate) and 1-[Bis-(dimethylamino)methyliumyl]-1H-1,2,3-triazolo[4,5- b]pyridine-3-oxide hexafluorophosphate , then explain which coupling agent should be used in which situations.
Using short words.
Don't say "Try and X", if you want to sound like you finished college.
Everybody who started finished. Somebody who flunked out the first year? They finished their college career early. Perhaps you were searching for the word "graduated?"
As for "try and X," I do agree that it lacks proper punctuation. If you want to be taken seriously you need philosophical rantings to take on a more precise syntax:
The oft-stated advice to "say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you just said." is for **oral presentations**, not writing.
When writing, it's all about organization & structure. Your introduction should clearly state the question / problem / objective, and end by summarizing your approach. Your results should be broken down by experimental design, analysis, & conclusion with each conclusion being very clearly stated. Your discussion should explicitly describe the implications of your results/conclusions beyond the experiments / results described.
Shorter is better. Push all the methodological detail to the Methods section and/or Supplementary Information. Focus on the important conclusions.
-An Academic in Engineering
As for "try and X," I do agree that it lacks proper punctuation. If you want to be taken seriously you need philosophical rantings to take on a more precise syntax:
Do or do not; there is no try.
It does not matter whether your try, it only matters whether you develop a style.
why does science have to be so exact? What, it's like they are trying to prove something, or something.
I'm in science long enough to be absolutely certain that I've never met a scientist who tried to manipulate people into anything. Sorry to be so blunt, but it seems to me that the uncanny picture you draw of scientists is just your imagination.
The real problem is that, thanks to the Internet, people can selectively choose bullshit and conspiracy theories that formerly was much harder to come by because no publisher would print that nonsense. Even worse is that at least in the US much of this crackpottery is a viable business, you can make a living out of making up some idiotic story about reptilian shape shifters (and it's easier than making a living with real science!), and people without scientific training are unable to discern crackpot pseudo-science from the real thing. Consequently, the number of people with all kinds of lunatic world views has increased, or at least they have surfaced into public view and found fellow morons on the Net.
That's the real problem, not the communication of the scientists.
I had to do a paper in 2014 in Electronics Engineering. I had adapted good lines in the draft:[Brackets show my edits]
Professor Sir Frank Holmes: [Electronic specifications] "are like a bikini; what they reveal is important, what they conceal is vital".
Otto Van Bismark: [Prototypes] "are like sausages; it's better not to see them being made."
Hal Abelson: "If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." (this is a reversal of Issac Newton's line, and was my case exactly).
All had to go - my grade depended on it. We had a period a week on report writing. People had to hand up draft headings before they knew what they were doing. External examiners were blamed. We had to sound 'like professionals.'
To write the same paper for a general audience would require I write an entire textbook first.