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Investigating the Complexity of Academic Writing (theatlantic.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the news-for-words dept.

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."

6 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Word limit not helping by getuid() · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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... :-)

    1. Re:Word limit not helping by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Depending on the field, the jargon does allow more concise explanations in a limited space and the intended audience will probably be familiar with it and have no problems with the jargon. As long as the study design and statistical analysis are easy to understand, I don't think it's a problem.

      But there are other disciplines where it seems like it's a competition to find the best purple prose and to say as little as possible with as many words as possible or obfuscate one's meaning so much that it's impossible to infer the author's real meaning. There's a reason that something like the postmodernism generator exists.

      Take a look at the Sokal hoax for a good example of this. Some journal (and one that just has authors pay for publications) accepted an article that was utter nonsense by intent.

  2. Re:Jargon by duckintheface · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think this is basically correct. Another way to say it is that "simple" is not always clear. But good technical writers will make the text as simple as possible, consistent with clarity. I remember in my Chemistry 101 class I had written a description of an experiment. The grad student grading the work had written over my text "Make it sound more scientific!". and the professor who had checked the papers had written on top of that, "NO".

    --
    "He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
  3. Why should scientist write for the common people? by postposthaste · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Scientists should be *everything*! by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Chemist here - the jargon is necessary to convey our complex views in one word. If Im writing and use: SOJT (second-order Jahn Teller), all chemists in my field know what Im talking about. Its not always pompousness. Many things we discuss dont have good 'regular' word analogies and we stretch the meaning of other words for our own use. Its not uncommon for someone to invent a word and try to use it to describe a process or molecule.

    I absolutely agree with this. The reason we have jargon is the same reason we have nouns. It's useful to have a word with which things can be referred to. It's also hard to know what people mean when they refer to "no jargon". How far precisely does one have to back off before it's jargon free? I assume mathematical concepts like even "convolution" shouldn't get a free pass.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  5. it's all about precision by thegreatemu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.