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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."
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... :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's only plagiarism if you don't cite your sources.
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.
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 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".
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.