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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... :-)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.