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."

Comments

Word limit not helping

[getuid()]

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... :-)

Re:Word limit not helping

[Obfuscant]

How much text would it take to make a submission in a theoretical physics journal understandable to the average person.

Can't talk about physics specifically, but in the journals I read it would double the size of the article to just make every point explicit. I.e., there are a lot of things that are written that depend on the reader having a good enough background to understand the implications. To make it understandable to the "average person" would take an entire journal for each article. There have been times when I've had to reread one sentence several times and then look at the equations before I could get the full meaning.

Reading a scientific article is not like reading a newspaper or story in People. It takes work. Doing it any other way would make the articles too long and boring to the intended audience. Making it transparent to the "average person" would leave the average intended reader going "yes, that's obvious ...".

Scientists should be *everything*!

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:Jargon

[duckintheface]

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".

We are the Tamarians

[Okian Warrior]

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.