Investigating the Complexity of Academic Writing (theatlantic.com) 160
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."
Word limit not helping (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... :-)
Re:Word limit not helping (Score:4, Interesting)
But there are other disciplines [xkcd.com] 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 [elsewhere.org] exists.
Take a look at the Sokal hoax [wikipedia.org] 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.
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But there are other disciplines where it seems like it's a competition to find the best purple prose
Math textbooks, for one. I've seen so many texts at a more advanced level where the author's purpose is evidently to dazzle the student reader with his or her "brilliance" even if it makes the text no longer something the student can learn from.
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How much text would it take to make a submission in a theoretical physics journal understandable to the average person.
Re:Word limit not helping (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ...".
Re:Word limit not helping (Score:4, Informative)
For theoretical physics I think it is hopeless. There are just too man concepts that would take too long to introduce. I'm a PhD physicist and I can't read theoretical physics papers - not the jargon, but I'm just not comfortable with the concepts. Just try explaining a HIggs boson to a non-physicist - and that is a decades old concept. Strings are hopeless, but they are just the basics needed for modern physics.
Other subjects are probably similar.
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How much text would it take to make a submission in a theoretical physics journal understandable to the average person.
As a sibling post pointed out, Einstein's papers were quite readable. The jargon associated with Sting Theory was, as it turns out, a huge red flag that the entire field was a waste of time and careers.
QM in a bit of an odd duck, as beyond a certain point you can't explain the details in any natural language, it has to be math. That's fine, that's not jargon. QM has a particular problem in that some in the field seem to delight in QM being hard for non-experts to understand, and that attitude shouldn't
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It's also that fact that everything has to be a hedge. You can't simply say, "My original research results show that stimulus A causes response B with p<0.5, and this is what I did". The first problem with that sentence is that you have to be both original (work not done before) and not original (work based closely on work someone else has already published, or else it's too much of a leap). The second problem with that sentence is that you have to hedge, saying instead "seems to indicate", or "possibly
Not word limit: audience, language (Score:2)
The point of any written work is to communicate effectively with the reader. To do that you have to target it to your audience startin
Non academics don't get it... (Score:2, Insightful)
Journal articles are written to get past reviewers in prestigious journals. Blame the publish or perish system.
Scientists should be *everything*! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
We are the Tamarians (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikia.com], 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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
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I might add that another 40% is learning how to associate random, meaningless names to fundamental principles.
Once you learn the history of these names, they are no longer random. And what's easier to remember and say? "Legendre transform" or "an involutive transformation on the real-valued convex functions of one real variable"?
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There's a Star Trek episode about Tamarians [wikia.com], 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.
They didn't communicate with jargon. As your link points out, they communicated with allegory and metaphor.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
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It's a land-grab for esteem by having something named after the researcher.
The person doing the naming that way is never the researcher who came up with the concept, it's other people who quote the concept and refer it by the original author's name. If the concept is sufficiently useful and gets cited that way a couple of times, the name sticks.
Fun fact -- experienced researchers know their field sufficiently well that they can refer to papers by naming the authors (disambiguating by context). If you can't even remember a couple of the most important concepts by non-descriptive
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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.
Exactly. A lot of scientists are just really bad at writing. They aren't trying to be unintelligible, but they lack the skill to do better.
I could say they should have taken more English classes in college, but honestly, have you tried reading any academic writing by literature professors? The jargon and unintelligibility can be just as bad as any science paper.
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Well, that's because they call it "literary science" ;-)
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Word processors
the what now?
I don't think I've reviewed a single paper written on a word processor which was't utter junk. Papers in computer vision are almost universally written in LaTeX. It tends to be that the people who don't use the de-facto tools of the trade also don't tend to write terribly good papers.
But yes, a wordprocessor or even half decent text editor will catch spelling errors. The grammar checker is totally useless though.
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Word processors
the what now?
I don't think I've reviewed a single paper written on a word processor which was't utter junk. Papers in computer vision are almost universally written in LaTeX. It tends to be that the people who don't use the de-facto tools of the trade also don't tend to write terribly good papers.
But yes, a wordprocessor or even half decent text editor will catch spelling errors. The grammar checker is totally useless though.
If you speak a halfway decent language the spellchecker is totally useless too as it will expect your language to consist of a finite amount of words.
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If you speak a halfway decent language the spellchecker is totally useless too as it will expect your language to consist of a finite amount of words.
Well, most academic writing is in English. Apparently this doesn't qualify as a halfway decent language...? But it certainly has a finite amount of words and a spell checker catches many common typos. For jargon words not in the dictionary, those are trivial to add and there's a finite number of them too.
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Agreed. I'm automatically more likely to trust a paper if it uses Computer Modern font. And less likely to trust it if I can tell that instances of "fl" and "fi" have not been converted to ligatures. :)
I am generally less like to trust article using Computer Modern, it is one of the first things students learn to change in LaTex, and if I see ligatures in computer code, something has gone very very wrong.
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But it's not supposed to be a pissing contest about formatting or putting up arbitrary barriers. It's that there's a correlation between poor papers and use of word. I have literally never had a paper to review that was written in word that's been good enough to accept.
I have seen no correlation with choice of font, and CMR is, in fact a very common choice, especially as some journal style files actually use it. BMVC (a computer vision conference) certainly does. By distrusting CMR, you're automatically dis
Re:Scientists should be *everything*! (Score:4, 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.
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I was referring to academic scientists as well for the same resons.
I agree about 1 and 5. Good writing certainly helps. It's better overall if you can explain clearly, because if you can't commnuicate, then you don't really contribute to the pool of knowledge.
But writing is hard. Some people can write well naturally. Most students though have dropped most writing related training some time previously to concentrate on the science. Dragging a first paper out of a new PhD student is generally an incredibly pa
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4. Deadlines don't just happen if you plan.
You can't plan to make research go faster. If your big result comes 3 days before the prestigious conference deadline, then you have 3 days to write the paper.
5. Job security of a scientist is writing. Researchers are measured in terms of the papers they write, not science they produce.
No that misses the nuance of it. The job security of the scientist is essentially citations. The writing has to be merely good enough.
More money is not the answer here.There should
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But young scientists are the busy researchers! It's "publish or perish", so the only thing that young researchers care about is how to get their papers past the reviewers. The competition on the academic job market has become insane and it's mostly about counting the number of publications in top journals.
My personal experience is that lucid and clear writing does not help at all, more technical and obscure papers seem to generally have a higher chance of being accepted. What helps is extensive proof readi
Jargon is necessary (Score:2)
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, star
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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.
Good point -- however, he gets it into a form where people:
can understand his descriptions well enough to use their elements to create well-formed questions.
It's more a question of audience (Score:2)
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.
Screw academic writing... (Score:2)
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It's only plagiarism if you don't cite your sources.
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Uhh ... (Score:2)
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/ [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 t
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grade level of 16 for understandability
I guess that's equivalent to the average person beginning graduate school?
How to deconstruct almost anything (Score:3)
How to deconstruct almost anything [fudco.com]
Had to stop reading TFA (Score:3)
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Like Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker is also one of those guys who basically stopped doing academic work and started writing one popular science book after the other. It's an industry and doesn't have much to do with actual research. They are kept by their universities because they popularize difficult topics and attract students and funding, not because of their great contributions to science.
Reviews and citations (Score:2)
All of the above (Score:2)
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'
Why should scientist write for the common people? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm commenting to express approval for your comment, and to counteract the useless negative comment that an AC already posted to it.
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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
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Reading is hard! (Score:2)
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 M
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Is high-falootin' one word or two?
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It's from the Old English, chagflkningrbbr which means "one who eats smelly cheese". I believe the OED has it as one word, but what do those English pansies know, right?
Obligatory XKCD (Score:3)
Opacity of jargon has various advantages, depending on the field. [xkcd.com]
A rose by any other name (Score:2)
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
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Of course in science, most of the terminology didn't exist in the last millennium. It would not be any easier to understand if it used Germanic roots. See Poul Anderson's Uncleftish Beholding for an essay on Atomic Theory written in Germanic English.
Academics write the way they think (Score:4, Informative)
This is one of the reasons I didn't enter academia (Score:4)
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 [worrydream.com]. 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.
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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/he
arXiv vs. snarXiv (Score:2)
Try the test yourself:
http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/ [snarxiv.org]
it's all about precision (Score:4, 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.
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I'm not a scientist, and I don't think anything you wrote above sounds like buzzwords and jargon. The implications may not be immediately clear to me, but the facts you've communicated certainly are.
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Those statement's don't mean the same thing. For example: consider an experiment where X was expected, however the magnitude of the X effect is unknown, relative to background noise.
1. "We find that, at 90% confidence level, there is no statistically significant evidence for X" means that the experiment background noise overwhelmed X.
2. "We found that X didn't actually happen." could be a groundbreaking result. However, if background noise was large, how would you know?
3. "We find that, at 75% confiden
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Those statement's don't mean the same thing. For example: consider an experiment where X was expected, however the magnitude of the X effect is unknown, relative to background noise.
Sure they do. For example: consider a paper where the statements do mean the same thing.
You really can't say from the single statement that was described as: "there is simply no way to turn that statement into 'common' English.". The paper would provide the context, in which this simplification would or would not be appropriate. For one paper, the simplifcation would be perfectly fitting. For another paper, a different simplification would be fitting.
The point the AC seemed to be making was that it is rathe
Scientific writing doesn't have to be opaque! (Score:2)
My favorite discussion of this topic is The Science of Scientific Writing [americanscientist.org]. 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 "stres
Why Legal Language is the way it is likewise scien (Score:2)
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.
Complex Issues (Score:2)
The bad writing habit I see the most is... (Score:2)
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.
Jargon and my complaints about scientific writing (Score:3)
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.
not that I have a huge amount of experience (Score:3)
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".
Yes, we are forced to write shit (Score:2)
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
Consider the dang audience! (Score:3)
To write the same paper for a general audience would require I write an entire textbook first.
Jargon (Score:3)
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.
Re:Jargon (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".
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Not all scientists and other academics write in a complex, jargon filled style, but many do. I have tended to stop using so many acronyms because sentences start to sound like code, rather than plain English. There has been a shift toward writing in as simple a way as possible considering the subject matter. It is tough to go into lots of details about a genome-wide association study and the mapped gene alterations in at-risk groups (single nucleotide polymorphisms and others) without getting a bit complica
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Not all scientists and other academics write in a complex, jargon filled style, but many do.
I have found that the amount of complexity and jargon is inversely correlated with the competence of the scientist. Great scientists, like Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein, were famous for their clear and simple explanations. Poor scientists use a lot of complexity and jargon to camouflage the fact that they aren't actually saying anything important.
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Well, that may be true, but I have no way of confirming that because some excellent works that I have read were extremely dense and complicated since the subject matter required it. Albert Einstein never had to explain biology. He would have probably said it was too complicated for him to explain properly, because, to be honest, it is. Relativity, while not obvious to most people, is still a relatively simple concept (pun intended).
So you are probably right that more competent writers are better at making t
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Naw, the more complicated the subject is, the more benefit you get from attempting to communicate clearly and efficiently. It is silly to presume it is a wasted effort unless the result is some sort of maximal simplicity. There is a giant sack of assumptions here, and I'll bet many of them are also involved in the low quality of academic writing referred to in the story.
Just because the subject is dense, that doesn't mean that the subject benefits less from clarity, or for removing jargon words in the cases
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Simply put, scientifically accurate and correct makes for a poor read. Things like references and foot notes et al whilst valid do disrupt the whole reading process and create disjointed prose. In printed format there is no real solution however in digital format two versions could be provided, the more scientific accurate and correct version and a more readable and enjoyable version.
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Not sure how much of the primary literature you read, I have to read it every day. Acronyms have become a nightmare, some articles I have read have a 1/4 of a page of listed acronyms in a footnote at the beginning. Single sentences can have up to 5 or 6 acronyms in them. So I would start by telling researchers to cool it with the acronyms. You can't write clearly in 3 and 4 letter codes. Nonetheless, some of these articles are extremely well written and very clear as long as you know the acronyms. I rarely
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Poor scientists use a lot of complexity and jargon to camouflage the fact that they aren't actually saying anything important.
I think excessive jargon is much more a problem in the humanities than it is in most sciences. To get published in most
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I have found that the amount of complexity and jargon is inversely correlated with the competence of the scientist. Great scientists, like Richard Feynman, and Albert Einstein, were famous for their clear and simple explanations.
They may have been - WHEN THEY WERE SPEAKING TO THE PUBLIC - academic writing is different matter, maybe you should review their papers to appreciate the difference.
http://www.academia.edu/375613... [academia.edu]
https://www.google.co.uk/url?s... [google.co.uk]
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I've found a good place to practice simplification skills is to spend some time editing articles on SimpleWiki http://simple.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org]
By limiting your vocabulary to simple words, you really have to capture the essence of the thing you're describing. Other resources for details still exist outside of the simple wiki if the reader needs them. And there is a never-ending supply of badly written articles that can use your help.
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Yes. Keeping the wording as simple as possible without sacrificing meaning is laudable. But some would argue that you may lose elegance when a more obscure word or phrase is more enlightening, but less well understood. So I suppose there is a balance that needs to be maintained between simplicity and sublime.
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I was once looking for a method of calculating 1-way latency between two computers. The standard method is to take a packet's round trip time, and divide by two. But that only gives you the average latency. It might take 100 ms to send the packet, and 20 ms to receive the response, but RTT/2 gives you 60 ms for each. So I found this paper where a grad student claimed to have found a more accurate method, and had this huge formula to represent it. I spent a whole day reading that paper, and at the end I foun
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IEEE journals within my area of expertise are often nearly indecipherable. Often once you penetrate the awful overuse of lingo anf jargon, the underlying achievement wilts. I think the authors often know this and use buzzwords and obfuscation to get published since they can't do so otherwise.
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My degree's in Applied Mathematics. You should see our papers... They're almost nothing but numbers and symbols!
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They're almost nothing but numbers and symbols!
Aren't ALL scientific papers nothing but numbers and symbols?
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For some definition of symbol, yes. Assuming we're to consider the alphabet symbols then, certainly. You *might* be over-thinking it, however. ;-)
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Not only that, but we are almost always writing for a specific targeted audience, not the general public.
It would be horribly boring to read papers written in the field you are studying if they all explained the same thing over and over again as half of the papers content. Well written papers will explain less common jargon / terms once, the first time they are used, while not having to explain common jargon to the field.
I for one don't want to write to the lowest common denominator about my research. I wri
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Targeting science journalists is a good middle ground between targeting only experts in your field and trying to target absolutely everyone. Like the parent said, "explain less common jargon / terms once," and you can figure that a journalist worth their salt will already know or be able to look up the more common terms.
Doing this has the added bonus that if your work happens to be newsworthy, it's much more likely that it will be explained correctly in the mainstream media.
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I know this is a crazy thing to say, but if you read the story you'll find that isn't what they're talking about. The problem is not that specialists use specialist jargon freely, it is that they use longwinded specialist jargon to explain the simplest of concepts, and jump through significant syntactic hoops in order to construct sentences that use the jargon words repeatedly and exclusively, and entirely without cause. Just see the examples in the story. Nobody is talking about dumbing-down papers, they'r
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Don't say "Try and X", if you want to sound like you finished college.
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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:
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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 wr
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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.
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"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" - A. Einstein
The papers are not as simple as possible but not simpler. They are needlessly complicated.
Or perhaps I should have said:
"The publications exhibit superfluous failure to acheive the threshold of maximal simplicity whilst maintaining preservation of the requisite specificity."
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Your attempt to refute my statement disregards cost associated with the simplification - a core tenet of my claim.
I recognize that there would be a cost associated with the simplification, but I assert that the articles are not simply neglecting to pay that cost but in fact deliberately put effort into obfuscating things.
I've had conversations and correspondence with many scientists; and they do not normally speak or write anything like what they submit for publication.
Yes, they do use lots of jargon, and technical language as needed when needed, but the language and sentence structure they use normally is far more ac
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I've had conversations and correspondence with many scientists; and they do not normally speak or write anything like what they submit for publication.
When they are conversing with you, they are not writing for publication in a forum intended for their peers. They understand their audience. They also understand the medium.
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they are not writing for publication in a forum intended for their peers
I assure you that you are correct. They are absolutely writing specifically to attempt to impress their peers by trying to sound more intelligent perhaps sound more credible by writing more complex prose.
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Champagne is jargon for 'Sparkling wine from a particular region of france'. So wrong.
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Indeed and it's a perfect example of why we use jargon. Everyone even vaguely familiar with alcoholic beverages knows what champagne is. The sparkling fermented beverage which the OP used to try to sound jargony is in fact the opposite. It's not jargon, it's using a combination of more general words attempting to describe precisely what is meant.
And it could equally well refer to lager! Or certain types of cider. Or traditional ginger beer.