Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday, 30 October 2015

Academic writing is needlessly complex


http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/
at
Labels: ,

6 comments:

  1. Adam Synergy30 October 2015 at 13:42

    I guess we've all encountered someone that favours the use of 'big words' in long overly complicated sentences. Why do they do this ? I suppose they believe that it makes them appear clever. Of course they're completely wrong.
    There is a body of published research arguing that the use of clear, simple words over needlessly complex ones can actually make authors appear more intelligent.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rhys Taylor30 October 2015 at 14:37

    There also seems to be an overwhelming tendency to want to make things as dull as possible. While this may make things very precise, it also makes things unreadable. Every week (at the very least) I see papers which sound interesting, probably have some neat conclusions... and then after five minutes I start yawning and give up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. David Lazarus30 October 2015 at 14:42

    I totally agree on this topic. Academic texts are often written with unnecessarily complex grammar.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Robert Minchin30 October 2015 at 18:50

    From some recent interactions (which Rhys will recall), some referees now see it part of their job to stamp out any writing that tends towards being readable.

    ReplyDelete
  5. David Lazarus30 October 2015 at 20:27

    Robert Minchin​ - Yes, gods forbid making anything useful understandable to the laymen. 😅

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rhys Taylor30 October 2015 at 20:49

    To give you some idea of what we're up against, MNRAS insist using the words, "per cent" instead of "%", as though we were measuring galaxies hydrogen content in American dollar value...  we can't even use contractions, for crying out loud. Even Astronomy & Computing wanted to change my section heading "What's in a name ?" to "What is in a name ?", which sounds ridiculous and would have had Shakespeare coughing up blood, probably. I told them to change it back, I hope they listen.

    ReplyDelete

Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

An Astonishing Level of Humanisation

I've mentioned the difficulties of both promoting/censoring violent action on social media before  and I can't really think of much ...

  • Circles of bigotry
    "To claim that you are being discriminated against because you have lost your right to discriminate against others shows a gross lack o...
  • Where Americans think Ukraine is
    Where Americans think Ukraine is These are the guesses of 2066 Americans as to where Ukraine is. Only 1 in 6 were correct. Presumably the...
  • A war on science or just people being unscientific ?
    Hmmm. [The comments below include a prime example of someone claiming they're interested in truth but just want higher standard, where...