Can the Academic Write?

Another issue I didn't see in this interview is that academics (at least in the sciences) aren't trained to write, but they are often held to the same standards as those who are trained. Moreover, a scientist's job isn't primarily to write for a general audience, so it's hard to say they've failed in that regard. Whereas a journalist who gets the science wrong when reporting on it (beyond simply dumbing it down or massaging the truth for comprehension) fails at the defining feature of the job: reporting the facts.

I think this interview misses a very important point. Academic writing is necessarily in English, which is by far not the native language of most academic writers. In journalism or even science dissemination to the general public, people usually write in their native language, which helps a lot to be perceived as a good writer compared to an academic paper written in English by a non-native speaker who will thus attempt to mimic the academic style of writing of their scientific community.

I see this often as a criticism of legal writing as well, and while some of it is legitimate, there's also an element of academic writing having a specific purpose. And that purpose isn't entertainment or pleasantness - it's precision.

Like recently, when I had a sentence using the phase "missing completely at random" and someone deleted "completely" for clarity. That word was there for a very specific purpose - "missing completely at random" and "missing at random" mean different things.

Academics seem prone to what Language Log terms "nerdview", the baffling but usually implicit assumption that lay audiences are intimately familiar with the terminology, idioms and house style of your academic niche.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4509

No, for the most part they cannot. That's why it is so exceptional when there is an academic that has a solid grasp of the subject and can make that intelligible to the general public.

When I read computer science papers, I often find them written in a rigid, academic style compared to a blog post or a book. I sometimes skip reading papers for that reason. This is sad — there's all this human knowledge that was painstakingly discovered that readers are skipping because it was poorly presented.

One good writing technique is to take a complex idea, simplify it by eliminating some details, and present the simplified version. Then, once readers have understood that, present the details that you left out.

Maybe academics are afraid that someone will take the earlier sentences out of context and claim they're "wrong". When I was in college, my advisor picked out such an introductory sentence and said that I should be more accurate. I explained that it's just a simplification and that the details he's worried about are in the next para. He said, "That's fine, but this sentence should be correct by itself." The earlier sentence was wrong only if one picks nits. Actually, it was simplified, not wrong.

I wonder if academics don't understand or respect (enough) the principles of good writing.

A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly relate to this discussion.

Academic writing is all about compressing complex topics and ideas with a long history into as concise a form as possible without losing accuracy. (At least in the natural sciences, where I come from; some people would say otherwise about some humanities, but that is beside the point.) This is why we use technical jargon: it helps us express precisely what we mean in as few words as possible. If you've ever tried explaining something highly scientific to a lay audience, you'll know how tedious it can be if you can't use your technical terms. One of my readers doesn't know a word I used? That's what dictionaries and textbooks are for. I can expect all my readers to already have a sufficient background knowledge to understand what I have written. In academic writing, the greatest sins I can commit are misrepresenting something, omitting something important, or - heaven forbid - not citing somebody correctly (= plagiarizing).

When writing for a nonacademic audience, everything changes. Suddenly I can no longer assume any background knowledge on the part of my readers, every word that sounds vaguely technical needs to be explained. Also, my readers really don't care who said xyz or who disagrees with him, they "just want the facts". Oftentimes, they do not understand that nobody actually knows exactly what these "facts" are yet, and that all we have are various hypotheses and theories vying for the upper hand. So how do I as a writer present them with as understandable an overview as possible, while still doing justice to the different points of view? It is a constant balancing act that all too often doesn't have a satisfactory solution.

Apart from the question of content, the language I use is quite another issue. As j2kun pointed out, scientists aren't trained to write - at least not in the sense journalists are. Scientists are taught to write for scientists: concisely and accurately. Writing in a way that is easy or pleasant to read is not a criterion. So when they do write for the general public, they need to completely overthrow whatever they have learnt about writing and go with a totally different style. That is not easy. All the time I have to keep in mind that the greatest sins here are a) being uninteresting and b) being unintelligible - even when clarity is bought at the expense of accuracy.

So yes, academics can write. It just isn't the type of writing lay audiences appreciate. All in all, a little more patience on both sides of the divide would probably be a good thing.

I write "Analogous to the above construction, we now have the following." This is stilted for a normal article, but is the expected academic style. Academics can write well enough to reach their peers. Complaining that every academic is not good at writing (see, I did it again!) is a bit like saying that policemen are not good novelists.

It might be hard to hear the truth from a non-academic as in this article. Some of you might feel better to hear it from a peer. Those I refer to "The Science of Scientific Writing" by George Gopen & Judith Swan published 1990 in the American Scientist: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-s... However many scientific publications are awful to read. Including mine.

OK, if nothing else, TIL that there is a legit journal called Speculum which specializes in the history of the Middle Ages. (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/spc/current) Other than that, this article didn't seem to say anything new.

I can't.

Don't know how I even got my degree. Probably because my prof. was nice and thought I know my shit despite writing badly about it :/

People that write articles about computers most certainly cannot. Words are often misspelled and their grammar is atrocious. It's so sad...