On academic writing: a personal note (2016)
sci-hub.do
sci-hub.do
> So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
https://thedetectiveshandbook.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/feynm...
This is part of a story in the book (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!) and from the book I understand it happened in the 1950s.
Basically what I'm saying is that starting point of "people read" actually might end up verbose enough that it's equally distracting. If those generalities are relevant to the study then the error of the original writer wasn't that she was too wordy, it's that she was too terse. Essentially it would have all these relevant concepts jammed into one sentence and it takes for granted that the reader is already comfortable working with these concepts.
Of course this is not necessarily an error from the perspective of people in the field--this is all from the perspective of the author of the note.
I get Feynmann's point, but you are absolutely right. I took a sociology class in symbolic interactionism years ago and what that original sentence is trying to stress is that:
* We see symbols whose meaning and interpretation is socially determined.
* Those symbols are visual but not always textual.
The original sentence explains why when a person in a blue outfit with badges on the shoulders and a peaked hat yells, "Get down!" you lay on the ground with your hands over your head, but when a person in a spandex jumpsuit and wraparound shades says the same thing you start dancing. Feymann's sentence loses that meaning.
My writing style, even my academic writing style, is a result of how I was trained as a writer: as a journalist, from spending so much time on my high school newspaper. I have long felt this was an advantage. I was trained as a writer to write straight-forward prose. And I was trained as an editor to eliminate unnecessary words and try to find the simplest way to say something.
My advisor was right, of course. Academic writing is not journalistic writing. I still try to keep my prose as simple as possible, but now I will repeat important sentiments throughout the paper. People don't read academic papers the same as news stories; readers expect to be able to read sections in relative isolation. If something is important, repeat it! But repeat it simply.
Any other tips or strange adaptations you've had to make, in order to make good writing work in academia?
Who ran the experiments? We ran the experiments. The experiments were not run. Who proved the theorem? We proved the theorem. We present. We conclude. Our analysis. It not only leads to better, simpler sentences, it's more accurate. We, as human beings who exist in this world, did these things.
Also, and this is more of a pet-peeve and may only be a practice from my particular community, but references are not nouns. "Betty White [6] already proved a version of this result" is good. "[6] already proved a version of this result" drives me batty.
I only really know academic computer science papers, and even then, papers that tend to have a systems component. Your most important claims, conclusions and results should be stated in your abstract and introduction. Some things are fundamental enough to repeat in your design/analysis and results, and some others will only end up in one of those sections. Don't use the same literal sentence, over-and-over, but reinforce important sentiments. If restating something all over your paper doesn't feel right, then it may not be as important as you think it is.
Academic papers are not novels, and they certainly are not mysteries. Don't hold out on a reveal until the end: say the most important stuff upfront. People often will not read your paper end-to-end, and usually only some of the sections. It's not possible to make your sections truly self-contained, but it's worth repeating fundamental things. If your experimental results are confirming your theoretical analysis, restate that theoretical result in your experimental results as context. If your experimental results demonstrate that a particular design decision you made in your system truly does provide better performance, restate that design decision.
I came to a different conclusion shortly before leaving my humanities graduate program: that the bad writing was covering for an absence of valuable insight. If you don't have anything to say, say a lot of bullshit. Nothing I've seen about the field in the last 15 years has made me reconsider that position.
I disagree. Academia by and large has a lot of common traits. I've been a programmer for a loooong time, and the majority of academic CS papers are opaque and inaccessible like most other academic papers I've read. I'll grant you that CS papers are generally easier to read (and not just because I'm a programmer), but that doesn't excuse the usual academic lack of clarity.
> Scientific writing is not usually meant to be consumed by readers outside a certain community.
That is a big problem tho, because it means journalists can't understand the papers. It means people can't easily verify information themselves without hours of effort. It means that papers with good information go largely unread and not understood for decades until someone resurrects it.
Clarity in writing is really important, especially when the information is precise and nuanced. Academia as a whole has done a pretty poor job of teaching people how to write papers that convey information well. I don't think its unfair to paint academia that way as a whole. And I think it is helpful for people to bring this up and make people (especially people in academia) realize that this is a bigger problem than they think.
When I thought about this, I immediately thought of a "TL;DR" section for any academic paper... until I realized that that's what the Abstract / Conclusion is sort of meant to be.
> ... the majority of academic CS papers are opaque and inaccessible like most other academic papers I've read.
The majority of CS papers' Abstract / Conclusion are also quite 'opaque and inaccessible'. Having gone through a fair share of CS papers myself (being a part of CS research), trying to get into a new area of CS is really hard when I try to read more recent academic papers, not just because of the technical jargon involved, but because of the unnecessary complex sentences that are required to convey the author(s) idea. A lot of things could be made simpler and easier to grasp. I largely agree with "it is helpful for people to bring this up and make people (especially people in academia) realize that this is a bigger problem than they think."
For a concrete example, you can’t explain algorithmic complexity precisely and also make the explanation accessible to general audiences. One is inherently mathematical and the other is just intuition. The math is exactly precise and for the same reason hard to digest.
Something seems to be going wrong there if easy to understand writing is rejected by papers.
> Journalists should consult with experts not unlike any layman consulting a lawyer for legal advice.
That's pretty gate-keepery. Also, it clearly hasn't been working. Having to consult a laywer for legal advice is a consequence of our extraordinarily and unnecessarily complex code of law and court system. Its not a good thing. Consulting experts just isn't feasible for most people. Its not a good state of things IMO.
Even if it is true that papers are unclear, the incentives for academics is to get prestige, which follows from getting papers accepted, which follows from getting (usually) 3 experts to say their paper is the least terrible paper in their stack. Professors need 30-40 papers in 5-6 years so journalists reading their paper for a 2 minute story is probably not on their radar. The process for getting a paper accepted is tuned precisely to be understood by the 3 reviewers, and further synthesis is out of scope.
Basically, it is incorrect to view papers as a way to spread knowledge to the masses (this is a common stance taken by science), but they are rather a form of academic currency which can be converted into other digestible forms, such as books. Often the knowledge in the paper is not even yet broadly accepted and may even be unsafe/incorrect e.g., medical research. So yes, consult with experts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively
Do you worry about the effectiveness of your writing style? As emerging scholars, perfecting the craft of writing is an essential component of developing as graduate students, and yet resources for honing these skills are largely under utilized. Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.
A key point in the video is that when you are a student the reader is paid to read your paper.
When you are not a student - the reader pays to read your paper (or book). Is it worth their time or money?
"I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a litte practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"
> Calvin’s vocabulary puzzles some readers but Calvin has never been a literal six-year-old. Besides, I like Calvin’s ability to precisely articulate stupid ideas.
- Bill Waterson
Someone posted this quote by Edsger Dijkstra yesterday: “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
A personal note, I'm a native english speaker living abroad, with a non-native-english speaking superiors. While their writing is quite good, i find myself battling constantly for what we might consider 'better, more clear' writing, in favor of the current scientific writing 'trends' in our field.
A successful paper or two with a weird phrase or typo will end up reshaping that field to adopt this language, as authors of subsequent work attempt to align themselves to the original topic.
At least in fields I was familiar with, a lot of Ph.D. training focuses on making people into good writers. Clear communication with both peers and the general population is rewarded; it is damn near impossible to get ahead without these skills.
I don't know what you mean by "hard to read." A good scientific paper is supposed to be very information rich. It condenses 100 other very dense papers into 4 pages, leaving just a few pages for the new contribution of the current work.
Even for a very clear paper, for a field I am well versed in, a good paper takes 10 readings to understand. Because of the information density.
But synthesizing newly discovered knowledge that only a handful you know (and often don't even understand all aspects of), into something others can understand is far harder than you think it is.
As a grad student, I've found explaining my work to non-academic laypersons to be a useful exercise. It's similar to those "Expert X explains Topic Y to N Levels of Education" videos and is good sanity check as to whether anyone cares about your work beyond the cloistered ivory tower of academia.
My hypothesis is this. In a single piece of academic writing, the author has several competing goals:
1. Get the ideas of the paper into the reader's head.
2. Persuade the reader to believe those ideas and that they are objectively true.
3. Give the reader the impression that the author is a prestigious, intelligent person doing difficult, original work.
When people argue for clearer writing, they are advocating disregarding the latter two, but authors don't have that luxury. In particular:
A big part of academic style, I think is an over-correction for a failure mode of 2. As we can see in the popular media today, often the best way to persuade people is to child-like appeals to emotion stated boldly and repeatedly. But that is also effective at persuading people of things that aren't actually true.
Academics are seeking truth, so they are rightly suspicious of any style that veers too close to unjustified proclamation and verbal strong-arming. Thus a style that is more passive and hedges its bets also comes across as more trustworthy. That is a necessary goal for the author too. A paper that is understood but not believed is no more useful than a paper that is incomprehensible.
The other part of persuading people is the impression of the merits of the author themselves. If some rando parent at your kids' soccer match tells you that wearing fabric on your face prevents disease, you might rightly disregard it. When a highly reputable epidemiologist does, you pay attention because they have earned your trust.
We grant more prestige to people, especially people professing novel insight, if they have a reputation of doing hard things. If the writing makes the idea seem too obvious or easy, we might wonder why it hasn't been discovered before? And if not, perhaps there is some fatal flaw?
All of this means that authors have real incentives to write in a more complex, less clear style, even though it has negative consequences for other goals. Choosing a style always involves trade-offs and our style is always intepreted in a certain social context that affects how it will be read.
> If you submit a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.
Anyone who clicks my profile will find I have no problem generating vast amounts of text in my own style or even as a character, but writing for a journal ties me into knots.
> No other re-ligion (lit. “back-binding” [one etymological analysis of the word /religion/] to some ideas to rely on for humans) is necessary for a society, but only reasoned about principles: reflection, symmetry, cooperative construction (by too many CAs -> 1CA).
I'm never explained as to how the etymology of re-ligion relates to the whole thesis, much less what the etymology actually means. That first sentence will already make 90% of the people in the humanities to close their tabs. Please explain concepts like these in full sentences, than rather jot out abbreviations and notes that only you could decipher. I'm actually intrigued about this etymology, but I can't understand! What is "CA"? What do you mean by morality relating to symmetry?
> Evolved religions like Christianity also abide to following principles. Their followers do:
1. think/reflect about the world (our thinking: one instance of reflection)
2. they are in search of beauty, of beautiful/good actions/deeds (symmetry (1))
3. they try to establish one text, one book, as core of their religion.
Ah, I don't have the energy to read the rest of this, people deserve a more legible manifesto than that.
* Uniting humanities and natural sciences by the principle of reflection #+BEGIN_SRC One single root of natural sciences and humanities: reflection. #+END_SRC See Principle #1 below.
* How to unite and manage the world by a natural/logical religion
abstract
No other re-ligion (lit. "back-binding" [one etymological analysis of the word /religion/] to some ideas to rely on for humans) is necessary for a society, but only reasoned about principles (prin-ciple: the thing to grasp first , primus+capere): reflection, symmetry, cooperative construction (by too many Central Authorities [too-many-CAs] -> only 1 Central Authority [1CA]; see Cultural Principle below).
Evolved religions like Christianity also abide to following principles. Their followers do: 1. think/reflect about the world (our thinking: one instance of reflection) 2. they are in search of beauty, of beautiful/good actions/deeds (symmetry (1)) to form a sustainable society 3. they try to establish one text, one book, as core of their religion: an instance of a CA (among other religions with their corresponding CAs)
(1) Seems like rather a far fetched argument, but who is not in search of beauty? The necessary association of beauty with symmetry anyhow is clearly shown in arts education about proportions, geometries of the human face or body. Good deeds and mutual respect/reciprocity of citizens, showing off characteristics of symmetry, too?!
Uncovering an abstract core of every human religion is our goal here for the betterment of education and world management. (Respect for every evolved religion is granted, but having different people adhering to different religions is not a good way to start thinking about a unity of humanity -- despite the potential of tolerance in various religions.)
The priciples reflection, symmetry, and cooperative construction are elaborated below.