Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

I often wonder while reading an academic paper how the writing could be as hopelessly bad as it is.

This type of manipulation and plagiarism may be partially to blame, but the academic writing style has also gone completely off the rails to the point that half the journal articles being published today read as if written by some kind of paper writing AI robot even when I am quite certain that that isn't the case. And no, I am not talking about cases where the author is writing in a non-native language.

I have a theory that it may have to do with imposter syndrome and a need to sound smart. The author, fearing that they don't really belong and at any moment will be found out, therefore never making tenure, starts jamming academic sounding words where they don't belong and stretching sentences with commas and semi colons until the whole thing is just as insufferable to read as it was to write.

There is also the possibility that there are just a lot of terrible writers out there.

I am sure this was not your intention or meaning, but please be aware that it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to write perfect English. English is a language you have to intuit. In contrast to other languages, it has very few fixed rules. Writing elegantly in English is most certainly an art form.

Of course, writing good science is hard enough for native speakers. It is very difficult for the vast majority of people on the planet - no matter how good their research.

And just so we are clear: Not everyone can afford professional editing services at every point in their career.

We meet in English under the premise that it allows for universal communication. In this, we accept that English natives are almost infinitely more privileged in writing, speaking, conferencing and networking. We also have to accept that the level of English proficiency varies, and - especially English - is easy to learn and so difficult to master.

I think at least skimming some edition of the

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicago_Manual_of_Style

and some of what is available under

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=military+writing+guide

would be useful for american english and technical writing.

I think you missed this part of the comment to which you were replying:

> And no, I am not talking about cases where the author is writing in a non-native language.

The issue here is not bad English in the sense you'd expect from a learner or someone who just isn't fluent. Nobody minds that, although you say not everyone can afford professional editing services: that's what journals are theoretically for!

The actual problem here is fluent English that is written in a totally bizarre style only found in academic papers. I've found that academic-ese is less of a problem in good computer science papers (like the one this article is about), but it crops up in some fields a lot. A trivial and not very important example is the way minor things are routinely described as "novel", a word you rarely find in everyday English, but in the research literature everything is "novel".

> it is virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to write perfect English. English is a language you have to intuit. In contrast to other languages, it has very few fixed rules. Writing elegantly in English is most certainly an art form.

Learning to write well in any language is difficult. English is not exceptional as a language. Its influence in economic activity is what gives it prevalance.

Oh that is certainly not true. English is a fuzzy merchant pidgin but that's precisely what makes it almost trivial to learn, plus the CIA in it's infinite wisdom has seen it fit to encourage production of deluge of entertainment media that make immersing oneself in English content easier than any other language.

There used to be bad writing contests for academics. One of the famous winners was Judith Butler's timeless[1]:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

You just can't argue with that.

[1] Ironically.

A friend submitted a paper to a journal in humanities. The reviewer said "his English is informal". In other words, these reviewers are asking for stilted English.

This makes me think of people smelling bad, in dark robes, wearing white powdered wigs, frantically using their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_fan

I also get this feedback on my papers. E.g. saying that it's written "more like a blog post".

Of course, they're not wrong. It is written more like a blog post. Because the writing style used in blog posts is hands down better than the writing style used in scientific papers. Blogs talk about the real reasons you worked on something, they go through simple examples, and they mention where you struggled and what you found confusing and what you tried that didn't work. All of these things are very useful for understanding, and in my experience almost entirely lacking from papers. Or at least, in my experience they're lacking from modern papers. I think in papers from 100 years ago the authors tended to talk more about their worries and their excitement e.g. [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/RZfCqWZ8EAY?t=630

"There is also the possibility that there are just a lot of terrible writers out there. "

Surely they are and writing in a way that is easy to read and understand is an art in itself.

But I would agree, that the main reason is probably the intention to sound smarter, than they are. Whole scientific disciplines seem to live by that standard.

This is not limited to science though, I recall a german poet (I think Heinrich Heine) said about his fellow poets:

You only fly so high like the swallow, that no one can actually hear your singing.

Good essay by Orwell that touches on this sort of thing https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... I used to be guilty of writing this way and one of my high school English teachers recommended I read it. I've tried to take the message to heart ever since.

Older academic writing was frequently beautiful. See the classic "On Cooling the Mark Out" paper. Every sentence is a joy to read.

https://infofranpro.wdfiles.com/local--files/19520101-on-coo...

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