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Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

Generally, I don't particularly appreciate how unreadable academic articles are. It makes them ineffective at communicating their ideas. And worse - there are a lot of pieces where jargon is used as a substitute for content.

Yes, it's not unexpectedly complex for a science paper. But like many academic papers, it is needlessly complex. As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.

I often wonder - would it be that difficult to present academic writings in simple English, or at least to provide a plain English abstract? Publishing a paper takes months; what're the extra 10 minutes to make it more effective and readable?

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> As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.

You've taken a paragraph that contained a lot of details and was quite precise, and replaced it with wishy washy language. For example, they day that the cells they found are heterodimers of the T1R cells on your tongue, specifically T1R2/3. You replaced this precise explanation with the single word "similar", which could mean that they are enitrely different cells that are tautologically "similar" in also detecting sweet tastes.

They were also explaining exactly what the cells detect, which you thought is not worthy of mention.

The single short clear phrase "upper GI tract" you replaced with the longer and more akward "the part of the GI tract between the mouth and the duodenum".

Overall, your phrase would sound more complex and awkward to a practitioner, and you have reduced the information significantly. There is a reason technical language is used in technical papers - it allows you to be concise, information dense, and precise.

Who do you think the audience is for the papers published in academic journals? I imagine the intended audience is their peers and therefore the precise, unambiguous language is much more effective at conveying the ideas. Jargon exists for a reason, it isn't invented in a vacuum.

If the audience is the layperson, then of course you are right. The ideas being expressed will be completely lost upon the audience because they won't understand half the terminology used. But I suspect you might be in the minority if you think academic journals are intended to have an audience that broad.

But removing all the details and jargon that the lay person might not understand isn't even the right way to go about making the jounal articles more comprehensible to a general audience. That thows away most of the information.

I am definitely in the minority, but let's not appeal to the masses. Excessive jargon is becoming more and more unwelcome in academia as readers and reviewers are getting tired of insubstantial jargon-padded papers bordering fraud. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of jargon in communication is now generally better comprehended. For example, jargon makes the articles difficult to consume for non-English speakers, enthusiast audiences, practitioners of applied science, and academics in different domains of research. There is a small counter-culture forming that embraces the value of effective plain English communication in research and I am a part of it.

Of course, I appreciate the value of jargon where it is necessary to convey meaning. Although Wikipedia has shown us plain English often conveys the entire meaning and details just fine, making jargon superfluous.

This paper, however, isn't the best example of jargon abuse. Some phrasing in it triggered me and I've reacted too strongly. Overall, it is relatively well-written.

More thoughts from another simple English advocate like me - http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html

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