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Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

Your critique assumes that the goal of scientific writing is to be intelligible to lay people.

In truth, the entire weird and crufty vocabulary is simply a common set of placeholders that makes it easier to grasp research, because the in-group learns to understand them as such.

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As a computer scientist (you can check my publication record through my profile) and an (aspiring) novelist, I disagree. A lot of papers are just poorly written, full stop.

It is also true that science literature contains a lot of jargon that encodes important information. But that doesn't excuse the fact that a lot of scientific writing could be improved substantially, even if the only audience were experts in the same field.

Yeah, a lot of scientific writing is just downright useless, and I don't just mean that in the "haha, it's hard to read, but it's ok"-sense. For example, in many fields (parts of theoretical physics, many parts of econ) publications are so hard to read that "reading" a paper looks less like "learning from the author by following what they did on paper" and more like "rederiving the same thing that the author claims to do, except by yourself with only some minor guidance from the paper." This is, frankly, absolutely insane, but it's the current state of things.

It's a fine line to walk when publishing. For example, is it ok to use the term "Hilbert space" in an article? Perhaps in physics, but not if publishing in biology - or at least in biology, a few sentences to describe the term may be more appropriate. But the use of the term is actually quite useful, as in this manufactured example the article may apply only to Hilbert spaces but not all vector spaces. So since the distinction may be important to the finding, the terminology is necessary.

Oh, no, I'm not dismissing terminology! (That's a whole separate topic, which is distinct from writing, though it can sometimes be a sign of bad writing.) I'm talking specifically about the actual writing. Iirc, there's a phrase that sums it up quite nicely: "most science is written like it hates you and wants you to stop reading immediately." Poor writing is so much the norm that people are shocked when you write a readable article. (You'd be surprised at the number of peer review comments I've received to the effect of, "the writing is surprisingly clear and direct," and I'm not like, a novelist, or essayist, or anything. English isn't even my first language! It's just not the norm to think about, and much less act on, these things.)

>"most science is written like it hates you and wants you to stop reading immediately."

As an educated lay person who dips into scientific papers occasionally I completely agree with this. And now I have a nice phrase I can remember next time I read a scientific paper and think "why does science hate me?".

I did a lot of paper doctoring when I worked in a foreign research lab, and I can agree a bit. But conference standards would push for good writing if the conference was good enough, and bad writing would be grounds for rejection (or at least heavy shepherding). So the easy conferences would get a lot of bad writing and the really competitive conferences would get much better writing (or the papers wouldn't make it past the crap filter in the reviewing round).

But first you need something good to write about, and a lot of papers fall short at that point. It doesn't matter how well it is written at that point (getting the "this is well written, but not interesting" rejection is painful but usually obvious).

I'm not saying this contributes to being more unintelligible. These are just filler words anyhow, not jargon. I agree that if anything, it makes it faster to read a paper since your brain just glosses over the same structures you've read 1000 times already and directs you to the meat. However, as someone who reads a lot of papers for my job, I just wish writers were more interesting——you will never see an em dash like I've used here, for example. Maybe scientists could benefit from reading more Hemingway in their downtime.

i recommend active voice over passive. i also tell students to strive for clarity.

"don't write like you have a pole up your ass."

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