Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

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The writing quality of academic papers is very poor, whatever its intended characteristics are, and we deserve better.

I'm skeptical that the only way for them to be precise and technical is to make them impenetrable. I think there is a culture of academic writing (many different cultures, really) that has adopted a voice and writing style which became a parody of itself over time.

Here's a trivial example: You frequently see papers use the passive voice, something a middle school English teacher would mark with a red pen. 500 participants were asked, vs. we asked 500 participants. In what sense is the former more precise and technical? It's not. It does not convey any additional meaning. People use it to sound objective and distant, even when they really aren't.

Realistically, academic writers usually don't even think about it as much as that. They're just copying the tone of other papers, because there is a culture and it enforces certain behaviors on its members irrespective of the value.

A pain in the ass was observed while writing was performed in the passive voice.

Nobody likes doing it, I think. We just do it because we’re scared our papers won’t be accepted otherwise.

In philosophy papers you see authors often use the pronoun "I", similar to blog posts. But they have other ways to make them hard to parse for outsiders.

Either your example is too trivial to justify your point, or the point itself is trivial. It's right for an academic to distance themselves from the subject of their study because we do need researchers who try not to be biased. If they fail that and then correct themselves, then what's the problem? Complaining about inconsequential uses of tone is obsessing about form over function and reeks too much of insecurity, to be honest.

They aren't magically "objective" because they used the passive voice. It's a performance.

Of course language does not guarantee that the study is objective—that would be in the design of the experiment, the reproducibility of results, and the absence of conflicts of interest among the researchers. Using the passive voice however elevates the outcomes being reported as facts that actually happened, instead of mere personal experiences.

People complain all the time about news being biased for being told from a reporter’s point of view, but complain all the same when events are reported in an encyclopedic manner as researchers do when they remove themselves from the events and the outcomes of their studies.

I'm convinced that the value of active voice is not precision and clarity, but rather the subliminal egocentrism away from the object (the research) towards the subject (the researchers) who need to receive credit for the work. The royal "we" also helps frame the work as a collaborative effort with the audience.

That's rubbish, passive voice has a number of detrimental effects, it increases text length without adding information, it makes subject (acting entity) and object (entity acted upon) easier to confuse and it confuses the reader about who actually did things (what some people often confuse with objectivity).

That said the assertion that most scientific articles are written in passive voice is outdated för quite some time. Most journal style guides advise to use active voice, e.g. https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/for-authors/write

> it confuses the reader about who actually did things

When scientific papers have a clear list of authors and delineated section headings, this point is moot. And in such papers, again, repetitive strings of sentences that begin with the same "we..." emphasizes the producers of the work over the work itself.

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