Why Is Academic Writing So Academic? | Hacker News Reader

Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

newyorker.com

55 pointsswed41 comments

Academic writing suffers, albeit to a lesser degree, from the same problem that has made legalese so annoying to read: the need for specificity.

Also, a need for references. Not just citations, but verbal references. What is jargon, after all, if not a specific and functional set of keywords and referents used in common by a given group or field? Jargon is efficient in academia. It is a common standard. If I write something in my field's jargon, people in that field will know what I'm talking about, and precisely what I'm talking about. This is more efficient, sadly, than trying to turn a clever phrase to describe a phenomenon there's already a perfectly dreadful word for.

It's not just specificity. Take for example the physical sciences' tradition of using passive voice, exclusively, when writing about the methods used in an experiment. You never write "We poured the mixture" or "We measured the transmittance", but rather "The mixture was poured into a 250ml Erlenmeyer flask" and "Transmittance was measured using a model 500 spectrophotometer with a 580nm filter".

The reason, as anyone who has read and followed more than a few "Materials and Methods" sections can tell you, is that this style of writing makes it very easy to skim through and find the relevant bits. The last thing you want to have to do with a pipette in hand is wade through someone's flowery prose to find out how many microliters to dispense.

Passive voice has a sense of "objectivity" to it, which would explain its prevalence. In my opinion, it is harmful in the sense that experiments (papers) are by no means truly objective, but rather attempts at raising subjectivity to a broadly intersubjective level.

For what it's worth, in Psychology (by APA standards) 1st person voice is discouraged, but so is passive voice. In the passages you use, removing 1st person (almost) requires using passive voice, but I would say removing 1st person voice is what discourages a very informal, prosey style, while the frequent use of passive voice often feels indirect.

> 1st person voice is discouraged

"Here we make use of measurable selection."

So, use of the first person, plural is quite widely accepted in nearly all of current and recent mathematics.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation this way, and one professor said "When you say 'we' maybe I don't agree?" and thankfully a fellow student spoke right up and defended me; she explained that using "we" was standard in mathematics.

Once I was trying to socialize with a high school English teacher and sent her a draft of a paper I was about to publish in some applied mathematics and asked her to give the paper a critical reading. Soon she asked me if using "we" was standard in mathematics, and I had to say yes. She gave me no more feedback! Gee, that's much better than what I got from English teachers in high school and college!

In the end, I first learned to write in college and by writing proofs in pure mathematics; the reason I was able to soak up the lessons was that such writing, as English, is so darned simple. Later I branched out from such simplistic writing.

Later I was trying to socialize with a woman who was a secretary in a university. She confessed that, in her experience typing, etc., the really clear writing was from the professors of mathematics and the physical sciences. Maybe she was just trying to butter me up!

I use "we" all the time...but I try to make it mean "me and the reader", i.e. "we then look at ....". In that sense, a paper should be a conversation between you and the reader even though the reader is passive in the interaction.

I'm struggling to figure out how you would write lab instructions in neither 1st person or passive voice. Would you just credit all actions to an anonymous experimenter, described in third person?

That's fair. For psychology methods it's easier to avoid both, at times, since you can write "participants viewed...", etc.. For other types of methods, especially where the object becomes implicitly understood, or would be redundant to state, I can see where passive voice might be useful. For instructions, you can just leave off the implicit "you should", EG "put X in Y". The tradeoff between passive and first person is important, and which is appropriate likely depends on the circumstance. They're both discouraged, but not banned, I'd imagine because poor writing often uses one or the other too often.

My experience has been the opposite in Computer Science; my adviser has made me move away from the passive voice whenever I used it.

Perhaps it varies with the field.

In my experience, younger PIs and the field I work in in general is moving away from the passive voice. While your experience seems to be that passive voice is clearer, from my perspective it is clunky and inelegant.

I disagree that 1st person voice results in flowery prose. Bad writing remains bad independent of passive or first person style.

It can be much clearer and, well, direct to use first person voice ("To assess wether the effect data X suggests holds true when Y, we do Z1, Z2, and Z3 as they cover Y1, Y2, Y3". This is clean and clear and much nicer than the respective passive voice. But again, perhaps just my opinion.

> to describe a phenomenon there's already a perfectly dreadful word for.

Gee, in high school I was taught that a preposition is a bad word to end a sentence with!

For whatever it's worth, I saw what you did there and attempted to re-upvote you. Well played, sir.

Thank you!

I think what the author is missing is the possibility that many academics are simply bad writers. Academic writing in many fields is extremely formulaic just so that the relevant information can be communicated regardless of the writing skill of the author. Add to that the fact that many academics are writing in a language that is not their first, so even if they had considerable skill in their mother tongue, there is no guarantee that will translate to long-form, casual English prose.

That said, I do agree with the article that it is an interesting time to be an academic, or at least to be observing the progress and development of academia. I highly doubt that populist writing in the vein of "Bad Astronomy" or (heaven forfend) the works of Dawkins will ever replace the dry, staid prose of the academic journal. What is happening is that new means of communicating information are forcing academics into media where the traditional formulae leave them in the lurch.

I've found that even academics who are actually quite good at writing for popular venues still fall into typically academic patterns (like the overuse of passive voice or jargon) in their journal articles. I blame it on peer review more than anything else - my experience with the peer review process (n=6) has been that unorthodox turns of phrase or narrative quirks are often the first things to get flagged. Peer review has a necessary and obvious function, but it also has a side effect of smoothing out prose style. The result is that journal articles (even in those in single-author fields) often sound like they were written by a hive mind rather than an individual.

I was actually intending to do graduate work in archaeology but switched to history when I realized how dreary the prose style favored by archaeologists was. At least history has a few authors with an engaging and original style (for instance, Simon Schama, Fernand Braudel, and Natalie Zemon Davis). To be fair, archaeology has some interesting prose writers of its own (Colin Renfrew, Marija Gimbutas) but the ordinary journal article style tends to be a morass of passive voice and clichéd phrasing.

I had a student once who is British but worked for a Spanish university. He was (is) a very good writer, very clear, good structure etc. He had a paper reviewed once by someone who, probably because he saw the affiliation or the study area the paper was about (which was in Spain), assumed the author was Spanish, and put in his comments 'the author should consider having his writing reviewed by a native speaker to correct some of the obvious mistakes'.

I LOL'ed that day.

The professor who taught me Derrida (translated by Gayatri Spivak, no less) told me that poor writing in philosophy dates back to Kant, who was a notoriously bad writer. But because Kant was also the father of all modern philosophy, a lot of future philosophers tried to emulate him and his often obtuse writing style.

Over the years, this became convention. Convention became dogma. And this dogma is the reason why I've thrown more than a few books flying across the room in frustration

I am reminded of the recent obituary of Grothendieck: http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendie...

Two extremely well-known mathematicians were asked by Nature to write an obituary for the late Grothendieck. They wrote it to be mostly understood by a nonmathematical audience, but Nature ultimately rejected the obituary on it being too technical.

It is almost as if each discipline has become an island. When I submit a math paper, I do not at all imagine a nonmathematician will read it. But then again, I also do not write it so that nonmathematicians could read it. I suspect this is largely the same across different fields.

I'm also not certain if this is necessarily bad; it would be tremendously hard and time-consuming to make each article understandable to another field. Or maybe this is precisely the problem?

> it would be tremendously hard and time-consuming to make each article understandable to another field.

You can't explain something that required years of thinking and learning to a non expert that has only a few minutes to spend. It's not the role of a research publication.

But what if I have a day? Can you help me then? Many papers are a team effort to understand, even for students in the relevant field.

No excuses.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics does a pretty good job of explaining math to non-mathematicians, however, I expect that it was a huge undertaking and benefited from having excellent editors.

Of course, you lose some rigor in doing this, but the central ideas are still intact (as far as I can tell) and it gives better intuition for those new to the field of study in question than a fully rigorous, technical approach would.

Haha, that obituary is kind of funny. I do graduate level research in quantum chemistry, and I still didn't understand most of what they were talking about. Then again, maybe that says more about me than their ability to communicate to non-mathematicians.

Another perspective from Pinker:

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-Stinks/14...

It's usually a combination of (1) being afraid of sounding unrigorous or unintelligent and (2) not knowing any better and having been trained on lots of bad examples

This book is excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Stylish-Academic-Writing-Helen-Sword/d...

It helps to have a good advisor beat the bad writing out of you via brutally honest critiques.

I find it best to write from the heart about something I'm really excited about, and if I can't do that, then not to waste my time writing anyways. Of course, as a non academic, I have that luxury.

As Orwell illustrated [1]

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

becomes

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Trying to sound clever has gone too far, just write the damn words.

[1] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...

In fairness, I suspect reading a paper written in the first style would be even worse.

EDIT: I can totally get behind the "classic" style referenced in the Pinker link elsewhere in this thread.

See for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1

Academic and journalistic writing is not supposed to hold the poetry of Biblical verse.

Could it be because academic writing is simpler than the literary one? For example, in math, 'for all yada, there exists bla' is different from 'there exists bla for all yada'. So, you literally memorize these two cliches because they greatly simplify math. There are many other such very precise cliches in math you keep reusing over and over. Even though, it makes your life simpler, to an outsider you come off as an academic bore. That's my theory anyway.

Another problem with academic writing is the arcane jargon can be so abstract as to be nearly meaningless and easy to exploit. See academic hoaxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair.

Well, if you are writing with the intent that nobody read your work, then you're not doing anything of academic merit. The whole point of writing this stuff down is to teach others.

Maybe journals should refuse to publish anything they haven't read and don't understand? Force people to write better...

This isn't generally true though, at top journals and conferences peer review would trash any paper that uses meaningless jargon.

Modern instructive writing (as oppose to creative writing like novels, short stories, erotic fiction, etc.) all suffer from lack of pictures. I know that sounds incredibly childish, but bear with me on this one. Unlike our computer overlords, us lowly humans are ultimately visual creatures with brains that have been evolved through the millennia to be extremely optimized at processing and storing visual / spatial information. In fact, we're so much better with visual information compared with words or equations, that even our language reflects this: when we understand something, we exclaim something like "oh, now I see it".

But, because of how hard it had been to serialize, transfer, persist, and unserialize drawings, we had no choice but to resort to shoddy words and equations to overcome the problem of communicating over large space-times. And so even now, in the era of image boards, instant messaging, etc., most of us still can communicate only with simple letters and numbers because we never learned how to communicate with colors, shapes, and lines when we went to school.

This is especially true in certain regions of academia (and professional fields like law, accounting, math, gynecology, etc.), where picture books, diagrams, comics, and the like are viewed with patronizing disdain (though fields like Mech Eng. seems to do better as they focus a lot on 3D modeling, 2D diagramming, isometric views, etc.).

In my opinion, the only way to improve academic writing so it's understandable, intuitive, and interesting is to improve how we write - with more pictures and less words. And the best way to do that, is to teach drawing like we teach English in our elementary, middle, and high schools

Illustration is harder than writing and mostly untaught outside if very specialized circles. Still, it is something I wanted to learn to improve my papers (Bret Victor being a huge inspiration here), and I can depend in my art school background wife for help, so I'm looking for oppurtunities to play around with it in my writings.

I once wrote a paper [1] with embedded QuickTime videos. It worked really well, but I found out quickly people don't use acroread on macs with QuickTime installed by default. Also, some people still print things out.

[1] http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07live.pdf

Experts in every field have trouble communicating with the 'non-technical'. For example, the dull, unintelligible jargon of experts in our field is a familiar, widespread joke. Think about it next time you read, or write, an error message -- something intended for end users but which even I often can't make sense of.

I expect part of the problem is that people who are attracted by clear writing and thinking are turned off by the academic fields that suffer most from overly academic writing.

There are some academics however, who are quite good at conveying their ideas, even in fields that are otherwise noteworthy for their opaqueness to outsiders. The economist Deirdre McCloskey is one example. I've read some systems CS papers that were quite good as well (Google has had several good ones, including this one [1]). Many academic papers are garbage though, and another reason is because they aren't saying anything worth noting. It's a lot easier to hide bullshit via obfuscation than through clarity.

[1]: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html

I expect part of the problem is that people who are attracted by clear writing and thinking are turned off by the academic fields that suffer most from overly academic writing.

In math formal language is easier to read than the informal one. Mathematicians write proofs in informal, paragraph style while newcomers are taught to read/write proofs in the most formal way because the latter is much more structured and clear.

For my masters thesis I was told repeatedly that I my writing was too informal. If I can't have fun writing academic papers, what's the point?

I tried to approach writing my thesis as something a good pop science book(GEB) should be, but all it got me was points deductions.

My thesis concerned data mining.

It wasn't always like that. If you go back to the early days of science the writing is actually quite different than what you encounter today. Terms are explained before they are used and data is given where possible.

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