
Can the Academic Write? - diodorus
https://theawl.com/can-the-academic-write-part-i-24fdaf8bf422#.r4dp9gjon
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j2kun
Another issue I didn't see in this interview is that academics (at least in
the sciences) aren't trained to write, but they are often held to the same
standards as those who are trained. Moreover, a scientist's job isn't
primarily to write for a general audience, so it's hard to say they've failed
in that regard. Whereas a journalist who gets the science wrong when reporting
on it (beyond simply dumbing it down or massaging the truth for comprehension)
fails at the defining feature of the job: reporting the facts.

~~~
veddox
Unfortunately, when the journalist fails and gets the science wrong, the
result is a whole bunch of people with silly ideas about science (as if we
didn't have enough of those already). When the scientist fails and gets the
language wrong, the result is a whole bunch of people whose silly ideas about
science aren't corrected because they never read the article.

Science loses either way.

~~~
j2kun
> When the scientist fails and gets the language wrong

I think you mean, when a scientist writes technically precise jargon that is
misinterpreted? If you mean that the scientist did bad science, science self-
corrects for that (at least in theory, and it has worked pretty well in
practice).

~~~
veddox
Yes, that's what I meant.

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p4bl0
I think this interview misses a _very_ important point. Academic writing is
necessarily in English, which is by far not the native language of most
academic writers. In journalism or even science dissemination to the general
public, people usually write in their native language, which helps _a lot_ to
be perceived as a good writer compared to an academic paper written in English
by a non-native speaker who will thus attempt to mimic the academic style of
writing of their scientific community.

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Fomite
I see this often as a criticism of legal writing as well, and while some of it
is legitimate, there's also an element of academic writing having a specific
purpose. And that purpose _isn 't_ entertainment or pleasantness - it's
precision.

Like recently, when I had a sentence using the phase "missing completely at
random" and someone deleted "completely" for clarity. That word was there for
a very specific purpose - "missing completely at random" and "missing at
random" mean different things.

~~~
wodenokoto
While that is true, it is very often used as an excuse of obtuse writing.

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grabcocque
Academics seem prone to what Language Log terms "nerdview", the baffling but
usually implicit assumption that lay audiences are intimately familiar with
the terminology, idioms and house style of your academic niche.

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4509](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4509)

~~~
veddox
Absolutely. Surround yourself daily with people using the same language as
you, and you begin to forget that the language your group uses is not the
language most other people use.

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douche
No, for the most part they cannot. That's why it is so exceptional when there
is an academic that has a solid grasp of the subject and can make that
intelligible to the general public.

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kartickv
When I read computer science papers, I often find them written in a rigid,
academic style compared to a blog post or a book. I sometimes skip reading
papers for that reason. This is sad — there's all this human knowledge that
was painstakingly discovered that readers are skipping because it was poorly
presented.

One good writing technique is to take a complex idea, simplify it by
eliminating some details, and present the simplified version. Then, once
readers have understood that, present the details that you left out.

Maybe academics are afraid that someone will take the earlier sentences out of
context and claim they're "wrong". When I was in college, my advisor picked
out such an introductory sentence and said that I should be more accurate. I
explained that it's just a simplification and that the details he's worried
about are in the next para. He said, "That's fine, but this sentence should be
correct by itself." The earlier sentence was wrong only if one picks nits.
Actually, it was simplified, not wrong.

I wonder if academics don't understand or respect (enough) the principles of
good writing.

~~~
jonsterling
Hmm, I think you should aim for sentences to be correct on their own _and_ be
arranged such that understanding & precision is built incrementally (in the
way you suggest). This is harder, but that's what good writing does---I want
my "simplified" parts to be real approximations of the precise parts; we
mustn't settle for the simplifications failing to approximate the precise
versions.

It may be easy for experts to avoid getting confused by a literally false
claim, which is clarified in the next paragraph. But your paper will often be
read by people who are not experts in the paper's topic, so some will end up
being confused by this.

It's stressful for me to read that kind of paper, since it causes a lot of
cognitive dissonance as you read! Maybe it's not like that for everyone, but I
prefer to read papers that don't use the approach you appear to suggest.

~~~
kartickv
I agree with you that simplifications should approximate the precise versions.
Mine did approximate them. Note that approximate means "not perfectly agreeing
with". But my advisor wanted them to agree perfectly, at which point they are
no longer approximations.

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veddox
A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still
as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly
relate to this discussion.

Academic writing is all about compressing complex topics and ideas with a long
history into as concise a form as possible without losing accuracy. (At least
in the natural sciences, where I come from; some people would say otherwise
about some humanities, but that is beside the point.) This is why we use
technical jargon: it helps us express precisely what we mean in as few words
as possible. If you've ever tried explaining something highly scientific to a
lay audience, you'll know how tedious it can be if you can't use your
technical terms. One of my readers doesn't know a word I used? That's what
dictionaries and textbooks are for. I can expect all my readers to already
have a sufficient background knowledge to understand what I have written. In
academic writing, the greatest sins I can commit are misrepresenting
something, omitting something important, or - heaven forbid - not citing
somebody correctly (= plagiarizing).

When writing for a nonacademic audience, everything changes. Suddenly I can no
longer assume any background knowledge on the part of my readers, every word
that sounds vaguely technical needs to be explained. Also, my readers really
don't care who said xyz or who disagrees with him, they "just want the facts".
Oftentimes, they do not understand that nobody actually knows exactly what
these "facts" are yet, and that all we have are various hypotheses and
theories vying for the upper hand. So how do I as a writer present them with
as understandable an overview as possible, while still doing justice to the
different points of view? It is a constant balancing act that all too often
doesn't have a satisfactory solution.

Apart from the question of content, the language I use is quite another issue.
As j2kun pointed out, scientists aren't trained to write - at least not in the
sense journalists are. Scientists are taught to write for scientists:
concisely and accurately. Writing in a way that is easy or pleasant to read is
not a criterion. So when they do write for the general public, they need to
completely overthrow whatever they _have_ learnt about writing and go with a
totally different style. That is not easy. All the time I have to keep in mind
that the greatest sins here are a) being uninteresting and b) being
unintelligible - even when clarity is bought at the expense of accuracy.

So yes, academics can write. It just isn't the type of writing lay audiences
appreciate. All in all, a little more patience on both sides of the divide
would probably be a good thing.

~~~
munin
As a graduate student at a top research university I have to ask: where do
scientists write concisely and accurately? That is the opposite of my
experience. Academic writing is very obfuscatory and frequently full of typos,
grammatical mistakes, or just straight-up inaccuracies. I blame the conference
publication review process.

~~~
veddox
> That is the opposite of my experience.

I can't deny you your experience (especially as you have more of it than I
do), at the same time, I can only echo my own. I don't know what your field
is, mine is biology, and while we too have our share of obfuscated papers we
also have many that are indeed as I described them above.

~~~
munin
Ah, computer science! You should stay in real science.

~~~
veddox
I'm hoping the remark about "real science" was ironic, otherwise I would have
to take pretty strong offense now ;-)

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sn41
I write "Analogous to the above construction, we now have the following." This
is stilted for a normal article, but is the expected academic style. Academics
can write well enough to reach their peers. Complaining that every academic is
not good at writing (see, I did it again!) is a bit like saying that policemen
are not good novelists.

~~~
mrob
How does the meaning of "analogous to the above construction, we now have the
following" differ from "by analogy"? Is the difference worth the higher word
count?

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Parkkeeper
It might be hard to hear the truth from a non-academic as in this article.
Some of you might feel better to hear it from a peer. Those I refer to "The
Science of Scientific Writing" by George Gopen & Judith Swan published 1990 in
the American Scientist: [http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-
science-of-s...](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-
scientific-writing/99999) However many scientific publications are awful to
read. Including mine.

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mturmon
OK, if nothing else, TIL that there is a legit journal called _Speculum_ which
specializes in the history of the Middle Ages.
([http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/spc/current](http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/spc/current))
Other than that, this article didn't seem to say anything new.

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k__
I can't.

Don't know how I even got my degree. Probably because my prof. was nice and
thought I know my shit despite writing badly about it :/

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helthanatos
People that write articles about computers most certainly cannot. Words are
often misspelled and their grammar is atrocious. It's so sad...

