
The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing - DarkContinent
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/?single_page=true
======
mazelife
I'm not going to say that there's isn't plenty of obscurantism, needless
jargon, and just plain bad writing in academia. But, this article paints a
pretty simplistic and one-sided picture. Let me take a quote that's emblematic
of the problem from one of the professors (!?) in the article: “Academics, in
general, don’t think about the public; they don't think about the average
person, and they don't even think about their students when they
write,”[Deborah S. Bosley] says. “Their intended audience is always their
peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.”

Specifically this notion that "[an academic writer's] intended audience is
always their peers," is treated as though it's somehow incriminating. But it's
not, it's what most academic writing is for! Many academics do write for the
public—and that's great, and more should do so—but they don't publish that in
journals or with an academic press and when they do write for the public,
their writing _is_ usually pitched at a more accessible level. But most of the
writing academics do is aimed at their peers because that is how ideas are
transmitted among specialists and how a body of knowledge is gradually
expanded. The notion that that they only do this just to "impress" or get
tenure seems to be a really bad-faith argument.

Look, any highly technical endeavor is going to have highly technical jargon
that’s pretty impenetrable from the outside. There's nothing wrong with that:
it allows specialists to communicate about complex topics efficiently. Whether
the field is medicine, philosophy, or computer science is immaterial. Frankly,
if you want to see a place where obscurantism, needless jargon, and just plain
bad writing are used as tools to disguise the fundamental banality of the
ideas being presented, look no further than a lot of business writing. I'd
take academic writing over management-speak any day.

~~~
airza
I don't see much complaining about academic jargon in this article. There is
some, but it's more about the tortuous syntax and sentences mostly devoid of
meaning. I also disagree that it's about impressing their peers and more about
writing in the 'usual' style for academic papers.

The style of business writing is equally cumbersome, but this frequently seems
to be a disguise for the fact that no actual information. Maybe some papers in
academia are trying to overstate their conclusions' complexity?

~~~
scott_s
As others in this discussion point out, the submitted article conflates the
two (tortured syntax; jargon). The other explanation for tortured syntax in
all domains is simpler: most people are bad writers.

~~~
voyou
It's not just that most people are bad writers; people generally get worse at
basic writing skills (grammar, sentence structure) when they are writing about
unfamiliar or complex topics. When academics are reporting on their ongoing
research, at least part of what they want to say will be ideas with which they
have only recently become familiar, and the clarity of their writing will
suffer as a result.

~~~
scott_s
I actually disagree. Speaking from writing computer science papers, the moment
of writing is when I understand it the _best_. I often have to go back and
read my old papers to remind myself of all of the nuances of the work. I think
a worse problem is the opposite: academics understand what they're writing
about so well, and have been steeped in it for so long, that they can't "see"
all of the information they leave out.

At the time, the writing is clear because I have had the entire topic in my
head for a month. But years later, I can see I did not clarify simple things
which would have made the text easier to understand.

------
probably_wrong
So, which papers are they citing as "needlessly complex"? Or, to be more
precise, which papers are "needlessly complex", and which ones are "justified
complex"? FTA:

> Bosley (...) says that academic prose is often so riddled with professional
> jargon and needlessly complex syntax that even someone with a Ph.D. can’t
> understand a fellow Ph.D.’s work unless he or she comes from the very same
> discipline.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the article is "needlessly complex", it
could also mean that the article deals with a complex topic, and therefore
will be complex to read if you are not up to date with the topic. An article
that makes no previous assumptions is ultimately called a book, and runs
hundreds of pages long, as opposed to an 8-pages scientific article. Or, to
make an analogy, it's not intended to be the full source code but a diff to
previous research.

Of course, there is some bad writing around (like the IG Nobel prize, where
students use longer words just because they can). But to claim that it makes
for a majority of writing seems to me like a stretch.

~~~
lordCarbonFiber
Building off what you're saying here, one important facet to academic writing
not covered by the article is the concept of specificity. For most fields
jargon is crafted to map single words/phrases to single concepts. In this way
a 16 page article becomes an 8 page article at the expense of losing anyone
that isn't already familiar with the mapping (or worse causing
misunderstandings when jargon shares a word but doesn't match the accepted
vernacular). Unfortunately, because of the stranglehold journalistic
publications have on the dissemination of scientific work, there is little
incentive to change styles or provide the tools for the non-specialist to
consume the information because the general public will never have the
opportunity to.

~~~
nmrm2
_> because of the stranglehold journalistic publications have on the
dissemination of scientific work..._

But they _don 't_.

There are media for longer form presentations of ideas -- dissertations,
books, and lecture notes (a.k.a. early drafts of books) come to mind. Each of
these is de facto mandatory for a successful academic career in science. A lot
of academics also publish blogs, documented software packages, etc.

The complaints about jargon in journal articles and conference proceedings
from non-scientists or from scientists talking about an area other than their
own come across, to me, as kind of self-centered. Sometimes _laypeople (or
even scientifically literate generalists) aren 't the target audience of a
text_. That doesn't mean there's some big problem with the world.

If I had a dime for every time someone who's never taken a non-intro science
course complained about not understanding a scientific publication...

------
rwj
Having been an academic, this article confused two things. The use of jargon
is often justified, as specialists often use particular words to encapsulated
complicated but also well defined concepts. Having seen the confusion that
comes when hidden assumptions are allowed to change (equivocation), the use of
jargon will not go away.

The problem that I see is that translating ideas into words takes work. Jargon
can also be translated. But unless the incentives are in place, this work
won't be done.

(I set aside the question of people who deliberately obfuscate. This is simply
compounding incompetence with fraud.)

~~~
sitkack
Having been a bureaucrat, this article was spot on. Of course some jargon is
necessary to communicate ideas in a particular domain. But many domains are
now using fancy words merely as a social norm which serves to distance and
elevate the clique.

------
ilamont
I felt that the article missed an important factor: People mimic styles and
conventions of a group they want to belong to. It starts in college when
students get their first taste of journal articles and scholarly books, which
comes with an implicit message: If you want to join the club & be taken
seriously, this is what you should strive for in your own writing.

~~~
sidchilling
The article does mention this at multiple places. For example, “Their intended
audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get
tenure.”, "Others say that academics have traditionally been forced to write
in an opaque style to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers—academic journal
editors, for example" and some more.

~~~
ilamont
This is bigger than trying to impress a journal editor to get a paper
published, or convincing department chairs and academic committees in order to
get tenure.

I am talking the process of matching the expectations of an entire community
and meeting the norms of that community. College students and some new grad
students are coming as outsiders who don’t know the rules of the game, but
they quickly figure out (from reading academic papers and scholarly books that
are assigned to them and examining the profiles of their instructors) that
“publishing” is the currency of the realm.

They will begin to match their terminology, writing styles, and references to
meet the norms of this community and to get their own publishing output
accepted. By the time they are ready to publish their first paper they’ve been
effectively indoctrinated and will continue perpetuate academic writing
styles.

------
capnrefsmmat
Anyone upset about academic writing would also enjoy Fred Rodell's "Goodbye to
Law Reviews", in which he pillories the writing in law review articles:

> There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style.
> The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground.

[http://www.refsmmat.com/files/goodbye.pdf](http://www.refsmmat.com/files/goodbye.pdf)

~~~
marrs
Opaque writing is a pet peeve of mine as well. It seems to be a particularly
strong vice of British academic authors. I tend to favour American texts as a
result.

I hope the emoji example doesn't catch on though. I found the example in that
article harder to understand than the opaque version.

~~~
toothbrush
> _I hope the emoji example doesn 't catch on though. I found the example in
> that article harder to understand than the opaque version._

I hope so too, but for different reasons. Because loading of exotic fonts is
of dubious safety [can't find a reasonable citation] and i'm a tinfoil hatter
[no citation needed], i've turned off CSS remote fonts, leaving me with the
following rendition of the emoji example :p

[https://imgur.com/IDgpNKI](https://imgur.com/IDgpNKI)

~~~
chrisseaton
People who use emoji generally aren't using CSS remote fonts, so that isn't
your problem. Emoji is part of the Unicode standard, so most modern system
fonts support it by default. If you can't see the emoji then the problem is
your system has out of date fonts, not that remote fonts are turned off.

~~~
toothbrush
Interesting! Indeed when i tried the URL in a random not-locked-down browser,
i had the same issue :). Thanks for the tip, i'll look into that then.

------
phkahler
I hate the term "space vector modulation"
[https://www.google.com/#q=space+vector+modulation](https://www.google.com/#q=space+vector+modulation)

The way it's described is always overly complex. The signals produced when
using it are no longer sine waves and people have even done papers doing
spectral analysis on the output. There's matrix math and all sorts of academic
blah. But in the end you can do it in 4 lines of code:

s = (min(a,b,c)+max(a,b,c))/2;

A = a-s;

B = b-s;

C = c-s;

In EE terms, we add a common mode signal to all 3 in order to avoid hitting
voltage limits for as long as possible. The load can't see it.

Anyway, the amount of analysis and math around this concept always seemed like
a whole lot of intellectual self gratification, so I prefer to substitute a
different M word for modulation.

~~~
tormeh
Bravo. Good example.

Regarding the M, I once jokingly considered replacing "time" with "temporal
dimension main anthropoperceptive vector" in a report to meet my academese
quota. I didn't. I did, however, rewrite all active-voice sentences to
passive-voice. A little bit of soul lost to academia.

------
yoodenvranx
When I was at university everybody was in the mindset of "better publish 1
thing 20 times instead of invent 3 new things." This resulted in overly
complicated and even fake-y writing in order to hide the fact that the exact
same thing was already published 10 times.

Another problem is that people tend to write more complicated because the
assume they sound more clever and intelligent when they do this and that their
research looks more difficult.

That is one of the reasons I left science, nowadays it is mostly about the
number of published papers, acquiring grant money and doing PR stuff. Actual
science fell of the wagon 1 or 2 decades ago...

~~~
stuxnet79
Publish or perish mentality is insidious. I've seen some downright unethical,
unscientific things in my short stint in academia. Glad I left for industry.
Miss the intellectual stimulation though :(

------
fulafel
Lots of defensive comments here. But it's plainly obvious that some academic
papers are indeed just obfuscated writing for bad reasons: posing because of
perceived prestige enjoyed by other indecipherable writers, or plain
obfuscation to hide the thin substance of the paper.

~~~
yoodenvranx
> plain obfuscation to hide the thin substance of the paper.

Unfortunately I have seen this exact thing over and over again.

------
hyperpape
This made me think of an analogy: the idea that academic writing should be
simple and jargon free is a lot like the idea that programming should be
accessible to non-programmers.

There are lots of ways that we've tried to hide the essential complexity of
programming. Some of them are higher level languages like Python, some of them
are domain specific languages (like SQL), and other ideas are more radical
(graphical programming languages and so on).

The obvious things to point out are that

1) The most successful of the alternatives aren't wholly jargon free.

2) They've certainly helped make parts of programming more accessible to
people, but haven't lead to the "programming for all" dream that has been
expressed before.

3) They aren't full replacements--people still are using programming languages
with pointer arithmetic and manual memory management for some purposes.

4) In the cases where new languages are general purpose (as opposed to DSLs),
there's no agreement that they're desirable. A Haskell enthusiast doesn't
think Python is right to try and reduce "jargon", they just think it should be
a different kind of jargon.

Analogies are always imprecise, but I think this is a helpful one. In
programming, it's not always clear what is incidental complexity vs. essential
complexity. In writing, it's the same thing. We can (mostly) agree that goto
should be minimized, and comefrom entirely avoided, but past that point, we
get a lot of disagreement.

------
ThomPete
Academic writing is the story of what happens when a field become more and
more sophisticated and more and more people try to make their mark by coining
new expressions or concepts to stand out.

This happens in everything from scienctific writing, to journalism, to food,
to design, development, skateboarding and so on. But obviously a field were
the very purpose is writing it shows itself in it's most extreme form
possible.

~~~
nmrm2
_> a field were the very purpose is writing_

This is true of vanishingly few academic disciplines.

~~~
ThomPete
Yes but not in "Academic Writing" as per the title :)

~~~
nmrm2
Academic writing isn't a field; or if it is one, then it's not one of the
(many) fields that's being discussed in this article.

~~~
ThomPete
I know but each of those fields communicate their findins through ex. writing,
which is what adds to the ongoing complexity of the writing.

Not really sure what you take issue with.

~~~
nmrm2
_> Not really sure what you take issue with._

Yeah we're talking past each other.

My point is that writing isn't the primary purpose of most academic work, and
even when publications are the primary measured output, it's rarely the case
that the publications are being evaluated based upon the quality of the
writing rather than the quality of the underlying work. It's possible for
excellent science to be written up poorly. And also vice versa.

So thinking of writing as the main output of science is kind of misguided. In
a way, the opposite of what you were saying is true -- the actual writing is
of far less importance than the results that the writing is being used to
describe, and so scientists struggle to communicate with the outside world not
because writing is the point, but because it's this thing they have to do in
between their experiments / proofs / software writing / etc.

~~~
ThomPete
Wait. I didn't say any of that.

I am simply pointing out that when writing is part of the way to communicate
then that takes on a refinement process of it's own.

Just like simple notes become complex 12 tone music or bebob over time.

Academic writing is often a product of academic reading and so it ends up
pushing the next generation into further obfuscation of meaning and towards
even more clique writing. We are talking about fields like Psychology, social
sciences, literature, biology, anthropology and so on.

I don't normally hear the problem being address in CS or in the Natural
Sciences and I don't see the article points that out specifically. But writing
is definitely one of the main forms of communication for those I mentioned and
they are a large part of acedmia.

~~~
nmrm2
I think we were talking past one another, and I misinterpreted what you meant
by "a field were the very purpose is writing" to mean "the purpose of academia
is writing".

Sorry for the confusion :-)

~~~
ThomPete
Ahh ok :) Fine fine.

------
alricb
Er, the example from the article isn't that bad, if you're used to the jargon.

> The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter,
> dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous
> deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself
> to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring
> doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows
> the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization
> of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization. A
> Sentimental Education does little more than elaborate the progressive
> literalization of the Annunciation.

The gist of it is that there's an opposition between "text" and "ideal"; from
the author's POV, ideals are really false idols, and Flaubert's genius is to
literalize stuff (hard to figure what's meant by "Annunciation" out of
context), that is to create text and not ideal.

~~~
hyperpape
Thanks for the explanation. I am suspicious, because what I never see in texts
"like this" is a close correspondance between any other terminology offered
and the literal text. That is, after reading your comment, I might ask:

1) what is the first encounter? 2) what is the devouring doppleganger? (Is
'devouring' merely poetic, or does it have some literal meaning that the
doppleganger is devouring?) 3) What is the path of reification? Why is it
similar to the path of carnalization of the spiritual?

There are some texts where every sentence leads to some such question, and the
questions are never answered. The feeling I am left with is that there's an
unlimited number of loose ends where the reader will be forced to guess at
what the author means (or not guess, since you can just read by skimming over
phrases like "the path of reification").

~~~
alricb
In this case, I don't think it's possible to answer without access to the
original context, and there doesn't seem to be an electronic version of the
book. I would also note that the book has been translated from the German, so
the exact word choice hasn't been made by the original author.

Here's, maybe, a more comprehensible (but difficult) segment from the
beginning of the book (from Amazon's preview): The easiest formula that
thematizes the relation of Flaubert's work to the Evangel, Scripture, is
perhaps this: in the name of the Cross, the Gospel--the "good tidings"\--is
crossed out. His oeuvre is thus a kind of "non-Gospel" or _dys-angelion_ \-- a
body of "bad tidings"; it testifies against the New Testament. History proves
the promise of salvation to be a lie; but history is nevertheless absolutely
determined by the New Testament, since it is nothing but per-version, its
_per-versio_ \-- its reversal. Only against the backdrop of this crossed-out
promise of the unheard-of love of the New Testament, which is affirmed
completely, does history make sense and reveal its horrible truth.

------
davesque
On the other hand, we have perfectly reasonable jargon which become needlessly
complicated when attempts are made to explain them in simple terms.

Take the concept of a Monad from type theory, for example, which can be
entirely explained in a few sentences: It's a type class which requires
implementation of a _bind_ function and a _unit_ function. Also, a few
equations involving _bind_ and _unit_ must always hold ( _only a few!_ ).
That's it. That is exactly what it is and nothing more (well, aside from the
actual type signatures of _bind_ and _unit_ and the actual equations, which
would have taken up even less space than this paragraph).

This bit of jargon only becomes complicated when you try and explain all of
its implications. But there are infinitely many implications so, at a certain
point, you just have to sit back and say, "Well, a Monad is exactly its
definition and that's all...and its definition is most effectively expressed
in terms of the jargon."

------
SolaceQuantum
Quite interesting is that I would argue such texts have only gotten more
approachable and less complex as time has gone on. If anyone wants to
experience complex writing they should enjoy some essays from the time of the
Romantic movement and before that of the great poet Milton.

------
abathur
I think jargon is a bit of a scapegoat. Documentation and writing about
technical topics has roughly the same risk; I think we've all seen sentences
or paragraphs that are entirely impenetrable if you don't know the terminology
and technology under discussion. Much of this writing could also be simplified
and made approachable, but unpacking all of the jargon all of the time is an
impractical burden on writing not meant for general consumption.

It's probably also worth noting that there are rarely-discussed personal and
professional risks to making your scholarship too "accessible" if it's the
sort of thing people outside of your field or outside of the academy
altogether are even a little likely to find controversial enough to harass you
over.

That said, I think much could be done to improve the situation by encouraging
journals, academic presses, awards and other mechanisms of scholarship review
to:

1\. Establish pragmatic readability standards describing roughly who should
find accepted articles readable, with or without a given condensed reference.

2\. Where needed, develop and maintain condensed references (perhaps in
conjunction with other institutions in the field) which provide enough
background and terminology to meet the readability goal.

One example might be "to be accepted, your submission should be rated as
readable with the aid of our condensed reference by a small sample of
undergraduates in your specialty, masters students in your department, and
doctoral candidates within your college." Even fairly permissive standards
(i.e., just PhD candidates in your specialty) of this sort would guide most
academics towards being much more conscious of how approachable their writing
is.

~~~
sitkack
It would be excellent if each discipline had a globally reachable dictionary
and published works directly referenced that dictionary.

------
mrjj
>There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read –
something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and
my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was
because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I have this uneasy
feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna
stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it
means.”

>So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t
remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member
of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic
channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it
means? “People read.”

From "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

------
grflynn
There are tools to remove redundant verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I like
this tool: [https://www.textunited.com/blog/shorten-text-to-be-a-
faster-...](https://www.textunited.com/blog/shorten-text-to-be-a-faster-
writer) HemingwayApp is also neat, if a little opinionated about what should
be edited out. Some phrases only sound right in certain contexts, and I never
liked that about academic papers, because they presume an ivory tower
readership when infact their target audience could be _any_ body of people

~~~
hyperpape
Relevant: Hemingway app grades Hemingway very poorly. I suppose that is not a
knock-down argument that it is bad, but it does make you wonder how carefully
they calibrated it...

------
wolfgke
Relevent xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1133/](https://xkcd.com/1133/) (also
relevant: [http://xkcd.com/547/](http://xkcd.com/547/),
[http://xkcd.com/722/](http://xkcd.com/722/) and
[http://xkcd.com/1436/](http://xkcd.com/1436/)).

------
alistproducer2
This is a topical article for me. I double majored in comp sci and business
and business writing is in my top 5 most influential classes for me.

In business, a huge part of what you do is communicate ideas to people. If you
can't write in a way that others understand or aren't taking into
consideration your intended audience's culture, educational level and other
factors you're doing it wrong.

------
jdlyga
This is true in software development too. I just got done reading a spec, and
there is so much needless acronyms and jargon. Most of those acronyms can
simply be replaced with one or two words, and it would vastly improve the
readability of the spec. Check out the article on Space X banning most
acronyms for a real world application of this.

------
mercurialshark
Reid Hoffman said it best, when explaining why he wasn't going to change the
world through the academy, when his advisor told him - "If more than a handful
of people understand what you've written, it's insufficiently academic."

------
stuxnet79
Surprised that Steven Pinker is on the vanguard of this clear writing
movement, when his writing tends to be very opaque and difficult to parse.
Started reading The Blank Slate, but couldn't finish it because it was so dry.

------
crispytx
The economy will likely turn around after we quit paying all these bums
$90,000 a year to write all this gobbledygook.

~~~
abathur
This sounds like something my grandpa would say about programming. :)

