
Why Is Academic Writing So Academic? - swed
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-is-academic-writing-so-academic
======
jonnathanson
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.

~~~
jballanc
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.

~~~
Machow
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.

~~~
graycat
> 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_!

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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.

------
jballanc
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.

~~~
benbreen
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.

~~~
roel_v
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.

------
mixedmath
I am reminded of the recent obituary of Grothendieck:
[http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendie...](http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html)

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?

~~~
yodsanklai
> 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.

~~~
tormeh
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.

------
cottonseed
Another perspective from Pinker:

[http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-
Stinks/14...](http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-
Stinks/148989/)

------
regehr
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...](http://www.amazon.com/Stylish-Academic-Writing-Helen-
Sword/dp/0674064488)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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.

------
SixSigma
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...](http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/)

~~~
qu4z-2
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.

~~~
zimbu668
See for yourself:
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1)

------
Pyret
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.

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therealdrag0
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).

~~~
Retra
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...

------
ffn
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

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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](http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07live.pdf)

------
hackuser
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.

------
jeffreyrogers
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](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html)

~~~
Pyret
_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.

------
sireat
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.

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jacquesm
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.

