The most popular answer outside the academy is the cynical one: Bad writing is a deliberate choice. Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.
Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks.
The most popular answer inside the academy is the self-serving one: Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter. Every human pastime—music, cooking, sports, art—develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to use a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in one another’s company. It would be tedious for a biologist to spell out the meaning of the term transcription factor every time she used it, and so we should not expect the tête-à-tête among professionals to be easily understood by amateurs.
But the insider-shorthand theory, too, doesn’t fit my experience. I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section of an experimental paper explains, “Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.” After some detective work, I determined that it meant, “Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or false.” The original academese was not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English translation. So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up the polysyllables?
RTWT
My guess is that they’re all unknowingly imitating some pompous Victorian twit with poor people skills but a brilliant mind, similar to the way test pilots try to sound like they’re from West Virginia, like Chuck Yeager.
The “argot” problem (what’s wrong with “jargon,” BTW?) is easily addressed in this day of hypertext markup; when one uses a word or phrase that everyone in the field understands but those outside the field might not, the first usage in a paper should be a link to something that explains it.
I don’t mean a footnote or endnote, but a link to a resource outside of the paper that gives a simple explanation of the meaning of that term in this context. Peer review being of, by and for insiders, there is good reason to exclude these accessibility asides from the material being reviewed, but providing them for comprehensibility by outsiders.
For example, on the excerpted article’s use of the word “argot,” a link to a page somewhere saying, in effect, “this pompous windbag criticizing other pompous windbags didn’t think ‘jargon’ was good enough so he wrote ‘argot’ instead.”
That’s the whole reason hypertext was invented. It’s high time that scientific publishing changed to something more like a combination of blogging and wiki.
Because they’re stinkers?
Because they don’t care about their audience?
Because they don’t understand the purpose of communication?
Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter.
This just means they really don’t understand it well enough themselves to explain it simply.
It simply doesn’t occur to them that their readers don’t know what they know
Telling people what they already know is kind of pointless. For this not to occur to them makes them an idiot.
A considerate writer will…
Exactly. Consider the purpose and the audience and your writing will at least stink less.
That example is bad. Not all sentences are assertions. If you don’t know what “assertion” means then maybe you shouldn’t be reading scientific papers.
Management is often at fault here.
When I started working for GE at what at the time was the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
My manager downgraded me for being too concise. So I finally prepared a report where i used multiple syllable and obscure words wherever possible. My manager said now that’s a good report.
I’ve read a factory description of operation (the DofO) that said “At the [rework/QA or whatever] station the product will be inspected with dual ocular sensors.” That meant a worker would look at it.
I second that. See below — I think that concise writing can get dinged in review as not offering adequate definitions and explanations.
My father (a career NASA and Marine pilot) once participated in a federal “presidential” commission on airline safety procedures. After spending about every other weekend in DC for 6 months, he told me his greatest accomplishment was keeping the resulting report down to 30 pages. He believed that was a record, and that it might actually be read.
Well, when I wrote research papers, one important concerns was that a number of my potential readers don’t have English as their first language. That meant removing colloquialisms and using relatively simpler words when feasible.
Another is don’t make claims that you can’t back up.
But having said that, I’ve seen some pretty dense and turgid propose that had nothing to do with these considerations. There, I’d say it’s a combination of status signaling and obfuscation.
There’s nothing like doing joint engineering projects with non-native english speakers to give one an appreciation for the simple declarative sentence. And, as you say, I got into the habit of carefully cleaning my writing of slang and colloquialisms.
Who was it who said, “Don’t write to be understood, write so you cannot be misunderstood.”?
When my wife was in nursing school, several of her textbooks were written by Ph.Ds in nursing (which sounds kind of strange). It seemed they had a running contest to see how many 5+ syllable words they could cram into each sentence. The minimum seemed to be around twelve.
I read a paper once from someone in the Netherlands on the topic of numerical solution methods for differential equations. It had very clear English prose. Didn’t help me in understanding the technical content though.
There is this gentleman named Victor Milenkovic who writes pretty clearly (see V. Milenkovic, E. Sacks, and S. Trac (2013) Robust Free Space Computation for Curved Planar Bodies, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 875-883). He employs passive voice a lot, but generally uses short sentences and short paragraphs, which is a style you will see in the popular press. He also defines his term early on.
The IEEE paper is generally about “finding if a square peg fits in a round hole”, working at a tolerance level approaching the limits of floating point accuracy. This is important in precision manufacturing, but I defy anyone around here to tell me anything beyond that what that paper is about. I complained to the first author about the opaqueness of the paper, who admitted that in the journal format one is working with severe page limitations.
Professor Milenkovic attended New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, where he had a very talented English teacher; he is also a graduate of Harvard University. I am pretty sure he acquired those writing habits at New Trier, because in his father’s papers, I found an essay giving a family history written for that English class. The term paper is accompanied by that same family history rewritten in the kind of wordy and ornate writing style you are complaining about, which I have independent corroboration is characteristic of an educated person coming out of Croatia. My reconstruction of these writings is that Victor wrote his term paper by talking to his dad, who later used Victor’s class assignment as a memory aid when writing his life story.
So stop your whining and bellyaching about the turgid writing in scholarly writing. If you are not understanding a paper, it is not about the prose but rather that a reader is lacking in the prerequisite domain-specific background.
Consider P. Milenkovic (2009) Triangle Pseudocongreuence in Constraint Singularity of Constant-Velocity Couplings, ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics Vol. 1, p 021006 (8 pp) to be a good example of scholarly prose:
“Constant-velocity couplings are parallel kinematic linkages, not only of use for smooth transmission of torque between deflected shafts 1,2 but also found in robot wrists 3–7 and guided-axle articulated railway trains 8,9. Hunt’s general theory of constant velocity couplings 10 specifies the mobility along with the constraints required of these mechanisms and identifies a comprehensive set of architectures meeting those conditions.
Hunt 10 ascribed to Myard a three-part paper with one title, in actuality three papers with separate titles 11–13, where the middle paper in the series 12 established the widely used principle 2,10,14 that an intersecting-shaft constant-velocity coupling needs to be symmetric about the plane bisecting the angle of shaft deflection. Fischer 15 credited Myard 12 with the term homokinetic plane, derived from Greek where “homo” means same and “kinetic” means motion. Though the French words homocinétique and homocinétisme describe the constant-velocity property of the entire coupling, Myard used the term plan bissecteur for the symmetry plane 11.”
In case you are wondering, a constant-velocity (CV) coupling or joint is an expensive repair item on a high-mileage front-drive car — in fact, early versions were invented in France for use on front-drive vehicles. Much of this paper should be understandable from your high school geometry class on triangle congruence proofs.
English-language papers on CV couplings uses the jargony word “homokinetic plane”, which the above quote attempts to explain results from a mis-translation of a French-language source. Thank you (high-school French teacher) Mrs Rangaves.
A more recent paper starts out:
“A type of industrial robot connects a roll-pitch-roll spherical wrist to a 3-axis anthropomorphic arm. Whereas this wrist can have a pointing deflection as much as ±145 deg [1], this is in trade for placing a wrist singularity at the center of that pointing cone. This singularity is a problem for seam welding, spray painting, sealant application or other tasks requiring motion without pauses.
The pitch-yaw-roll wrist removes the singularities from the working space [2] by placing them at right angles to the robot forearm. Mechanical interferences limit the pointing cone to less than a hemisphere. A class of compound wrists [3–5] connects a pair of pitch-yaw pointing devices back-to-back – the roll joint may be added either before [3] or after [5] this pointer. By dividing the deflection between two universal joints, the critical angle of 90 deg on each of these is reached when the pointer deflects a full 180 deg. On account of mechanical interferences, one such wrist is limited to a hemisphere [5] whereas two others claim a pointing cone of ±100 deg [3,6]. The reduced pointing range of these alternatives may contribute to the popularity of the roll-pitch-roll wrist.”
That prose style was influenced by a clear-writing English professor colleague who studied under Noam Chomsky and has since been polished in the polemical parrying her on Rand’s fine Web site.
One reviewer commented “The paper needs a careful proof reading by ab (sic) expert English speaker.” Another remarked, “The writing of this paper is horrible to the extreme. . . . In fact, he treats his readers as cats and dogs . . .”
Jim, is that you?
Can I get links to those papers, Paul? I’m building a robot consisting of two arms, each made of two Canfield joints in series, and I think both of those papers might be useful to me.
The first is paywalled, but if you can get guest library access at your local “U” you can access it. The second is held up in review.
I am amazed that most folks missed the biggest reason for bad writing in academia.
A very sizable fraction of academics are not that smart and they attempt to cover that up with big words.
See, that did not take a tome to lay out, just years of experience in academia….
That was one of the theories Pinker postulated.
Not only did Pinker write about that theory, it was one that you actually QUOTED in your post on the matter.
I understand that not everyone clicks through and reads the entire article, but what I don’t understand is why people seem to think that reading the quoted portion itself is too much to ask before commenting on a post. Unless they came straight from the RSS feed to the comments, and all they had from the RSS was the original linked question?
Not quite. Pinker said they were hiding the fact they had nothing to say, and Dennis went further to say they just weren’t very bright. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive, but the overlap is nowhere near 100%.
I once listened to Jerry Pournelle speak on a panel at an SF convention. He said that when he began writing fiction, he needed to learn how to write. His engineering writing wasn’t sufficient for good fiction writing.
What do you mean by “good” fiction writing? Niven? Crichton? Clancy?
What about Frank Herbert in his breakout novel Dune along with just about the entire Asimov Foundation Series and endless sequels? Those works seems to be filled with clunky, academic-inspired prose. There are whole sections of Foundation novels that read like minutes from a city council meeting (First Foundation) or minutes from a faculty meeting (Second Foundation).
But Asimov was noted more for the concepts and ideas in his fiction writing, whereas Herbert’s Dune was the Sgt Pepper Album of the sci-fi genre, widely admired as ground breaking and never to be reproduced since, even by Herbert.
I’m just telling you what Pournelle said. I wasn’t critiquing the entire genre of SF.
But now that you brought it up, who cares? I’d rather read a clunky, poorly-written SF novel brimming with ideas and with good storytelling than some post-modern literary bullcrap with mediocre ideas that shoves propagandistic political correctness/progressivism disguised as SF down my throat.
That’s the reason SF is dying.
In contrast, Asimov’s non-fiction writing takes extremely difficult subjects and makes them understandable to just about everyone. That ability is both difficult and rare.
I think perhaps Pinker is just writing about the people around him, other academics, because he reads a lot of their work. But bad writing is everywhere.
It starts with standardized testing — which I generally support, but in honesty must critique in at least this one area. The good people Pearson hires to subjectively score writing will award fewer points to a “simple” sentence constructed from clear diction compared to the higher score they bestow upon compound and complex sentences that deploy more obscure terminology. That is, scorers prefer jargon and intricacy to lucid prose. After a decade of rewards for opacity, a scholar loses appreciation for clarity.
I believe that Microsoft Word even has a “readability” score in its spell/grammar checker, too, which awards a higher “grade level” for more complex and obscure sentences and words.
The secret to good writing is finding the balance between “simple enough for a layperson to understand” and “complex enough not to insult the reader’s intelligence”.
Working in public-facing government long enough one finds that the balance isn’t really that easy to strike; there can be a pretty significant gap between the Lowest Common Denominator and the Highly Informed Citizen, and the policy-makers are often distributed along that same spectrum, as well.