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.
The real issue here is there may not be any way to report the "facts" such as they are. The jargon, the mathematical models are the sine qua non of the facts. Without them you're just playing sophistic games trying to engage lay enthusiasm with overwrought analogies that never really approximate the truth.
It's also not what we do for a living. I rough order of what I should be doing with my day:
1. Writing Papers
2. Writing Grants
3. Mentoring Students
4. Thinking up new ideas for 1 & 2
...
Somewhere, probably right around "Refactor a bunch of code", is "Write for a lay audience". How many members of any profession are good at a thing that's not even a tertiary priority for their job compared to the people who are experts in that?
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, your advisor's attitude is common. The mathematics literature seems to be particularly effected. There is incredible opposition to inserting a statement which isn't perfectly rigorous, even in the introduction where reader should expect a simplified overview of the paper. The result is one of the most opaque literatures in all of science --- it is almost impossible for a nonexpert to have any idea whatsoever what a paper is about.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks. I don't really understand articles like this--isn't audience one of the cornerstones of good writing?
Journalism is going to have different writing than academic writing, which will have different writing than marketing, which will have different writing than a fiction author...
... goals and audience are important, as you're saying. This article just comes across as uninsightful.
As long as each group of writers sticks to its ideal audience, there's no problem. The conflict starts when academics are asked to write for a popular audience, or a scientist reads something a non-scientist wrote about his field. Then you get a style/audience mismatch, with the ensuing arguments as detailed in the article.
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.
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?
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...
However many scientific publications are awful to read. Including mine.
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) Other than that, this article didn't seem to say anything new.
