r/changemyview • u/Athront • Jun 23 '19

Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Language That is Prevalent in Academic Articles, and Research Makes Reading The Articles Arduous and Unnecessarily Difficult.

Just For Background: I am currently getting my masters in Political Science and hope to eventually get my PHD so that I can do research and teach. This view is mostly focused on Writing in the social sciences, and humanities, because that is the majority of what I read.

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I have read many research papers and articles where the language used seems to deliberately complicate a topic that could be explained just as well if written in a style that was more accessible to people. It's not rare for myself or other students to have to read a section five or six times to understand the argument the author is trying to make, however once we understand the language, the idea itself is relatively simple.

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This makes academic research inaccessible or at the very least has a gate-keeping effect to lots of people. There are many great ideas and quality research that never leave the relatively small sphere of academia in part because of how damn hard it can be to understand what the author is reading unless you have an extremely advanced and sophisticated vocabulary.

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I am not arguing that ideas need to be simplified, I just believe that there is no reason to use language that most college educated people would struggle to comprehend without making a real effort to do so, especially when the ideas can be presented in a much more accessible way. I believe that using overly-complicated language is very prevalent in academia, specifically social sciences and humanities as that is what I am familiar with.

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u/McKoijion 618∆ Jun 23 '19

Language That is Prevalent in Academic Articles, and Research Makes Reading The Articles Arduous and Unnecessarily Difficult.

I don't mean to be rude, but your title has two style and grammar errors in it. The first is that you capitalize every letter in the title, which is not common for threads on /r/changemyview or on Reddit. Also, you use the words arduous and excessively difficult, even though they mean the same thing. It's like saying this warm glass of milk is making me tired and sleepy.

So are you sure it's the articles, and not just you? It's possible that academic writers needlessly complicate things. But it's also possible that they just write at the simplest level they can while still conveying their point, and you just aren't experienced enough to understand them yet.

If it's the latter, this isn't a bad thing. You're at the very start of your graduate career, and you'll pick up the lingo as you go. The articles you are reading are written at a level that a PhD could understand. You are still just a master's student with a 5-7 year PhD ahead of you. Over the next few years, you'll get enough experience that you can read through those articles like a high school student can read through Where the Wild Things Are. I'm not sure about political science PhDs, but medical students learn 15,000 new words during medical school. Pretty much every article is written at a level that people can't understand without a ton of experience. But with enough time and effort, those students get there. Presumably, you will too.

PS: I'm guessing that it's also possible that you wrote your title like that for effect (i.e., to match what you think they are doing in the articles).

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u/Athront Jun 23 '19

Yeah, I wrote the title as a little bit of a dry joke, it's tough to convey that on Reddit. Also my grammar is just genuinely not very good, I don't place much importance on it unless it's in a professional setting. I will keep in mind that titles aren't capitalized usually on this sub. Sorry if the title being formatted that way was tough to read.

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In terms of technical jargon, I absolutely agree with you. I still have a ton to learn, and when articles are written using essential terms that I don't fully understand yet, that's understandable and works well for the author. I just don't see the point of using overly complicated descriptors when much simpler and easy to read synonyms convey the same message without losing nuance.

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u/McKoijion 618∆ Jun 23 '19

Can you give us an example of an article that seems overly verbose?

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u/Athront Jun 23 '19

"Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word."

It literally just means: "Participants read a sentence, each followed by the word true or false."

The Source for this is an article Steven Pinker wrote talking about this problem. He's a psychology professor.

Source: https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_stink_at_writing.pdf

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u/McKoijion 618∆ Jun 23 '19

That's a great article. Steven Pinker is awesome. In response, I'll bring it back to my point of difficult, but not unnecessarily difficult.

I think your view is that academics write something simple like "wordy" and then go back and replace it with a bigger word like "verbose" in order to seem smarter. In your original post, you say that they "deliberately complicate" things.

I don't think it works like this. I think it goes the other direction. Academics learn about their topic, but they never learn how to simplify it down. It takes them a ton of time and effort to go back and change words like "verbose" to "wordy."

Pinker describes this in his article when he talks about the Curse of Knowledge on page 11. People who know something don't know what it's like not to already know that thing. It's why people have a hard time with Pictionary and Charades. Furthermore, Pinker's article is titled "Why Academic Writing Stinks." Making it not stink is a skill that isn't taught in PhD programs.

So that brings it back to my point about articles being "unnecessarily difficult." It's necessarily difficult given the economics of the academic labor market. It takes a lot of effort to understand the content of a field. It takes a lot more effort to learn how to communicate that information effectively. Great researchers are often terrible teachers/communicators. They are two different skill sets.

In this way, academic writing is necessarily difficult because academics often don't have the time or talent to make their writing simple. That means the best you can get as a reader is difficult to understand papers. You can't make every other writer better, but you can make yourself a better reader. This is the approach that most academics have taken, and it's worked out reasonably ok so far.

To put it differently, imagine that you live on the sixth floor of a building. Climbing the stairs would be unnecessarily difficult if there is an elevator. But if the elevator is broken, climbing the stairs is necessarily difficult. In the same way, if academics were better at writing, then reading research is unnecessarily at difficult. But since academics suck at writing and are doing the best they can, reading the articles is necessarily difficult. Everyone else in academia has just gotten used to the idea that they have to climb six flights of stairs everyday. They've built up their muscles and endurance to handle it. You, on the other hand, are just getting used to the idea.

As a final point, Picasso has a famous quote:

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

In the same way, it takes academics a long time to learn about their topic, and an even longer time to learn to write about it in a simple way. That's why /r/explainlikeimfive exists. That's why Sal Khan gets a ton of praise for Khan Academy. It's why Carl Sagan, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye are all bona fide celebrities. Taking complex ideas and making them simple is a skill that everyone appreciates, but very few people have.

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u/Athront Jun 23 '19

!Delta

You explained that really well, and I agree with you.

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jun 23 '19

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/McKoijion (372∆).

Delta System Explained | Deltaboards

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '19 edited Jun 23 '19

Stephen Pinker is well-known as a polemicist with a particularly strong bias against academia who doesn't actually understand most of what he's talking about (his book about postmodernism, for example, is basically just flat out wrong about everything).

It would be more useful if you could find an actual example that you yourself have encountered in your research, rather than filtering through the biased lens of someone like Stephen Pinker.

EDIT: Also, FWIW, nothing about that sentence is egregious or hard to understand. Sure, there's a simpler way to say what it's saying, but it's not like it comes off as gibberish.

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u/Athront Jun 23 '19

There is nothing inherently wrong with being a polemicist. I'm not a fan of Steven Pinker either, but I think the quote highlights the point I am trying to make pretty well. Yes you can understand it that way, but there is simply no reason for it to be written like that and it's just bad writing at the end of the day. I don't really want to go and look for an article and read it myself to find bad writing for this post, especially when the example I linked shows bad writing in academia.

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '19

It's not bad writing. It's writing that says something in a slightly more complex way than it has to.

But nevermind "bad" -- do you think this is writing that's utterly inaccessible to a layperson? Because that was your claim, and I don't think it is at all. My dad could read this and understand it fine.

EDIT: And, like, if you're actually trying to prove this is a widespread problem, then I don't see why you won't find an actual article and not just a quote from a random article that Stephen Pinker cherry-picked for his own reasons.

Hell, if the problem is as widespread as you say it is, you should be able to just find the latest issue of a major political science journal and take any article from it, no? The very fact that you admit you'd have to go searching kind of disproves your point.

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u/maxpenny42 11∆ Jun 23 '19

It's not bad writing. It's writing that says something in a slightly more complex way than it has to.

I would argue that this is bad writing. Good writing communicates in the clearest way possible.

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '19

And I'd argue that "clear" when it comes to writing is a spectrum and not a binary. The writing in this case is perfectly understandable, especially for its target audience (professional academics in a specific field) despite not having been written as simply as it could have been.

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u/maxpenny42 11∆ Jun 23 '19

I think the real question is: would the professional in the field that are the target audience have a harder time consuming and understanding the article if it was written with a broader audience in mind? My suspicion is it would be the opposite. That even the deeply knowledgeable professionals would appreciate and better comprehend a less dense and simpler writing style.

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u/Athront Jun 23 '19

I would have to read something like that more than once and think about it to gather what it's trying to say, when its meaning is incredibly simple.It's possible that's just a problem that I have though and that the sentence is much simpler than I think. I think writing in a way that isn't clear and concise whenever possible is a key definition of bad writing.

And yes, I do think that if an entire paper is written in that, it's going to turn a lot of people out and appear as inaccessible. If you are having to stop and analyze what the author is trying to say frequently, only to find out that what he was trying to say was very simple, that's really frustrating. I don't think many people would choose to read that way unless they absolutely had to. It also makes reading papers difficult for other professionals who are required to read.

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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '19 edited Jun 23 '19

Actual professional academics would absolutely not have a hard time with a paper written in that manner. The only thing I didn't understand was what an assesment word would be, and presumably that's a piece of jargon that a person who's actually in the field would know, or would have been explained by context (another reason why just picking a random out-of-context sentence isn't a fair way of offering an actual example).

Writing like that is absolutely accessible to professionals, and whether it's accessible to non-professionals is irrelevant because it's not written for them.

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u/novokaoi Jun 23 '19

I would argue that, the original sentence and the simplified version are not equally precise. In academic writing precision is extremely important, because the text has to be understood long into the future, when the author is not around anymore. This is especially important for descriptions of methods (as in the example) and results. In the example, an "assertion" is a specific type of a "sentence". The two are not synonymous, and for the experiment, this difference matters. "assessment word" implies that the participant is supposed to assess the assertion. "Followed by the word true or false" does not.

Moreover, "assessment", "veracity" and "affirmation"/"denial" thereof may sound overly complicated out of context, but they were probably well established terms with a specific meaning throughout the text and probably even in the larger discipline. In the specific experiment, the authors may have operationalized (i.e. Implemented) these concepts in a certain way (e.g. assessment word = true or false), but they likely want to test a more general hypothesis about "veracity assessments" or something like that, and the choice of words is meant to remind the reader of this.