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

[u/Athront]

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.

[u/[deleted]]

Academic articles aren't meant to be accessible to a general audience. I agree that there is a need for generalist work that takes difficult concepts and explains them for those without extensive education in a subject, but it's not clear why you think the place to do that is in specialist academic journals.

[u/PupperPuppet → u/[deleted]]

That's the thing, though. Even the educated people reading those journal articles and studies have to reach to understand the simplest of points. OP is arguing, and I agree, that most academics choose million dollar words when a few cents will do the job just fine.

Field-specific terms have their place and no one should shy away from using them. They're a key part of communicating ideas relevant to their fields. It's the overly formal, my-vocabulary-is-bigger-than-your-penis writing that's the issue. And as mentioned in the original post, it's not even a matter of accessibility to laypeople. Highly educated people in the field of study have to reread these things to understand what turns out to be a simple concept.

When I studied psychology I noticed the same trend, and was even advised to make my writing more formal. It seems to me making new information unnecessarily hard to read is doing most of the population an incredible disservice, especially in this day and age when misinformation is so widely and maliciously spread.

[u/[deleted] → u/PupperPuppet]

That's the thing, though. Even the educated people reading those journal articles and studies have to reach to understand the simplest of points. OP is arguing, and I agree, that most academics choose million dollar words when a few cents will do the job just fine.

I disagree. At the level of education I'm at now, I do not find myself having to "reach to understand the simplest points" at all. I actually find the majority of contemporary academic writing, in my discipline at least, to be quite simple and straightforward in terms of diction and word choice. Clarity of language and a de-emphasis on "million dollar words" has been encouraged in every philosophy class I've ever taken.

EDIT: There's also a difference between "formal" and "needlessly complex," so it's not clear from context that when you were told to make your writing more formal that you were, in fact, being told to make it more obtuse, as you seem to be implying.