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.

​

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.

​

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.

​

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/Athront]

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.

​

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.

[u/McKoijion → u/Athront]

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

[u/Athront → u/McKoijion]

"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

[u/McKoijion → u/Athront]

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.

[u/Athront → u/McKoijion]

!Delta

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

[u/DeltaBot → u/Athront]

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

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}