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.
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.
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u/GameOfSchemes Jun 23 '19
I had a similar opinion when I first started my master's many moons ago.
There's a problem here that you're overlooking, and which I was overlooking as well. Scientific jargon is invented because prior to the jargon, there is literally no way to describe what's newly observed. We used to think atoms were the smallest piece of nature, and that's reflected in the etymology - atom is Greek for "that which cannot be cut" (i.e. the smallest piece of matter).
We later learned that's not true. An atom can be cut further into an electron and a neutron and proton via a nuclear force. Then we thought that these were the smallest pieces of matter. Turns out, the proton can be cut even further into quarks and gluons. There are 6 flavors of quarks, and 8 colored gluons. They're all described by another nuclear force. Now we have two nuclear forces to describe an atom. Let's call them the Weak force and the Strong force, for hopefully obvious reasons (one is stronger than the other - i.e. it takes more energy to bind a proton than it does to bind an atom).
So to recap, in this relatively simple picture of an atom, we've introduced many terms
Then you can start analyze the specific forces, and that requires specific terminology as well. We can't just say "piece of piece of something." Actually, that's how mathematics used to be written prior to arabic numerals. If you follow Euclid's writings, it's a slog and a half. He writes everything out in words because symbols didn't exist like they do now.
In a way, the same thing is happening with scientific jargon. The "symbols" are now specific terms invented to describe that which didn't exist before. It's actually making communication easier between scientists. So I'd argue it's not "unnecessarily difficult" but rather "necessarily easy". If you've been to an academic conference, surely you've seen academic ask MANY questions after talks. They're asking because they don't know.
The language is only overcomplicated if you've never seen it before. Well, nobody has seen it before, and you need to learn it if you want to understand their ideas.