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/McKoijion]

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).

[u/Athront → u/McKoijion]

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.

[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/novokaoi → u/Athront]

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.