I think this interview misses a very important point. Academic writing is necessarily in English, which is by far not the native language of most academic writers. In journalism or even science dissemination to the general public, people usually write in their native language, which helps a lot to be perceived as a good writer compared to an academic paper written in English by a non-native speaker who will thus attempt to mimic the academic style of writing of their scientific community.
Can the Academic Write?
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Re: Can the Academic Write?
#22Academics seem prone to what Language Log terms "nerdview", the baffling but usually implicit assumption that lay audiences are intimately familiar with the terminology, idioms and house style of your academic niche. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4509
Academics rather have the implicit assumption that the readers arewilling to learn about the words that they are unfamiliar with on their own.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#23I write "Analogous to the above construction, we now have the following." This is stilted for a normal article, but is the expected academic style. Academics can write well enough to reach their peers. Complaining that every academic is not good at writing (see, I did it again!) is a bit like saying that policemen are not good novelists.
How does the meaning of "analogous to the above construction, we now have the following" differ from "by analogy"? Is the difference worth the higher word count?
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#24A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly relate to this discussion. Academic writing is all about compressing complex topics and ideas with a long history into as concise a form as possible without losing accuracy. (At least in the natural sciences, where I come from; some people would say otherwise about s…
Thanks. I don't really understand articles like this--isn't audience one of the cornerstones of good writing?
Journalism is going to have different writing than academic writing, which will have different writing than marketing, which will have different writing than a fiction author...
... goals and audience are important, as you're saying. This article just comes across as uninsightful.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a graduate student at a top research university I have to ask: where do scientists write concisely and accurately? That is the opposite of my experience. Academic writing is very obfuscatory and frequently full of typos, grammatical mistakes, or just straight-up inaccuracies. I blame the conference publication review process.
> That is the opposite of my experience. I can't deny you your experience (especially as you have more of it than I do), at the same time, I can only echo my own. I don't know what your field is, mine is biology, and while we too have our share of obfuscated papers we also have many that are indeed as I described them above.
Ah, computer science! You should stay in real science.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#26It might be hard to hear the truth from a non-academic as in this article. Some of you might feel better to hear it from a peer. Those I refer to "The Science of Scientific Writing" by
George Gopen & Judith Swan published 1990 in the American Scientist:
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/the-science-of-s...
However many scientific publications are awful to read. Including mine.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#27Another issue I didn't see in this interview is that academics (at least in the sciences) aren't trained to write, but they are often held to the same standards as those who are trained. Moreover, a scientist's job isn't primarily to write for a general audience, so it's hard to say they've failed in that regard. Whereas a journalist who gets the science wrong when reporting on it (beyond simply dumbing it down or ma…
Unfortunately, when the journalist fails and gets the science wrong, the result is a whole bunch of people with silly ideas about science (as if we didn't have enough of those already). When the scientist fails and gets the language wrong, the result is a whole bunch of people whose silly ideas about science aren't corrected because they never read the article. Science loses either way.
> When the scientist fails and gets the language wrong
I think you mean, when a scientist writes technically precise jargon that is misinterpreted? If you mean that the scientist did bad science, science self-corrects for that (at least in theory, and it has worked pretty well in practice).
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, when the journalist fails and gets the science wrong, the result is a whole bunch of people with silly ideas about science (as if we didn't have enough of those already). When the scientist fails and gets the language wrong, the result is a whole bunch of people whose silly ideas about science aren't corrected because they never read the article. Science loses either way.
> When the scientist fails and gets the language wrong I think you mean, when a scientist writes technically precise jargon that is misinterpreted? If you mean that the scientist did bad science, science self-corrects for that (at least in theory, and it has worked pretty well in practice).
Yes, that's what I meant.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is the opposite of my experience. I can't deny you your experience (especially as you have more of it than I do), at the same time, I can only echo my own. I don't know what your field is, mine is biology, and while we too have our share of obfuscated papers we also have many that are indeed as I described them above.
Ah, computer science! You should stay in real science.
I'm hoping the remark about "real science" was ironic, otherwise I would have to take pretty strong offense now ;-)
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#30A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly relate to this discussion. Academic writing is all about compressing complex topics and ideas with a long history into as concise a form as possible without losing accuracy. (At least in the natural sciences, where I come from; some people would say otherwise about s…
Thanks. I don't really understand articles like this--isn't audience one of the cornerstones of good writing? Journalism is going to have different writing than academic writing, which will have different writing than marketing, which will have different writing than a fiction author... ... goals and audience are important, as you're saying. This article just comes across as uninsightful.
As long as each group of writers sticks to its ideal audience, there's no problem. The conflict starts when academics are asked to write for a popular audience, or a scientist reads something a non-scientist wrote about his field. Then you get a style/audience mismatch, with the ensuing arguments as detailed in the article.