Why Is Academic Writing So Academic? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#11

Post by benbreen » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #7

I think what the author is missing is the possibility that many academics are simply bad writers . Academic writing in many fields is extremely formulaic just so that the relevant information can be communicated regardless of the writing skill of the author. Add to that the fact that many academics are writing in a language that is not their first, so even if they had considerable skill in their mother tongue, there…

I've found that even academics who are actually quite good at writing for popular venues still fall into typically academic patterns (like the overuse of passive voice or jargon) in their journal articles. I blame it on peer review more than anything else - my experience with the peer review process (n=6) has been that unorthodox turns of phrase or narrative quirks are often the first things to get flagged. Peer review has a necessary and obvious function, but it also has a side effect of smoothing out prose style. The result is that journal articles (even in those in single-author fields) often sound like they were written by a hive mind rather than an individual.

I was actually intending to do graduate work in archaeology but switched to history when I realized how dreary the prose style favored by archaeologists was. At least history has a few authors with an engaging and original style (for instance, Simon Schama, Fernand Braudel, and Natalie Zemon Davis). To be fair, archaeology has some interesting prose writers of its own (Colin Renfrew, Marija Gimbutas) but the ordinary journal article style tends to be a morass of passive voice and clichéd phrasing.

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#12

Post by hackuser » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 9:26 PM UTC

Experts in every field have trouble communicating with the 'non-technical'. For example, the dull, unintelligible jargon of experts in our field is a familiar, widespread joke. Think about it next time you read, or write, an error message -- something intended for end users but which even I often can't make sense of.

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#13

Post by yodsanklai » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

mixedmath wrote: post #9

I am reminded of the recent obituary of Grothendieck: http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendie... Two extremely well-known mathematicians were asked by Nature to write an obituary for the late Grothendieck. They wrote it to be mostly understood by a nonmathematical audience, but Nature ultimately rejected the obituary on it being too technical. It is almost as if each discipline has become an isla…

> it would be tremendously hard and time-consuming to make each article understandable to another field.

You can't explain something that required years of thinking and learning to a non expert that has only a few minutes to spend. It's not the role of a research publication.

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#14

Post by puranjay » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 10:01 PM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #7

I think what the author is missing is the possibility that many academics are simply bad writers . Academic writing in many fields is extremely formulaic just so that the relevant information can be communicated regardless of the writing skill of the author. Add to that the fact that many academics are writing in a language that is not their first, so even if they had considerable skill in their mother tongue, there…

The professor who taught me Derrida (translated by Gayatri Spivak, no less) told me that poor writing in philosophy dates back to Kant, who was a notoriously bad writer. But because Kant was also the father of all modern philosophy, a lot of future philosophers tried to emulate him and his often obtuse writing style.

Over the years, this became convention. Convention became dogma. And this dogma is the reason why I've thrown more than a few books flying across the room in frustration

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#15

Post by superobserver » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 10:06 PM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #10

jonnathanson wrote: post #5

Academic writing suffers, albeit to a lesser degree, from the same problem that has made legalese so annoying to read: the need for specificity. Also, a need for references. Not just citations, but verbal references. What is jargon, after all, if not a specific and functional set of keywords and referents used in common by a given group or field? Jargon is efficient in academia. It is a common standard. If I write so…

It's not just specificity. Take for example the physical sciences' tradition of using passive voice, exclusively, when writing about the methods used in an experiment. You never write "We poured the mixture" or "We measured the transmittance", but rather "The mixture was poured into a 250ml Erlenmeyer flask" and "Transmittance was measured using a model 500 spectrophotometer with a 580nm filter". The reason, as anyon…

Passive voice has a sense of "objectivity" to it, which would explain its prevalence. In my opinion, it is harmful in the sense that experiments (papers) are by no means truly objective, but rather attempts at raising subjectivity to a broadly intersubjective level.

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#16

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 10:11 PM UTC

regehr wrote: post #2

It's usually a combination of (1) being afraid of sounding unrigorous or unintelligent and (2) not knowing any better and having been trained on lots of bad examples This book is excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Stylish-Academic-Writing-Helen-Sword/d...

It helps to have a good advisor beat the bad writing out of you via brutally honest critiques.

I find it best to write from the heart about something I'm really excited about, and if I can't do that, then not to waste my time writing anyways. Of course, as a non academic, I have that luxury.

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#17

Post by tormeh » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #13

mixedmath wrote: post #9

I am reminded of the recent obituary of Grothendieck: http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendie... Two extremely well-known mathematicians were asked by Nature to write an obituary for the late Grothendieck. They wrote it to be mostly understood by a nonmathematical audience, but Nature ultimately rejected the obituary on it being too technical. It is almost as if each discipline has become an isla…

> it would be tremendously hard and time-consuming to make each article understandable to another field. You can't explain something that required years of thinking and learning to a non expert that has only a few minutes to spend. It's not the role of a research publication.

But what if I have a day? Can you help me then? Many papers are a team effort to understand, even for students in the relevant field.

No excuses.

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#18

Post by Machow » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 10:23 PM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #10

jonnathanson wrote: post #5

Academic writing suffers, albeit to a lesser degree, from the same problem that has made legalese so annoying to read: the need for specificity. Also, a need for references. Not just citations, but verbal references. What is jargon, after all, if not a specific and functional set of keywords and referents used in common by a given group or field? Jargon is efficient in academia. It is a common standard. If I write so…

It's not just specificity. Take for example the physical sciences' tradition of using passive voice, exclusively, when writing about the methods used in an experiment. You never write "We poured the mixture" or "We measured the transmittance", but rather "The mixture was poured into a 250ml Erlenmeyer flask" and "Transmittance was measured using a model 500 spectrophotometer with a 580nm filter". The reason, as anyon…

For what it's worth, in Psychology (by APA standards) 1st person voice is discouraged, but so is passive voice. In the passages you use, removing 1st person (almost) requires using passive voice, but I would say removing 1st person voice is what discourages a very informal, prosey style, while the frequent use of passive voice often feels indirect.

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#19

Post by ffn » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 10:26 PM UTC

Modern instructive writing (as oppose to creative writing like novels, short stories, erotic fiction, etc.) all suffer from lack of pictures. I know that sounds incredibly childish, but bear with me on this one. Unlike our computer overlords, us lowly humans are ultimately visual creatures with brains that have been evolved through the millennia to be extremely optimized at processing and storing visual / spatial information. In fact, we're so much better with visual information compared with words or equations, that even our language reflects this: when we understand something, we exclaim something like "oh, now I see it".

But, because of how hard it had been to serialize, transfer, persist, and unserialize drawings, we had no choice but to resort to shoddy words and equations to overcome the problem of communicating over large space-times. And so even now, in the era of image boards, instant messaging, etc., most of us still can communicate only with simple letters and numbers because we never learned how to communicate with colors, shapes, and lines when we went to school.

This is especially true in certain regions of academia (and professional fields like law, accounting, math, gynecology, etc.), where picture books, diagrams, comics, and the like are viewed with patronizing disdain (though fields like Mech Eng. seems to do better as they focus a lot on 3D modeling, 2D diagramming, isometric views, etc.).

In my opinion, the only way to improve academic writing so it's understandable, intuitive, and interesting is to improve how we write - with more pictures and less words. And the best way to do that, is to teach drawing like we teach English in our elementary, middle, and high schools

Re: Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?

#20

Post by seanmcdirmid » Mon, Jan 26, 2015, 10:31 PM UTC

ffn wrote: post #19

Modern instructive writing (as oppose to creative writing like novels, short stories, erotic fiction, etc.) all suffer from lack of pictures. I know that sounds incredibly childish, but bear with me on this one. Unlike our computer overlords, us lowly humans are ultimately visual creatures with brains that have been evolved through the millennia to be extremely optimized at processing and storing visual / spatial inf…

Illustration is harder than writing and mostly untaught outside if very specialized circles. Still, it is something I wanted to learn to improve my papers (Bret Victor being a huge inspiration here), and I can depend in my art school background wife for help, so I'm looking for oppurtunities to play around with it in my writings.

I once wrote a paper [1] with embedded QuickTime videos. It worked really well, but I found out quickly people don't use acroread on macs with QuickTime installed by default. Also, some people still print things out.

[1] http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/mcdirmid07live.pdf