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Education

Academic Writing is Getting Harder To Read (economist.com) 102

Posted by msmash from the quality-decline dept.
Academic writing has become significantly less readable over the past 80 years, particularly in humanities and social sciences, according to an analysis of 347,000 PhD abstracts by The Economist. Using the Flesch reading-ease test, researchers found that readability scores in humanities and social sciences plunged from 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. The decline was observed across all disciplines, with humanities and social sciences becoming as complex as natural sciences by the 1990s. The study, examining abstracts from 1812 to 2023, covered English-language doctoral theses from British universities.

Academic Writing is Getting Harder To Read More | Reply

Academic Writing is Getting Harder To Read

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  • Incomprensable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @11:50AM (#65028517)
    Apparently, many people think that being incomprehensible is a sign of being intelligent. Also, it is a good way of disguising that you have nothing worthwhile to say. I have read many scientific articles that were so full of jargon and inside terminology that they were virtually incomprehensible. This may make you look clever to the in group but practically guarantees that your work will have no lasting impact. Some things are intrinsically complicated, but using language to hide your meanings is an activity best left to politicians, who find that it is a job requirement.
    • There was a similar study (I don't have the link offhand) that found quarterly reports from companies that had bad results or didn't meet their targets were more likely to contain empty language that used a lot of words to say very little. The people using it know it's hollow, but want to distract from that by dressing it up as much as possible. Journals could always start rejecting these submissions, but if you have an entire discipline that's become overrun with charlatans then the peer review process is

      • That's called a tap dance. I'm sure with all the great AI LLMs around we can get a summary. This is why if I were a peer and understood the scientific or technical premise in the document and could not understand your paper; it would be a red flag for bullshit.

        • In the real world those people get published because the reviewer isn't going to spend time trying to to parse the paper. They just look at how complicated the paper has been made and decide the person must be smart if they can write something that confuses the highly educated reviewer.

          Like that famous study publishing a paper full of AI drivel.

    • You're just seeing the low-hanging fruit being taken out leaving significantly more complex papers that address more complex topics as the only thing that you can practically publish.

      This is going to be pretty normal in any field including the humanities. It's not that they're trying to be overly wordy or incomprehensible it's that the simpler topics have been long since addressed in detail and you are left with the more complicated stuff. So you're stuck with more complex reading.

      • That; and deeper topics.
        The more you know collectively about a field, the narrower the studies are going to be. And so the more specialize and nuanced the language is going to get.

        I am a computer scientist. I use to do algorithmic for a subfield. Trying to read papers from other algorithmic subfields is tough. Try reading FOCS or STOCS papers. That's rough, why? Because they assume you've read pretty much all other papers in that space published in the last 10 years!

    • I came across a biostatistics article a few years back that claimed to have developed a statistical test to measure the effect of confounding factors. This claim of inventing information out of the aether without having to collect additional data was dressed up in a lot of pseudo-innumerate jargon one usually finds in life science literature.

    • Subject should be Re:IncomprensIble NOT "Re:Incomprensable" Start by spelling properly.

    • I have read many scientific articles that were so full of jargon and inside terminology that they were virtually incomprehensible. This may make you look clever to the in group but practically guarantees that your work will have no lasting impact.

      That's simply not true. Scientific papers are not written for random members of the general public to read, they are written for other members of the field to read. To do this in an efficient manner we use jargon to mean precise things in order to avoid adding pages of verbage to precisely describe something in English which is a very imprecise language. Take for example, the Higgs boson discovery paper from ATLAS - it's full of jargon like "sqrt(s)", "eta", "boson", "lepton" etc. None of these are terms a

    • many people think that being incomprehensible is a sign of being intelligent

      There's no doubt writing something concise and clear is much more difficult then rambling on and on.

      I have more to say, but I need to stop here otherwise I will undermine my own point.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Apparently, many people think that being incomprehensible is a sign of being intelligent.

      Sad, but true. I see it as the opposite.

  • Other comments (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Orwell [peped.org] had a few things to say about bad writing.
    I think it happens because intellectuals grow up thinking that impenetrable verbosity signifies value. Especially with jargon. Perhaps in this case the PhD holder believed it would look better to her humanities reviewers.

    Some old scientific papers were notably brief, i.e. Einstein's paper on field equations for gravity.

    • Have you read Maxwell's paper on Electro-Magnetism? hundreds of pages, well written all of it. A seveth grader could read it, understand all of it? Probably not because he does talk through a lot of difficult math, but read it and understand everything but the mathy bits? probably. Einsteins paper.... It becomes a two inch text book by the time it is presented to grad students. I know, I had both his (basically a pamphlet) and the text book that broke it down.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Xarius ( 691264 )

      Some of it is actually taught, which is infuriating. I'm at university part time, and work full-time in business doing tech projects. In my job we have to write clearly, concisely and simply--it could be designing a letter millions of customers will read, or instructions on the online self-service portal, or internal training materials: it all had to be written well and be understandable. We had regular training on this type of writing.

      Then I started studying at degree-level and get consistently marked down

  • That's becuase (Score:1, Insightful)

    by BigChigger ( 551094 )
    it's significantly more full of bullshit too.

  • Its difficult to make hard topics simple to read. (Score:3)

    by mprindle ( 198799 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @12:03PM (#65028575)
    It takes skill to write a scientific paper that is easy to understand yet maintain the meaning of the topic being presented. Its not impossible but exceeding difficult the more esoteric the topic is. That being said, it seems more and more published papers seem to be short on actual information and instead are filled with enough stuff to make it appear to be worthwhile.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Once upon a time a clinical fellow came to work in the lab I was in. Her first day the PI asked her what her goals were for her six month fellowship. "Two first author papers" she said. We all laughed at her becuase in our field one paper a year was pretty good, for someone with relevant skills, of which she had none.

      Yet most of us were competing with her kind for jobs. So you discover the minimum publishable unit, dress it up in grand claims, fill it with jargon just to be sure no upstart on the hiring or

    • It takes skill to write ANYTHING that's simple to read. Convoluted, complicated writing is a sign of poor writing skill, regardless of the topic. Too many academics downplay the importance of making their writing readable. It takes effort to simplify concepts. Any concepts. Failing to do so is lazy or incompetent, or both.

      • I don't know that academic downplay the importance of easy to understand writting. We love science communicators!

        When we talk to each other, we don't feel the need to make the writting 8th grade readable. No 8th grade is going to read it.

        We write it in very formulaic ways using specialized language and field dependent structure. Why? Because it makes it easy to read within the community, which is your intended audience.

        It is the same thing as good UI. Good for whom? Trying to do what? These should be your f

        • Simple does not equal 8th grade reading level. What it does mean, is that the ideas are communicated in a way that is coherent and free of excess baggage that obscures the message being communicated.

          Writing in formulaic ways is a crutch, a poor substitute for writing that is readable and communicates well. Formulaic is when you blindly follow the template provided by a professor, without regard to whether the template applies to the subject at hand, or whether it actually makes the content understandable.

  • Once the 10 year system started to rely heavily on impact factor, it became trivially easy for people to collude and game the tenure system.

    In order for that collusion to continue, you need to create enough obfuscation that people donâ(TM)t realize a lot of what is being published is worthless, and is only there to pad resumes of aspiring academics.
    • my experience in academia some 25 years ago was that many people would write ONE paper, then use that one paper to then write variations on that theme in several other papers, many time referencing the original paper as a resource that proves their thought to be true.

      In the 'soft sciences'

  • Most of the time, sure. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @12:09PM (#65028599) Homepage Journal

    But then you come the occasional landmark paper, and suddenly the writing gets a lot better.

    I've puzzled over this: is it cause or effect? Does a landmark paper get cited because it's better written, or does it get better written because the author expects people to read it? I think it's effect. When an author knows he's got a winner, he dispenses with the frippery. With pressure to publish to pad your CV, most papers are half-baked or nothing burgers, and the lack of substance is routinely disguised with inflated language. Clear writing comes across as cheeky.

    I think it's become a kind of fashion. My company was submitting a research proposal in conjunction with a well-known lab at Harvard. I took it upon myself to edit the final proposal draft, so I streamlined the overblown academic prose from the Harvard group. The Harvard PI told me to revert it back. He acknowledged that my version was better writing, but the proposal reviewers were used to bad academic style and if we didn't write the science parts that way we'd look inexperienced. The technological part of the proposal on the other hand had to be well-written because it was stuff the reviewers wouldn't be familiar with.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It is much, much easier to write a paper when you've got good results. Getting bullshit accepted requires much more work on the writing side.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        I don't think papers with bullshit *results* are common. I think what's common is papers that aren't very interesting where that fact is obscured with language you could describe as bullshit, because it's intended to shape your attitude toward a boring result.

        An interesting result is one that challenges expectations or common sense assumptions, but any program that pursues such results will *inevitably* produce mostly boring results. Still, boring is not the same as useless; it's important for someone to

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Papers with bullshit results are definitely common, but I agree, marginal results dressed up to sound as important as possible are the majority.

          It applies to grants as well. I had one colleague who went on and on about how difficult grants are to write. He'd basically spend six months "working" on one, submit it at the last second, then spend the next six months "working" on the next. What he was actually doing was taking the same grant and trying to tweak it to sound exciting enough to fund. Writing was ge

  • Between colloquial and stuffy. And I might add that different disciplines have different amplitudes, periods, and phases of the swing.

    Life sciences in the US seem to be near the "stuffy" side right now. Pick up a NEJM and you'll see lots of run-on sentences, heavy use of jargon, and a great deal of refering to oneself in the third person. But not as much as in articles from 30 or 40 years ago.

    Contrast this with engineering literature where a lot more "we" and "I" is tolerated in places where "the authors" o

    • I did some academic reviews as requested back in the day, what I found a lot in the NEJM was that the researchers used statistics incorrectly, making me believe that they had very little, if any, understanding of statistics. When I would add in those comments and return the paper, as I had been ASKED TO DO, man would those people get mad!

      I wasn't trying to jerk their chain, just they knew I taught statistics so had asked me to review their statistics they used in the paper!

  • I was once the director of a university lab and one obvious way to publish more is to take a paper that got accepted in one journal and "re-work it" to publish it again. You have to make the second paper seem like an advance over the first and the easiest way to do that is to simply add unnecessary content. If it is longer and has a new graph or image, you are good to go. Each succeeding paper tends to be less clear than the previous.
  • Humanities and social sciences moved from soft science to pseudo-science as repeatedly [wikipedia.org] demonstrated [newdiscourses.com].

  • Everywhere (Score:2, Troll)

    by davebarnes ( 158106 )

    I real technical articles in journals.
    It is really bad there. Abstracts at the grade 23 level.
    It is all because academia values turbidity.

  • The DARPA SCORE program found replication rates as low as 42% in some academic domains such as Psychology and Education. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov] As long as it is easier to obfuscate your results rather than doing the work to make sure your work is reproducible we are going to have less readable work products.

  • Firstly, you need to distinguish between science and sociology. Both are getting harder to read for very different reasons.

    Science is getting harder to read because experiments are becoming increasingly technically advanced. We are at the stage where you want study the effects of gravity at a sensitivity scale where dropping cannon balls and feathers from the Tower of Pisa will not do. Hardly anyone knew what an RT-PCR was before COVID, much less why it is more sensitive than an antigen test. The amount of

    • Speaking of antigen tests, is it me or are they deep magic dismissed as a crappy routine thing?

      You have this cheaply mass manufactured entirely passive device capable of detecting nanograms virus byproducts and showing them as a bright red line on a piece of paper. The amount of science and technology in one bit of plastic, paper and liquid is astonishing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nashv ( 1479253 )

        It is something we have been able to do for technically decades now and COVID simply provided the scale that made cheap manufacturing feasible and worth it. It’s the same kind of ‘magic’ as being able to buy a microcontroller for 2 bucks. Something that a few decades ago cost 1000x more.

        • Yep. It's the astonishing sensitivity of it, not far removed from the astonishing precision that goes into boring, day-to-day computational devices. Routine and disposable astounding levels of tech.

          Sometimes it just strikes me that's all.

  • Venn diagram explanation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @01:01PM (#65028759) Homepage Journal

    Okay, I can't resist saying a few words on the topic... The political diversions ticked me off.

    Writing well is difficult. Doing complicated scientific research is also difficult. The number of people who can write clearly about complicated scientific topics is in the intersection and the number of such people has always been small. These years fewer and fewer people learn to write well and the science keeps getting more and more complicated. The intersection has become the empty set in many fields, some of them rather broad.

    Personal anecdote time? The longest chunk of my career was helping scientists write clearly. These are deep thinkers, but almost none of them were skilled writers. I'm quite shallow, but also quite broad, so I was able to help many of them get their ideas across. But I'm reminded of the exceptions. In particular, there was a guy who kept sending me this paper to work on and I never managed to figure out what he thought he was trying to say. Maybe he actually was faking it? That might help explain why he moved into management? (And I still feel like my retirement was part of management's transition to less publishing...)

    • That rings true.
      Many scientists are bad communicators. But since we mostly talk to each other, it doesn't really matter.

      Realistically, we only need a handful of science communicators in each field.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        I should have included something about the time dimension. However that would clash with your "handful". At least in terms of communicating the findings to the public in a timely way, we need more than a handful.

  • "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit" - My Moms.

  • ... it was just my failing eyesight.

  • Something I find kinda funny about all these anti-social scientists rants is they sound exactly what I see out of the sovereign citizens when they talk about lawyers or the free energy community when they talk about physics. People who think they are really smart not liking answers and not wanting to take the time to learn the field, so they complain about the language and the field because they know more than experts. So yeah... the anti-social science crowd are really just in the same camp as flat earth

  • That's fine. Humanities a social sciences are hardly in demand anymore and will disappear completely from the curriculum landscape in the near future.

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