> So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
If you take the benefit of the doubt on the part of the author of the verbose sentence, then it could be that each of the abstractions in it is relevant. In that case, beginning with "People read" means you have to bring the reader around to the idea that it's relevant for contrasting individuals with collectives, social communities with non-social communities (?), and visual or symbolic types of learning with other types of learning.
Basically what I'm saying is that starting point of "people read" actually might end up verbose enough that it's equally distracting. If those generalities are relevant to the study then the error of the original writer wasn't that she was too wordy, it's that she was too terse. Essentially it would have all these relevant concepts jammed into one sentence and it takes for granted that the reader is already comfortable working with these concepts.
Of course this is not necessarily an error from the perspective of people in the field--this is all from the perspective of the author of the note.
"Your words are expensive." Said to me by my graduate advisor when he said I had not stated something, and I pointed out I had, once, in an earlier section.
My writing style, even my academic writing style, is a result of how I was trained as a writer: as a journalist, from spending so much time on my high school newspaper. I have long felt this was an advantage. I was trained as a writer to write straight-forward prose. And I was trained as an editor to eliminate unnecessary words and try to find the simplest way to say something.
My advisor was right, of course. Academic writing is not journalistic writing. I still try to keep my prose as simple as possible, but now I will repeat important sentiments throughout the paper. People don't read academic papers the same as news stories; readers expect to be able to read sections in relative isolation. If something is important, repeat it! But repeat it simply.
You represent a small intersect of people who are both good writers and academics, so your advice is rare and valuable to people seeking to follow in your footsteps.
Any other tips or strange adaptations you've had to make, in order to make good writing work in academia?
As a student of a former journalist and journalist myself (mainly photojournalism for the independent student paper, but I wrote for the high school paper), I don't agree with the sentiment that they are dissimilar, specifically because of their mutual emphasis on clarity and efficiency. Can the reader still understand the contribution from the abstract or first sentence of every paragraph? What if they just skimmed over the figures and captions? Does the title reflect the content of the work? I have this same attitude as a photojournalist: could a reader understand the event if they were to look at an uncaptioned image?
> why is it that a profession so fundamentally
involved in the business of writing ... pays so little attention to this aspect of its work?
I came to a different conclusion shortly before leaving my humanities graduate program: that the bad writing was covering for an absence of valuable insight. If you don't have anything to say, say a lot of bullshit. Nothing I've seen about the field in the last 15 years has made me reconsider that position.
Do you worry about the effectiveness of your writing style? As emerging scholars, perfecting the craft of writing is an essential component of developing as graduate students, and yet resources for honing these skills are largely under utilized. Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.
"I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a litte practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"
Here's a quote from the creator of Calvin and Hobbes that's particularly relevant to the above passage:
> Calvin’s vocabulary puzzles some readers but Calvin has never been a literal six-year-old. Besides, I like Calvin’s ability to precisely articulate stupid ideas.
Unsurprisingly, this applies to programming all too well. A computer program is simply a description of an idea, and the ability to write complex code does not a great programmer make. The best programmers are able to come up with simple solutions to complex problems. The worst programmers are those who devise complex solutions to simple problems.
Complex problems often do not admit simple solutions. What I think you are trying to get at is that the best programmers (and writers, etc.) are able to decompose the complexity into digestible chunks, so that each module (or chapter, etc.) can be understood with relative ease.
Good, simple writing often goes unnoticed or looks easy, since it "gets out of the way" and doesn't confuse. It can take a whole lot of writing on one's own to appreciate just how much patience and effort that takes, though.
Someone posted this quote by Edsger Dijkstra yesterday: “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
My impression is that many new academic writers try to imitate the style of established academics. The results are very unnatural and hard to read texts. And journals are fine with terrible writing style, because most academics are not good writers. Furthermore, unclear and convoluted writing is often seen as fitting due to the complexity of what is being written about.
Also consider that by the numbers, most of academia wasn't even born native English speaking, whether they now live in an English speaking country or not.
A personal note, I'm a native english speaker living abroad, with a non-native-english speaking superiors. While their writing is quite good, i find myself battling constantly for what we might consider 'better, more clear' writing, in favor of the current scientific writing 'trends' in our field.
A successful paper or two with a weird phrase or typo will end up reshaping that field to adopt this language, as authors of subsequent work attempt to align themselves to the original topic.
Former academic here. Have to rather strongly disagree with you.
At least in fields I was familiar with, a lot of Ph.D. training focuses on making people into good writers. Clear communication with both peers and the general population is rewarded; it is damn near impossible to get ahead without these skills.
I don't know what you mean by "hard to read." A good scientific paper is supposed to be very information rich. It condenses 100 other very dense papers into 4 pages, leaving just a few pages for the new contribution of the current work.
Even for a very clear paper, for a field I am well versed in, a good paper takes 10 readings to understand. Because of the information density.
It's all too human an instinct to attempt to signal in-group membership by imitating and adopting the culture of said in-group (see shibboleth [1]). It's also common to go overboard in these attempts to the point of hypercorrection which, if turnover rate is high enough, may then become accepted usage for the next generation…
"...you see students' work where the point, whether it's stated or not, is basically that they're clever." [1]
As a grad student, I've found explaining my work to non-academic laypersons to be a useful exercise. It's similar to those "Expert X explains Topic Y to N Levels of Education" videos and is good sanity check as to whether anyone cares about your work beyond the cloistered ivory tower of academia.
Criticisms of academic writing are a popular and well-justified trope, but I have yet to see any speculation of why otherwise intelligent people acting in good faith would produce writing that everyone dislikes.
My hypothesis is this. In a single piece of academic writing, the author has several competing goals:
1. Get the ideas of the paper into the reader's head.
2. Persuade the reader to believe those ideas and that they are objectively true.
3. Give the reader the impression that the author is a prestigious, intelligent person doing difficult, original work.
When people argue for clearer writing, they are advocating disregarding the latter two, but authors don't have that luxury. In particular:
A big part of academic style, I think is an over-correction for a failure mode of 2. As we can see in the popular media today, often the best way to persuade people is to child-like appeals to emotion stated boldly and repeatedly. But that is also effective at persuading people of things that aren't actually true.
Academics are seeking truth, so they are rightly suspicious of any style that veers too close to unjustified proclamation and verbal strong-arming. Thus a style that is more passive and hedges its bets also comes across as more trustworthy. That is a necessary goal for the author too. A paper that is understood but not believed is no more useful than a paper that is incomprehensible.
The other part of persuading people is the impression of the merits of the author themselves. If some rando parent at your kids' soccer match tells you that wearing fabric on your face prevents disease, you might rightly disregard it. When a highly reputable epidemiologist does, you pay attention because they have earned your trust.
We grant more prestige to people, especially people professing novel insight, if they have a reputation of doing hard things. If the writing makes the idea seem too obvious or easy, we might wonder why it hasn't been discovered before? And if not, perhaps there is some fatal flaw?
All of this means that authors have real incentives to write in a more complex, less clear style, even though it has negative consequences for other goals. Choosing a style always involves trade-offs and our style is always intepreted in a certain social context that affects how it will be read.
I never really found my voice writing for academic literature.
Anyone who clicks my profile will find I have no problem generating vast amounts of text in my own style or even as a character, but writing for a journal ties me into knots.
To be honest, that document is a prime example of what a manifesto shouldn't look like. I can't understand what you're trying to say from the beginning sentence:
> No other re-ligion (lit. “back-binding” [one etymological analysis of the word /religion/] to some ideas to rely on for humans) is necessary for a society, but only reasoned about principles: reflection, symmetry, cooperative construction (by too many CAs -> 1CA).
I'm never explained as to how the etymology of re-ligion relates to the whole thesis, much less what the etymology actually means. That first sentence will already make 90% of the people in the humanities to close their tabs. Please explain concepts like these in full sentences, than rather jot out abbreviations and notes that only you could decipher. I'm actually intrigued about this etymology, but I can't understand! What is "CA"? What do you mean by morality relating to symmetry?
> Evolved religions like Christianity also abide to following principles. Their followers do:
1. think/reflect about the world (our thinking: one instance of reflection)
2. they are in search of beauty, of beautiful/good actions/deeds (symmetry (1))
3. they try to establish one text, one book, as core of their religion.
Now you're making very, very huge sweeping generalizations about the nature of religion right away at the second sentence, which would now make the remaining 10% of the humanities people to run away. The particular qualm I have (disclaimer: though as a non-humanities person) is the third part: religion is not operated only by what is explicitly written in the texts, but are also implicitly defined by the cultural norms of that society (which is why some religious people often try to "find" things in the text in support/opposition to current cultural norms (such as women's rights in the Bible or the Quran), rather than interpreting the text and then create a top-down cultural norm based on that!) And the "singular text" thing might just be a byproduct of you thinking Christianity is the only religion in the world... (more specifically, a product of Protestanism) Also you really need to be careful when using the term evolved: I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but you're now adding a evolutionary view of "progress" in religion that you have never explained!
Ah, I don't have the energy to read the rest of this, people deserve a more legible manifesto than that.
[+] [-] sampo|4 years ago|reply
> So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
https://thedetectiveshandbook.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/feynm...
This is part of a story in the book (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!) and from the book I understand it happened in the 1950s.
[+] [-] jcranberry|4 years ago|reply
Basically what I'm saying is that starting point of "people read" actually might end up verbose enough that it's equally distracting. If those generalities are relevant to the study then the error of the original writer wasn't that she was too wordy, it's that she was too terse. Essentially it would have all these relevant concepts jammed into one sentence and it takes for granted that the reader is already comfortable working with these concepts.
Of course this is not necessarily an error from the perspective of people in the field--this is all from the perspective of the author of the note.
[+] [-] scott_s|4 years ago|reply
My writing style, even my academic writing style, is a result of how I was trained as a writer: as a journalist, from spending so much time on my high school newspaper. I have long felt this was an advantage. I was trained as a writer to write straight-forward prose. And I was trained as an editor to eliminate unnecessary words and try to find the simplest way to say something.
My advisor was right, of course. Academic writing is not journalistic writing. I still try to keep my prose as simple as possible, but now I will repeat important sentiments throughout the paper. People don't read academic papers the same as news stories; readers expect to be able to read sections in relative isolation. If something is important, repeat it! But repeat it simply.
[+] [-] exo-pla-net|4 years ago|reply
Any other tips or strange adaptations you've had to make, in order to make good writing work in academia?
[+] [-] psychomugs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamcreasy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|4 years ago|reply
I came to a different conclusion shortly before leaving my humanities graduate program: that the bad writing was covering for an absence of valuable insight. If you don't have anything to say, say a lot of bullshit. Nothing I've seen about the field in the last 15 years has made me reconsider that position.
[+] [-] yerwhat01010|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] m12k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chakkepolja|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billytetrud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively
Do you worry about the effectiveness of your writing style? As emerging scholars, perfecting the craft of writing is an essential component of developing as graduate students, and yet resources for honing these skills are largely under utilized. Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago's Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.
[+] [-] maire|4 years ago|reply
A key point in the video is that when you are a student the reader is paid to read your paper.
When you are not a student - the reader pays to read your paper (or book). Is it worth their time or money?
[+] [-] msp_yc|4 years ago|reply
"I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a litte practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!"
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/02/11
[+] [-] olooney|4 years ago|reply
> Calvin’s vocabulary puzzles some readers but Calvin has never been a literal six-year-old. Besides, I like Calvin’s ability to precisely articulate stupid ideas.
- Bill Waterson
[+] [-] Sharlin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkhdigital|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cenk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkp8000|4 years ago|reply
Someone posted this quote by Edsger Dijkstra yesterday: “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
[+] [-] vaylian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beanjuice|4 years ago|reply
A personal note, I'm a native english speaker living abroad, with a non-native-english speaking superiors. While their writing is quite good, i find myself battling constantly for what we might consider 'better, more clear' writing, in favor of the current scientific writing 'trends' in our field.
A successful paper or two with a weird phrase or typo will end up reshaping that field to adopt this language, as authors of subsequent work attempt to align themselves to the original topic.
[+] [-] mellavora|4 years ago|reply
At least in fields I was familiar with, a lot of Ph.D. training focuses on making people into good writers. Clear communication with both peers and the general population is rewarded; it is damn near impossible to get ahead without these skills.
I don't know what you mean by "hard to read." A good scientific paper is supposed to be very information rich. It condenses 100 other very dense papers into 4 pages, leaving just a few pages for the new contribution of the current work.
Even for a very clear paper, for a field I am well versed in, a good paper takes 10 readings to understand. Because of the information density.
[+] [-] Sharlin|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
[+] [-] psychomugs|4 years ago|reply
As a grad student, I've found explaining my work to non-academic laypersons to be a useful exercise. It's similar to those "Expert X explains Topic Y to N Levels of Education" videos and is good sanity check as to whether anyone cares about your work beyond the cloistered ivory tower of academia.
[1] https://youtu.be/w5R8gduPZw4?t=164
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
My hypothesis is this. In a single piece of academic writing, the author has several competing goals:
1. Get the ideas of the paper into the reader's head.
2. Persuade the reader to believe those ideas and that they are objectively true.
3. Give the reader the impression that the author is a prestigious, intelligent person doing difficult, original work.
When people argue for clearer writing, they are advocating disregarding the latter two, but authors don't have that luxury. In particular:
A big part of academic style, I think is an over-correction for a failure mode of 2. As we can see in the popular media today, often the best way to persuade people is to child-like appeals to emotion stated boldly and repeatedly. But that is also effective at persuading people of things that aren't actually true.
Academics are seeking truth, so they are rightly suspicious of any style that veers too close to unjustified proclamation and verbal strong-arming. Thus a style that is more passive and hedges its bets also comes across as more trustworthy. That is a necessary goal for the author too. A paper that is understood but not believed is no more useful than a paper that is incomprehensible.
The other part of persuading people is the impression of the merits of the author themselves. If some rando parent at your kids' soccer match tells you that wearing fabric on your face prevents disease, you might rightly disregard it. When a highly reputable epidemiologist does, you pay attention because they have earned your trust.
We grant more prestige to people, especially people professing novel insight, if they have a reputation of doing hard things. If the writing makes the idea seem too obvious or easy, we might wonder why it hasn't been discovered before? And if not, perhaps there is some fatal flaw?
All of this means that authors have real incentives to write in a more complex, less clear style, even though it has negative consequences for other goals. Choosing a style always involves trade-offs and our style is always intepreted in a certain social context that affects how it will be read.
[+] [-] haroldship|4 years ago|reply
https://www.coursera.org/learn/sciwrite/home/welcome
[+] [-] tomrod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Faaak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|4 years ago|reply
Anyone who clicks my profile will find I have no problem generating vast amounts of text in my own style or even as a character, but writing for a journal ties me into knots.
[+] [-] xenonite|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtbtobi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lasagnaphil|4 years ago|reply
> No other re-ligion (lit. “back-binding” [one etymological analysis of the word /religion/] to some ideas to rely on for humans) is necessary for a society, but only reasoned about principles: reflection, symmetry, cooperative construction (by too many CAs -> 1CA).
I'm never explained as to how the etymology of re-ligion relates to the whole thesis, much less what the etymology actually means. That first sentence will already make 90% of the people in the humanities to close their tabs. Please explain concepts like these in full sentences, than rather jot out abbreviations and notes that only you could decipher. I'm actually intrigued about this etymology, but I can't understand! What is "CA"? What do you mean by morality relating to symmetry?
> Evolved religions like Christianity also abide to following principles. Their followers do:
Now you're making very, very huge sweeping generalizations about the nature of religion right away at the second sentence, which would now make the remaining 10% of the humanities people to run away. The particular qualm I have (disclaimer: though as a non-humanities person) is the third part: religion is not operated only by what is explicitly written in the texts, but are also implicitly defined by the cultural norms of that society (which is why some religious people often try to "find" things in the text in support/opposition to current cultural norms (such as women's rights in the Bible or the Quran), rather than interpreting the text and then create a top-down cultural norm based on that!) And the "singular text" thing might just be a byproduct of you thinking Christianity is the only religion in the world... (more specifically, a product of Protestanism) Also you really need to be careful when using the term evolved: I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but you're now adding a evolutionary view of "progress" in religion that you have never explained!Ah, I don't have the energy to read the rest of this, people deserve a more legible manifesto than that.
[+] [-] tunnuz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JPLeRouzic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thefrenchsavage|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]