I hadn’t actually considered academic writing as an expression of sociopathic manipulation until now, but it explains a lot.
This is perfect
inhales
Complex 1a was prepared according to well-known synthetic procedures. The reduction potential of the complex was increased due to the nephelauxetic expansion of the occupied FMOs induced by photolytic epimerization of the auxiliary tetrahydrophosphazolidine sulfide ligand to enable a strongly σ-donating dihaptic coordination mode.
translation: we made molecule 1a, we shouldn’t need to tell you how, it’s obvious, lmao, git gud. the molecule became less likely to gain extra electrons because shining light on it made one of its weird-ass totally-not-bullshit parts wiggle around a bit so that it could bind more strongly to the metal atom through two of its own adjacent atoms, making the metal atom’s relevant electrons floofier.
In my first year of uni, I had to write a 20 page paper, so I wrote it about how academic writing sucks.
Cheeky as hell, but I got a good grade, and my teacher liked it
Is there an AcademicDictionary in the vein of Urban Dictionary for all the jargon and filler patterns?
It’s just a good thesaurus.
I understood every word of that, and I hate you.
I understood about 45% of that, and I also hate them.
In defense of jargon:
coming up with new ideas and expressing them to others requires new vocabulary. You can’t simply say things in “plain English” especially when you want to communicate with peers.
This is why academia is so often refereed to as a discipline; you must train yourself in new ways of thinking. Making it accessible to the layperson is the job of scientific communicators, not scientists at large.
And it’s not like this is a unique issue with acedemia, every organization I’ve ever participated in had special vocabulary if it was necessary or not.
Jargon is only legitimate when it clarifies more than plain English. If it does, fine, use it.
Many professionals (not only scientists) are really bad at crafting sentences and texts, even without jargon.
I get jargon, but even if you replace all of the jargon in a typical paper with simple words, the writing style is often horrible. It’s often weirdly repetitive, has fluff-pieces and empty phrases, and just doesn’t get to the point. (I’ll ignore the inherent worthlessness of many articles here, since this is a symptom of funding policy)
I don’t expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they’re actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can’t. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.
As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.
I don’t expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they’re actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can’t. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.
As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.
This is why I believe scientists should be required to take liberal arts classes; especially related to written and spoken language. Trying to read a scientific paper as an outsider is painfully hard because you’re trying to understand what the Big Words are trying to say, but then the paper also takes a borderline meandering path that loops back on itself or has sections that mean nothing, leaving you (or at least, me) confused. Like, c’mon man, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying, but your narrative is more convoluted than House of Leaves.
How can you expect to truly make a breakthrough in science if you struggle to accurately and precisely convey your ideas to your peers? Study the great writers so your papers can have great writing and results.
If it helps, try doing it from a scientific perspective - as if you’re studying a new creature or property of physics - and make notes on things like,
How the author expresses their ideas.
Was the author easily understandable?
What, if anything, made it easier or harder for you to understand what was written?
What elements made the writing more precise, concise and/or accurate to what the author was trying to convey (using outside sources)?
…and so forth.
(And yes, I also think liberal arts students should be required to take some level of hard STEM classes (not watered-down “libarts-compatible” stuff, but actual physics, chemistry, biology, etc) as well.)
Edit: you might even end up with a reputation for being more intelligent than you actually are, simply because you’re able to convey your ideas significantly better than your peers.
Yeah, it’s an in-group exclusivity signifier.
Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there’s 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.
edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.
You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that’s relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it’s baked into an image.
The quickest way I’ve gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.
I’ve been learning crypto math the hard way, it’s brutal.
I’ve found one way that works is to learn about the people, like learn about Gauss’s life and work, it helped give me context and perspective for the random terms.
Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.
Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn’t come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.
And the Einstein Field Equations really didn’t answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn’t until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.
GR is fascinating, because it’s something you actually can spend a long, long time completely failing to observe.
Basically until you either try to understand galaxies, or you’ve got a pesky drift issue with your satellites, you don’t need to think about it much at all. Well I suppose if you want to understand why gravity is sometimes weird but you can just ignore that for a really long time.
IT guy here, we suffer from a similar problem where everything is an acronym so it sounds like alphabet soup that if said as a word means sometimes you can’t even quietly go look it up later. You either nod along knowing what it means or nod along not knowing what it means but having no chance to learn without outing yourself.
And you can’t out yourself because, in many workplace cultures, the appearance of knowing is more important than actually knowing. :/
Gotta love Dirichlet boundary conditions (the function has to have this value), Neumann boundary conditions (the derivative has to have this value) and Cauchy boundary conditions (both).
On the other hand, there’s a bunch of things that are so abstract that it’s difficult to give them a descriptive name, like rings, magmas and weasels
It’s something that people, in least in my field of microbiology, have been recently aware of and are trying to correct. The problem is not just an in-group signifier, since everyone, even experts, finds the author insufferable and difficult to understand
I dated a girl who acted like writing / talking like they made her better / smarter than other people. She got off on the elitism. I’m no academic slouch, but my philosophy is if you can’t break it down in basic terms that anyone can understand, then you don’t understand it enough yourself.
I could break stuff down to you but I won’t because I have shit to do and there’s textbooks. Also your eyes would glaze over 2% of the way in. So in that sense, I can’t, because I can’t make you actually want to understand it. Best I can do is hand-wave and rely on you not understanding why my explanation falls short of actually being one, making you think you understood something.
Talking shop and obfuscation are not the same thing but are generally indistinguishable for the uninitiated. I guess what I’m mostly miffed about is the implication that’s going on in OP’s erudite thesis and your anecdote: That people who talk about stuff you don’t understand do it to exclude. Maybe, you know, stuff is just complicated and needs years of study and practice to understand. It’s not a status thing, someone with a Ph.D in chemistry will have quite a task ahead of them understanding what hair stylists are talking about when talking shop about chemicals unless they themselves happen to specialise in that area. Now try explaining conditioner chemistry to a philosopher, instead, it’s probably hopeless.
I would go so far as to say that knowing and understanding something is only half of the issue. The other half is being able to clearly convey it to others. And that’s where a lot of people (myself included) fall short.
I don’t agree, there’s a reason why we need people like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining things in simpler terms and that they’re not the people doing the research itself…
and that they’re not the people doing the research itself…
I don’t think that’s relevant. People like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have also done great at explaining science to the general public.
Sure, but not being able to explain it in layman’s terms doesn’t mean you don’t understand what you’re working on and in fact the majority of scientists and engineers and programmers and highly specialized individuals aren’t very good at vulgarization for the simple reason that they don’t need to do it when they’re accomplishing the work and outside of they they’re not required to explain their work to laymen since there are people specialized in doing just that.
This post reports that the requirement to use words like “novel” and refer to ourselves using the third-person “we” was circumvented following our transition to industry. Furthermore, the capability to write original text without using the passive voice was gained. These developments represent a significant improvement in clarity. Additional increases in the efficiency of communication may be possible as the ability to express concepts in a straightforward manner is developed further.
It just makes us feel cool in our endless misery
