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Comment by airza | Hacker News Reader

I don't see much complaining about academic jargon in this article. There is some, but it's more about the tortuous syntax and sentences mostly devoid of meaning. I also disagree that it's about impressing their peers and more about writing in the 'usual' style for academic papers.

The style of business writing is equally cumbersome, but this frequently seems to be a disguise for the fact that no actual information. Maybe some papers in academia are trying to overstate their conclusions' complexity?

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I dunno, taking aim at jargon seems to be central to the article's purpose based on my reading of it:

"The idea that writing should be clear, concise, and low-jargon isn’t a new one—and it isn’t limited to government agencies, of course. The problem of needlessly complex writing—sometimes referred to as an 'opaque writing style'—has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition."

That's pretty much the thesis of the article. Anyway, I've certainly encountered academic writing with "tortuous syntax and sentences mostly devoid of meaning," although it's a small minority of writing in my experience. This article seems to suggests it's a conspiracy to keep the public out while signaling some kind of in-group membership. But I've always let Occam's razor guide me: a much simpler explanation is that many people (and academics are by no means free from this) are not good writers.

I'd like to add that most high impact journals limit how much you can write which causes a lot of the complexity.

If the science isn't good enough then it won't get published. And if it's too simple then by default it won't get published.

So now you have complex science that can be well elucidated by someone who can write well except that the word count limit is half of what you need. Complexity ensues.

The journal then pushes back and says "x isn't clear enough." So then you have to make it clearer but still stay within the word count limit. Other things then need to be optimized.

* My example is controlled for bad writing. Source: My wife is published in many high impact journals and continues to do so. The requirements are the bane of her existence.

As others in this discussion point out, the submitted article conflates the two (tortured syntax; jargon). The other explanation for tortured syntax in all domains is simpler: most people are bad writers.

It's not just that most people are bad writers; people generally get worse at basic writing skills (grammar, sentence structure) when they are writing about unfamiliar or complex topics. When academics are reporting on their ongoing research, at least part of what they want to say will be ideas with which they have only recently become familiar, and the clarity of their writing will suffer as a result.

I actually disagree. Speaking from writing computer science papers, the moment of writing is when I understand it the best. I often have to go back and read my old papers to remind myself of all of the nuances of the work. I think a worse problem is the opposite: academics understand what they're writing about so well, and have been steeped in it for so long, that they can't "see" all of the information they leave out.

At the time, the writing is clear because I have had the entire topic in my head for a month. But years later, I can see I did not clarify simple things which would have made the text easier to understand.

I don't think the article conflates the two at all, it lists each out separately and in no way implies that they are the same thing, only that they are part of the same problem.

Except that the issue I have, and some others have, is that jargon is not a problem.

I doubt it's about overstating the conclusions' complexity. It's usually more that "I have neither the time nor space to fit a thesis in this space".

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