Thoreau wrote that real reading is that which we have to "stand on our tiptoes", and "devote our most wakeful hours" to grasp. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze believed that we aren't really thinking if we don't struggle with the content. He maybe took it to an overly extreme level in his writing, but I like his general point.
The article cites the increased presence of words such as 'robust’, ‘significant’, ‘furthermore’ and ‘underlying’ as examples of how papers are getting harder to read.
They go on to say,
>The words aren’t inherently opaque, but their accumulation adds to the mental effort involved in reading the text.
The article doesn't sufficiently explain why mental effort is something to be avoided. Or why multisyllabic words are actually bad. Perhaps if one read more texts with lots of multisyllabic words it would get easier over time?
They give a scary example sentence from an abstract (completely taken out of context anyhow):
>Here we show that in mice DND1 binds a UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif predominantly in the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA, and destabilizes target mRNAs through direct recruitment of the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex.
Well a good reader knows that when you don't know a word, you look it up. If i was reading this paper I would have to look up just about everything in that sentence:
What is DND1? What is a "UU(A/U) trinucleotide motif?? What is "the 3' untranslated regions of mRNA", what is translation of mRNA for that matter? What does mRNA even do? What is a target mRNA and what does it mean for one to be destabilized? What is the CCR4-NOT deadenylase complex?
Would it take me hours to read this paper and gain an incomplete, novice-level understanding of it? Yes. But just in that one sentence I would learn like 1000% more about biology than I currently know.
You do not need researchers to waste time writing a basic biology textbook in every single one of their papers. You need them to communicate their research and get to the point. If the reader wants to understand it they need to put in the work, science will never be easy and devoid of mental effort.
I realize this will not be a popular post as many people value accessibility in science and more widespread science literacy. But I argue that accessibility is not the same thing as easy reading, and a literacy built on purposefully watered down texts is a cheap knockoff of true understanding won through dedicated effort.