Hacker News Reader

You are missing the point, by quoting out-of-context from the section with this big header: We optimize papers for the referee, not for the (intended) audience.

The author's issue is not with defensive writing. It's with writing to defend against the wrong audience.

Perhaps you haven't been in academia, and haven't experienced it yourself, but the author's problem is very real. Your intended audience will understand a point, and want you to go further. But the referees are often not the intended audience.

Imagine trying to explain the value of a new type of N95 mask to an anti-masker. You'll be spending your time writing defensively to try to argue for the most basic aspects of wearing a mask, when you would really just like to go into details on what's cool about the new type of mask, for people who actually care about better masks.

I have a very recent example for this, we are a very research based shop and have recently submitted a paper about part of our open source software. One of two reviewers literally answered with 10 points, where every single one is a variation on it not being a study.

The reviewer is saying your paper isn't a "proper" study?

I'm wondering about the nature of your shop. You said it's heavy on research, but it also doesn't sound like you're in academia.

No this isn't a study at all is the joke. We are developing/offer a database for health insurance (specifically the German Market) data, for non technical people to analyse the effectiveness of certain treatments etc. Or create certain cohorts for studies. The paper was an overview/introduction to It. while I'm proud to have written it, it's basically marketing/legitimation for our field. Another division of our company does actual data science, research and publication on these topics. We're in a weird middle ground as our ownership is all health insurances which makes us technically public service, but our work environment is far more tech oriented (and 20 years young on average).

Why are you trying to publish it in a journal?

This is what demo papers are for. Submit to a demo track, and don't take negative reviews personally :)

> and don't take negative reviews personally

I didn't as it it's obvious the reviewer didn't read the paper :)

> Your intended audience will understand a point, and want you to go further. But the referees are often not the intended audience.

How do you know this? Like both you and OP, I've had my writing misinterpreted by reviewers. These reviewers may not be experts in my precise niche, but reading research is part of their profession. If even they misinterpret it then it is likely I was not clear enough. I have no reason to believe that experts in my niche would not also misinterpret it, and there's no way to verify this once the work is published.

Furthermore, vocabularies and terminology in a field can change. I find it very confusing when a paper from today and 15 years ago are using differing definitions for the same term.

As such I think defensive writing is a good practice, and I'm not sure why making your work more readable is ever a bad thing.

> when you would really just like to go into details on what's cool about the new type of mask, for people who actually care about better masks.

Defensive writing wouldn't stop you from doing this. It would ensure that a wider audience (across fields and into the future) can benefit from your proposals

> Of course papers are expected to be "bulletproof." It's called a standard of excellence.

And sometimes it's just having to add verbiage in anticipation of a lazy or uninformed reviewer, who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about. The net result is that there is a lot of work and fluff that interested readers often have to put up with that exists solely to get the paper through review and serves little other purpose.

> The rest of the post aside, this particular bit of the "rant" just feels like a defense of lazy writing. An academic paper isn't just a blog post, and it shouldn't be.

If your point here is that blog posts are "lazy writing", then I assure you I have read many blog posts that are much more thorough, well-researched, and worked-over than academic papers. I do agree with you that the two are separate things, but blog posts have a number of desirable qualities that academic papers have difficulty optimizing for–either because they are not prioritized, or because they would actively hurt the chances of acceptance.

> who is not necessarily the audience that you actually care about

But see, that hits the nail on the head.

There's a reason papers are full of long intros, backrounds, and even mini-literature surveys.

Because the audience isn't just other tenured professors in the same subfield. It's the rest of the field, it's grad students, it's undergrads, it's researchers in other fields it might be valuable for.

It's also for people trying to figure out even which subfield the author is approaching it from, to contextualize the paper -- is this political science paper being written by a structuralist or a culturalist, even when they never explicitly say so, but it makes all the difference for judging it?

It's easy but short-sighted to assume you're writing solely for your peers. Thankfully, the "verbiage" and "fluff" you disdain is deeply appreciated by many, many other readers.

To reiterate: there are very good reasons for these standards. What's fluff to you, is extremely valuable to many others.

I’m not actually really in academia, so when I say these papers have fluff I mean they actually have fluff, not content useful to professors or students or casual readers or whatever. These are things added specifically to get through review and only make the paper worse.

I guess we read different papers. The ones I read are mainly in psychology, sociology, political science, and political philosophy. And in having read well over 1,000 papers (just by counting in Zotero), I can't ever recall reading part of a paper and thinking "this is fluff" or "this must have been added specifically to get through review".

Not once.

Maybe it's a problem in other fields, or in very specific journals? I honestly don't even know what fluff looks like, which is why I'm so confused by this whole thread.

It sounds like repeating "state-of-the-art", "novel", never before seen, revolutionary new research that will change the entire world, you wouldn't believe how my method beats other baseline methods by huge margins, and you wouldn't believe how this paper will revolutionize the entire field, etc, etc, multiple times in the paper so the bored reviewers don't reject your paper. I'm exaggerating but it's close to the truth. You kind of have to turn your paper in an advertisement of your work to get past the reviewers.

Got it, that helps me understand it more.

But again, your paper ought to be an advertisement, no? That makes it clear why it matters? That's why there's an abstract, an intro, a conclusion.

I have read a lot of writing where I wonder, "yes but what's the point? why does this matter? what's the actual impact here?" So to have that clearly stated is incredibly helpful for all readers -- not just what it does but how much it matters, why and for whom.

Writing for a public audience isn't a place for false modesty -- it confuses rather than helps.

You have a good point but I think it’s a matter of degrees than a yes/no situation.

There are also other things a researcher is incentivized to do to get past reviewers such as emphasizing only the good points of your algorithm, deemphasizing its downsides, comparing only against current so-so algorithms or baseline algorithms or algorithms a couple of years old instead of the latest state of the art so that your algorithm can look good. As in, even if you propose an algorithm that has new ideas in it that could bear fruit in the future with more refinements, you as a researcher would only hype it up to get past the reviewers.

I took this to be more about writing for the express purpose of being accepted (or not rejected) instead of a defense of lazy writing. When the outcome of the work can only be “accept” or “reject” it incentivizes writing from a defensive perspective rather than one that is more speculative or questioning.

There is also problem of "defensive writing" as in writing that is not supposed to be understood. Math is very often used in this way - math is impressive, math gives vibe of rigor and formalism, math requires a lot of effort from reviewer to dispute, but is very often bullshit meant to sell a simple idea (sometimes even wrong idea) as a big contribution that is just simply hard to understand for uneducated. Nobody want to look uneducated, so it's unlikely you will be criticized.

I think the specifics of "defensive writing" depend strongly on the subject. In the author's subject (infosec), you probably need to defend against the "it won't work" and "the assumptions are unrealistic" schools of criticism, so you end up being overprecise and including unnecessary complexity just to preempt the critiques. In other subjects (the mathy side of TCS), you mostly need to defend against the "it's probably well-known" and "what is this good for?" attacks, so you end up providing lots of context that confuses more than it elucidates and speculating about possible applications you don't believe in yourself.

I myself am a bit skeptical of how far this "defensive writing" is to be blamed for the unreadability of papers, and even if it's such a bad thing at all when done in measure. In maths, reading papers is about swearing and asking the author just as much as it is about actually reading; yet the reasons for the unreadability are often more natural than "we need to get this past the referees" (all else being equal, referees still reward readability). New ideas rarely are born easy to explain. Ugly ducklings need their time to grow. You can wait for 10 years hoping that by then your own work has taken the proper shape to explain to undergrads, or you can write it up half-baked in half a year and let others play with it. What is better for science? The answer is far from obvious, particularly because releasing your ideas into the wild will often get them properly explained faster than trying to do it yourself.

> Considering how many papers I read that still are easily misunderstood even by smart readers... I think "defensive writing" is better understood as "good writing".

I agree 100%.

One thing I HATE HATE HATE is when research articles use unnecessary synonyms. Ie, plasma membrane in one sentence and then phospholipid membrane in another and then cell membrane in another. For someone just trying to get a grasp on a topic, it is REALLY fucking confusing. And even if you're an expert on the topic, it's still annoying. Just pick one and stick with it.

OR uses stupidly complex words just to appear smart. Ie, ameliorates, a term I've ONLY ever seen in biology research articles and yet is a completely unscientific/unnecessary word. This isn't your creative writing class. Just fucking say that you found that your drug decreases lipid synthesis, NOT that it ameliorates it you big dunce.

ALSO one more thing that annoys me - when people only use a term 3 or 4 times in a paper, but still INSIST on using the acronym. Ok, I get it - if it's something WAY more commonly referred to by its acronym like DNA or COPD, it's acceptable and probably preferable. But if it's central pontine myelinolysis, just fucking type it out instead of writing CPM so I don't have to waste mental energy trying to decipher what it means.

If anything, scientific writing should be dumbed down more.

PS. While I'm on my biomed-academia soapbox, I'd like to point out that the correct pronunciation of constitutive is just as it's written - similar to constitution. It's TUTIVE not TUITIVE.

> This isn't your creative writing class

I think it is less this and more just code-usage to facilitate showing that they're part of the in-group. If I use the appropriate words ("Elucidate", "Ameliorate", "in situ"), I'm showing that I have learned the subject from a similar heritage.

Partially an aside, but an interesting talk on academic writing, which I've enjoyed [0].

[0] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM

But in situ actually MEANS something.

Elucidate is unnecessary but not terrible - at least it's used in everyday writing. If I had my druthers, I would ask for a less cumbersome word to be used. Still, I think most reasonably educated people would know what it means without missing a beat.

Words like ameliorate are just wrong. Just absolutely wrong.

I guess I'm having a hard time understanding the distinction you're working to draw between the three words. All three mean something, and could be argued to have value because of their pithiness [0]. If you're inclined, I'd be interested in a bit more of you're framing. Especially in terms of bio-medical texts, I'm a bit confused which characteristics make 'ameliorate' worse than 'in situ'.

[0] Like this word. I could have said "Because of their precise meaning", but I picked a word that encapsulates that directly.

I mean, the point of writing a paper is to educate - and if you're using obscure words, you are also probably succeeding in obscuring your message.

Take this example:

> Chemical and/or biological therapeutic strategies to ameliorate protein misfolding diseases.

Why not just "to target protein misfolding diseases"?

The target audience for most academic papers is not the general public and these words or phrases are known to the target audience. If the idea is that academic papers should have a more general audience, then I feel that’s a different statement, because I agree that academic papers are often less accessible to non-target audience members due to word choice.

In the case you mentioned there is a bit of redundancy which makes the word “ameliorate” easy to substitute. Terms like “therapeutic” and “misfolding” make it easy to derive that we’re going from a bad to good state.

“Activated protein X ameliorates biofilm formation” has more content than if we swapped to “target” in this case, because it has the added effect of indicating that the interaction was “good”.

As a continued aside, I think you’d enjoy the talk I originally posted. It dives into the difference between using writing to think vs persuade or educate, and how not recognizing that difference can cause poor scientific communication.

> As a continued aside, I think you’d enjoy the talk I originally posted. It dives into the difference between using writing to think vs persuade or educate, and how not recognizing that difference can cause poor scientific communication.

Thanks, I'll check it out!

As someone who recently used `ameliorate` in an abstract(!), let me make the case for it.

`Target` sounds active and vigorous, but it is quite vague in that context. You can target a diseased brain region (for stimulation, surgical removal, etc) or a mutated gene for deletion, but it's not clear to me what "targeting" something abstract like a disease would mean.

`Ameliorate` means "to make something better". It has the added implication that the situation is quite bad, but the intervention won't totally restore things to normality. This is exactly what I meant: we don't think this intervention is a silver bullet that will reverse the disease, but it seems like it should help--and our proposal is cheap and easy, so...consider it.

This also keeps Reviewer #2 from busting your chops over how effective the proposed strategies might be, which you'd be inviting with a stronger word like "cure."

Here, you could also use `treat`, which feels like an intermediate-strength claim. "Manage" might work too though that comes with implications of its own too: to me, managing a disease suggests that it is temporarily being held at bay, or the negative consequences are averted without fixing the underlying problem.

I learned `ameliorate` in junior high--and was writing for people with PhDs--so I went for it.

You all assume some grand reasoning and evil intent behind the word.

Simply, most people writing scientific articles are bad at writing and generally are happy or is somewhat English. They don't obsess offer single word, because their focus is elsewhere and they have no clue about writing anyway.

It is exactly because no one obsesses over single words in practice that these words gain usage, though. Academic writing is taught and word choice is a part of what is taught. I started using those words in my academic writing because that’s how I was taught to write from lab courses to journal contributions. Early in my studies professors and teaching assistants did correct single words where a more normative word was possible, so you just start writing like that to avoid any trouble.

There isn’t anything intrinsically evil about norms and signaling, I feel that assuming someone recognizing a structure means that structure is inherently evil is a bit presumptive. In-group jargon usage is common and useful for some, and a hurdle to overcome for entrants, that’s it, absent any moral judgement.

In situ has an actual meaning--and it would look decidedly weird if you called it (say) "in-place hybridization."

`Elucidate` is an basically a fancy weasel word: I read it as "I don't actually have a strong prediction about what will happen--but I expect something obviously cool will happen when I do this experiment."

It is a synonym for “in-place”, though. If academic writing was optimizing for reach, the more commonplace word instead of the latin variant would likely be used. To your point, though, if someone submitted a paper using “in-place” someone would probably point it out [0].

I think that’s the original point, that a lot of the word-level complexity is just how the writing is taught and subsequent reinforcement by mentors and peers to use the appropriate language.

Yeah, elucidate is just a fancy word for “figure out” - but I think it is part of the dialect because of the connotation you mention (Even if a casual reader might not use it).

[0] Not because it is strictly wrong, but because it violates how the in-group expects converse. I think this holds even if we go outside of phrases (One could argue in-situ hybridization is one item), as if I discover something new I’ll likely use the term “in-situ” if it involves similar locality properties

It's funny that so much of what we do as humans is signalling.

As someone who has written academic papers and sometimes used such "fancy" words: consider that not everyone is a native english speaker. As a native catalan and spanish speaker, there are times where that "fancy" word is easier to come up with than the "standard" one (because "fancy" english words tend to be those that come from latin).

Your "ameliorate" example is a good one. In catalan, "millorar" is an extremely common verb meaning "to improve". Hence, I can easily see myself using it at some point, as rare as it may sound to you.

I'm not saying it is better to do it this way, what I'm saying is that instead of being so annoyed at the author trying to seem smart, maybe you can shrug it off as a quirk of those who are writing in a foreign language.

Those fancy words don't look fancy if everybody is using them.

Especially if you are not native speaker, the fancy word is equally new word then the supposedly common word. Because both are new to you and you learned both from other papers. So you just use the one you remember better and ameliorate sound like common French word. Or maybe it is from Latin, but if you deel with Latin often it sound common.

It is like using POJO in tech. You kind of forget the word is not normal after a while.

> One thing I HATE HATE HATE is when research articles use unnecessary synonyms. Ie, plasma membrane in one sentence and then phospholipid membrane in another and then cell membrane in another. For someone just trying to get a grasp on a topic, it is REALLY fucking confusing

I think that this is generally frowned upon in any technical writing, including scientific. So it is not an expected convention in scientific writing.

Because peer-reviewed ist often also friend-reviewed. If you attend conferences you know most of the time who is pushing which topic and in your field. And seen the draft version at the conference.