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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

I'm a PhD student. Maybe I'm not a good PhD student. But honestly, when I read most papers I usually just end up confused.

The concepts are complicated enough, but then the writing style in papers is just really strange and unnecessarily verbose and over-complicates even simple concepts.

I end up getting most of my knowledge through blog posts and slides which cover the papers vs. the papers themselves.

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My perspective: Most people are terrible writers. And that also applies to many scientists. And in addition, there are cargo cults of writing styles that people follow, just so that their writings are perceived as part of the scientific culture.

When regular people publish books, they get proofread and you actually get feedback from people who are trained in proofreading. In academia this not something you can expect from a publisher. And that's why we have lower standards for published academic writings.

Some journals have a proofreading stage before publication. But proofreading can't save bad writing. I blame the overemphasis on "critical thinking" in modern liberal arts education at the expense of fundamental writing skills and thinking in clear terms.

The typical CS paper is written by a grad student who speaks English as a foreign language. They can't express their ideas as well in English as their native language, and they probably don't have that much experience in writing in any language. When they write, they often end up copying phrases and sentence structures from other research papers.

Most papers about new results are published in early stages of research. The authors barely understand the results enough to be convinced that they are correct. They can't explain the results well, because they don't understand them yet. If they continue working on the same topic, they will probably come up with a good explanation after a few years and two or three complete rewrites.

> the writing style in papers is just really strange and unnecessarily verbose and over-complicates even simple concepts

Specialized terminology and complete descriptions can sometimes help to make writing more precise and correct. They can also make writing less clear - intentionally or unintentionally.

Why would the writer of a paper want it to be less clear? Perhaps to artificially inflate the importance of the work (and/or the length of the paper) or to make it seem non-obvious and "novel." Or perhaps to "fit in" with a certain style of writing or language ("academese" or "paperish") commonly used in the discipline.

My advice is: be as clear (and as simple) as possible without sacrificing precision or correctness. Clear papers with good and significant work are incredibly valuable and are likely to be more influential than unclear papers, even if the underlying work is good.

Since so many papers are unclear and poorly written, you may also find that clarity and good writing can help to differentiate your work.

Academese is often overly verbose; with sentences that run on forever. Good writing, readable writing, requires effort. I've found this especially difficult for non native English speakers, myself included.

You're not wrong. Most authors of academic papers are not good writers. Perversely, regardless of where they are on the spectrum spanning from good to mediocre to terrible, writers' output is usually made worse when they know they're writing for an academic context—this is why most of the blog posts you're thinking of, with their informal language, make better papers than the papers themselves.

I wish there were a culture of (a) always writing a blog post to accompany any paper, and (b) rewriting historical* papers to make them more accessible. On the latter point, undergrads should probably be doing this for at least one paper per semester, despite the general expectation that they ordinarily do not deal with "research".

* Doesn't have to be distinguished ones; just any paper you come across and feel is too hard for you/your peers to follow without more effort than should be necessary, or any paper you thought was interesting but didn't get its due in public, or ones that did but have fallen out of cross-generational memory.

>You're not wrong. Most authors of academic papers are not good writers. Perversely, regardless of where they are on the spectrum spanning from good to mediocre to terrible, writers' output is usually made worse when they know they're writing for an academic context—this is why most of the blog posts you're thinking of, with their informal language, make better papers than the papers themselves.

This isn't necessarily the writer's fault at all. I have had reviewers complain that the language in my paper was too informal. I wasn't using slang or something like that. But in so many words, the reviewer wanted _more_ academese. It was the last paper of my grad school career and I was sick of academese. In so many words, I told them to pound sand. That was my only paper to never get published.

That's normal, most papers are written unnecessarily complex, likely to make them appear more impressive than they actually are. Many blog posts that contain just as much information as papers, but presented in a much more intelligible way.

After editing a lot of my peers papers before publication, I think the weird writing style comes from poor ESL skills.

ESL = English as a second language?

Had a similar experience when working in a research lab.

I think the issue is that I have a hard time learning things without doing myself. And generally trying to reproduce stuff from a paper is really hard.

I like it when the authors provide digital artifacts including code and data to make it easier to analyze and reproduce the work.

There seems to be some improvements in this area. Machine learning papers sometimes provide their data sets and other artifacts on websites like paperswithcode.com.

Have you ever contacted the authors to request their data? I personally have not.

That should continue to increase. Hopefully it will be academic misconduct to not release code - but also further, it should be misconduct for the code not to be able to reproduce the paper's output with a one line command.

I find academic papers optimise for conciseness, so they tend to use in group terms.

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