The Science of Scientific Writing (1990)

I regret to announce that I share your sentiments with regard to the circumloquacious fashion of the writing in that article.

I think we've made progress since it was written. Eye-tracking shows how we read and which words or letter combinations trip us up.

By the way, wouldn't that table naturally have time in the left hand column, considering it's probably an independent variable, while temperature is dependent?

Maybe it could be better written, but their advice gels with how I try to approach technical writing. The most common problem I see are authors packing too many concepts or facts into a single sentence. The writing becomes difficult to read for a reason that I was aware of, but could not articulate until I read this piece: readers are searching for syntactic closure. The more stuff - no matter how important - you put inbetween the subject and verb, the harder it is to read. The way I think about it is that until the reader gets that syntactic closure, all new words go into a temporary buffer. If that buffer spills before reaching closure, the reader is lost.

I encounter this in CS papers I read and co-author frequently. My most common editing remark is "split into two sentences."

The original article suggests ways of writing that will aid reading, and they give reasons why the texts they quote are poorly expressed. The article is useful because of that.

Observation: In the child comments in the post you link to is a comment from xanmas. This user points out the space constraints on much academic publishing. I remember papers in experimental physics where the list of authors took up more space than the text of the paper - however some re-writing always helps.