Hoo, boy…
Apologies, Mr. Mathiesen, for what is to follow, because you have triggered a Hill I'm Willing to Die On™. You may have meant more nuance than can fit in a single tweet, but I hope I can respectfully change your mind.
Apologies, Mr. Mathiesen, for what is to follow, because you have triggered a Hill I'm Willing to Die On™. You may have meant more nuance than can fit in a single tweet, but I hope I can respectfully change your mind.
My points here apply to some fields more than others, but I think we can safely begin with the assumption that a lot of academic writing—maybe most of it—is written in an unnecessarily complex way. THAT is what I think academics should learn to avoid.
There are complex ideas, which contribute to a learning task's *intrinsic* cognitive load. The problem with much of academic writing is that it adds *extraneous* cognitive load. Academics who want to communicate well should aim to minimize this extraneous cognitive load.
Minimizing extraneous cognitive load doesn't just increase the odds that students and the public will understand your work—it helps *other researchers* engage more efficiently with your work as well.
I'm a researcher, and I've edited hundreds of academic papers in many different fields. I can tell you that I derive no in-group "geeking out" pleasure from reading arcane, turgid academese. I want to understand your *ideas*, but they way you express them may get in the way.
If, as in the article cited in the original tweet, students skip over sections of a paper because they find them too confusing or technical, yes, we should teach them why those sections are important, but we'd be remiss if we didn't interrogate WHY they find them unappealing.
Students don't magically start *loving* methods sections once they become researchers. There's something about the way those sections are usually presented in journals that is simply not engaging, and I think it has a lot to do with…
…the fact that we still default to narrative paragraphs, expecting them to do a job better suited to other means of communication. Example: Wouldn't you be more interested in a section on sample preparation if it were presented as a recipe? Would also help reproducibility, IMO.
Letting researchers "geek out" in an esoteric bubble is troubling—even unethical—on a few fronts. First: funding. I don't know about Denmark, but in Canada, most research is federally funded. If the public pays for the research, they deserve access to the fruits of that research.
As I've written about before, open access is just one consideration. Even if people can download papers for free, the research does them no good if they can't understand it. ivacheung.com/2014/01/why-op…
We are finally starting to recognize the value of community engagement in research, not least because doing so helps put that research into practice. In some patient-oriented research projects, patient partners are active in defining the research question and doing lit searches.
So academic publications aren't just for fellow scholars anymore. They're for the public as well. And anyone who does translation, whether it's to another language or another context, knows that *quality translations begin with a quality source text*.
Further, you don't have to stray far from your own discipline to get lost in another field's academese. At a time when researchers and funders are placing more value on interdisciplinarity, we have to recognize how arcane language and presentation can stifle collaboration.
Finally, I absolutely understand the appeal of belonging to an in-group—through shared interest and shared terminology. But, again, we would be ethically remiss if we didn't interrogate how that attitude can exclude—and, more importantly, WHOM that attitude can exclude.
By "letting researchers geek out" and preserving the status quo of scholarly communication, could we be excluding people with valuable ideas to contribute who might just want (or be able to) engage in a different way? /FIN
Yes, and there's no shame in having interdisciplinary teams help you communicate your research, too! (See ivacheung.com/2015/02/time-t…)
But a coupla things:
1. Peer-reviewed papers are also communicative…
But a coupla things:
1. Peer-reviewed papers are also communicative…
2. My critique of the article cited in the original tweet was that it placed the blame on the students for not reading research papers "properly" rather than asking whether the papers themselves do a good job of communicating.
If all or most of your audience members "just don't get it," what you're putting out may be flawed. And rather than investing resources into teaching your audience how to come up to your level, it may be more efficient to ask what you could be doing differently to reach them.
