The irresistible allure of garbled nonsense

I came across this article from 2015, and read it, and found it rather interesting, and worth sharing.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing

EDUCATION
The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing
A new movement strives for simplicity.

VICTORIA CLAYTON
“The Atlantic”, OCTOBER 26, 2015

Extract:
A disconnect between researchers and their audiences fuels the problem (of needlessly complex writing), according to Deborah S. Bosley, a clear-writing consultant and former University of North Carolina English professor. “Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don't think about the average person, and they don't even think about their students when they write,” she says. “Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.” But Bosley, who has a doctorate in rhetoric and writing, says that academic prose is often so riddled with professional jargon and needlessly complex syntax that even someone with a Ph.D. can’t understand a fellow Ph.D.’s work unless he or she comes from the very same discipline.

A nonacademic might think the campaign against opaque writing is a no-brainer; of course, researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work. Cynics charge, however, that academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers. Others say that academics have traditionally been forced to write in an opaque style to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers—academic journal editors, for example. The main reason, though, may not be as sinister or calculated. Pinker, a cognitive scientist, says it boils down to “brain training”: the years of deep study required of academics to become specialists in their chosen fields actually work against them being able to unpack their complicated ideas in a coherent, concrete manner suitable for average folks. Translation: Experts find it really hard to be simple and straightforward when writing about their expertise. He calls this the “curse of knowledge” and says academics aren’t aware they’re doing it or properly trained to identify their blindspots—when they know too much and struggle to ascertain what others don’t know. In other words, sometimes it’s simply more intellectually challenging to write clearly. “It’s easy to be complex, it’s harder to be simple,” Bosley said. “It would make academics better researchers and better writers, though, if they had to translate their thinking into plain language.” It would probably also mean more people, including colleagues, would read their work.

Some research funders, such as National Institutes of Health and The Wellcome Trust, have mandated in recent years that studies they finance be published in open-access journals, but they’ve given little attention to ensuring those studies include accessible writing.

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This strikes a chord, given some of the topics recently discussed on this blog.  For years I have been concerned about the increasing tendency in academia for specialists to effectively develop their own languages, designed to reinforce the exclusivity of their little clubs.  I'm very much aware of it in my own discipline, glacial geomorphology, where researchers are (for obvious reasons) trying to demonstrate that they are highly-trained specialists who deserve respect (and funding) from academia generally and from their universities and research bodies.  So we (I am one of them) have developed a jargon, including many words not understood by anybody else, which we use in our publications -- so we communicate with our peers, and shut everybody else out.  Since our peers are the ones who determine our career paths, that's all OK........ and we may even get a rosy glow when somebody else says to us: "We looked at your paper.  Didn't understand a word of it...."  We live within our tribes, and they provide our reassurance and our security. All the other people out there are outsiders and inferiors. 

Over the years since I started this blog, I have tried to scrutinize and "de-mystify" many articles which have been virtually impenetrable!  Sometimes I have to give up in despair, and papers just disappear without mention.  Sometimes I misunderstand things or am guilty of failing to spot crucial bits of information -- that's the way of the world.  But more often I find myself asking "Why could not these people (multiple authors are the norm, these days) express themselves more clearly?"  My instinct, certainly, is to be deeply suspicious of the intentions and the conclusions of the writers of articles that are complex or convoluted.  It's all too easy for these writers -- who think they can get away with it -- to slip into the territory of invented evidence and falsified results.

More and more often, I perceive that authors dress up their research in such complexity that one has to assume that the intention is to avoid scrutiny when of course they should welcome it.  The average reader sees statistical analysis, complex tables and data sets, graphs and diagrams, and descriptions of experimental results involving highly sophisticated gadgetry and thinks: "Wow!  This is high-powered science!  Brilliant!  When the authors say in their abstract and in their press release that this work represents a fantastic advance, it must be true!"  The trouble is that it might also be garbled nonsense, from beginning to end.  Technology is not the same as science.

As I have frequently complained on this blog, editors and journalists nowadays read press releases and watch promotional videos -- the more spectacular the better -- and hardly ever actually read journal articles.  Academics are fully aware of that.

In recent weeks we have discussed the work of Carl Sagan, Gordon Barclay and Kenny Brophy, and it all comes into sharp focus when we consider this matter of academic writing.  There are many interconnected issues here.  One of them is the "sexing up" or interpretative inflation of evidence, as described in the latest edition of "British Archaeology".  Of course, the more impenetrable a specialist journal is, the greater is the pressure for a "second tier" or glossy "pop" article in a journal like "Current Archaeology" or "British Archaeology" -- where authors have to simplify and summarise their findings for the common man.  Almost always, in these articles, caution is thrown to the winds and academic standards are lowered.  Our old friends, Ixer, Bevins, Parker Pearson, Darvill, Richards, Pollard and many others are old hands at it --  sometimes two, three or four separate articles (all capable of citation) appear, all based on the one piece of research with very minor tweaks.  The principle seems to be that if you repeat a dodgy hypothesis often enough, with enough conviction, if becomes the truth.

I was hunting down this particular issue recently with respect to the "research" at West Angle Bay and Llandre, both selected as type localities for the Penfro Till on the basis of multiple cross-citations of apparently "learned" articles and virtually no published field research.  Some people, who should be ashamed of themselves, just haven't read the literature properly.

What's to be done?  Well, for a start, if you can't understand something, for safety's sake assume that the writer is a charlatan.......