Education - Why Researchers Are Bad At Writing

Researchers want to help other people learn from them, so they write peer-reviewed papers, blog posts, etc. But researchers are also bad at writing, making it difficult for other people to learn from their research. So I was very interested in reading Steven Pinker’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Why Academics Stink At Writing”. Here’s a summary of what Steven Pinker has written, so that you can learn why it is hard to write your own research to the general public.

There are three “general” reasons why it is difficult to understand what a researcher is saying, that Pinker acknowledges has already been discussed at length: 1) He doesn’t have anything to say, and he’s just making stuff up to hide his lack of knowledge.

2) The topic is so complex that you have to use complicated language (or “jargon”) to explain it.

3) Other resarchers expect him to use jargon, and if he refuses, they may reject his papers as not being serious enough.

Pinker offer three other reasons:

Pinker Reason #1) Researchers want to believe that the topic is complex and that only a few people can understand it. Therefore, they use “jargon” to prove their belief to themselves. The researcher does not want the reader to understand what he is saying because then it would mean the topic is easy and that the researchers has just wasted five to ten years of his life studying it.

Pinker identifies these tactics used by researchers to convince themselves that the topic is difficult:

• Providing detailed references to previous research that was used to create his own research work.

• Talking about what other researchers are currently talking about

• Apologizing for his article being too controversial and difficult to understand

• Refusing to commit to any opinion on the topic, as the researcher fears that another researcher may prove his opinion wrong.

• Using scare-quotes to distance themselves from common idioms uttered by the general public (for example: “I think that this student is a real ‘quick-study’”).

Pinker Reason #2) The Curse of Knowledge. A researcher may be tempted to assume that the reader is as smart as him. This is a bad assumption to make, and can lead to writing that may be clear to someone as smart as the researcher, but impossible for a less-smart reader to understand. For example, the researcher may use abbreviations when the reader does not know their meaning, or casually use Latin words when a reader only knows English.

Pinker Reason #3) “Chunking”. Scientists want to create container words to hold several related ideas together. This makes it easier for the researcher to organize his own thoughts, but more difficult for the reader to understand those thoughts. (For example: instead of “calling the police”, a researcher would write “law-enforcement perspective”, a container word to refer to many different ways of involving ‘law enforcement’, such as “calling the police”.)

Pinker wants researchers to be able to write clearly. But writing clearly is very difficult to do. He advertises his own free downloadable booklet, “How Can You Fix Your Writing?” to help researcher out. Hopefully, I will get time to read his booklet and be able to convey his information accurately.