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It looks like they only looked at abstracts. I'd argue that they should be more complex and that abstract readability don't correlate with the readability in th
by bocklund 9y ago
It looks like they only looked at abstracts. I'd argue that they should be more complex and that abstract readability don't correlate with the readability in the text.
You can communicate the big ideas and importance in the necessary context in the abstract. These are built on top of many small simple ones. Back in the day 'We measured this thing' was plenty for a journal paper because there was so much disagreement that each result was novel and interesting.
Now I still believe that the quality of writing has decreased, but my point is that you can have a complicated abstract for an idea that is extremely clear in the text.
- jlg23 9y ago> It looks like they only looked at abstracts. From the text: "We then validated abstract readability against full text readability, demonstrating that it is a suitable approximation for comparing main texts."
- AstralStorm 9y agoAnd they perpetuate bad science by not saying how they validated it... (Either they just ran the algorithm on some full papers, which is just as worthless, or did "by inspection", which requires additional qualification and exact results they assigned.)