> Note, this is standard in the academic world, even if there is a single author. This is true. It's awful writing. And there are many other indications of t

> Note, this is standard in the academic world, even if there is a single author. This is true. It's awful writing. And there are many other indications of terrible writing in academic papers as well. - The Royal We. We are not amused by the use of the Royal We in academic writing. Like much of the bad writing in academics, this probably was borrowed from bureaucratic style intended to diffuse and deflect. The right way to write a paper as a single author is to be honest to the reader. You are a single person: use "I". - Official style. Reams of tirades have been written about passive voice, avoidance of responsibility ("experiments were done" instead of "I did the following experiments"), and longwinded gobbledygook. - Weird use of tense. Academic authors jump between past, past perfect, and present tense with no justification, sometimes in the same sentence, particularly when moving from experiments to results to discussion. - Backwards construction. This is particularly true with formalists. It's traditional in mathematics to start with fundamentals and slowly build towards your conclusion. But these same authors, when writing empirical or position papers, don't realize that this is awful construction in actual text. - Horrible titles with little explanatory value. "On Foo" means "I wish to intimidate you with my knowledge on Foo". Words like "on", "towards", "an understanding", etc., should be banned entirely. Academic authors don't know how to tell their story, how to make strong and concise arguments, or how to be convincing. Worse still, many think this is "how you do it". Why? Because their advisors, who were also awful writers, did it that way. Few of these people have ever been trained to be good writers. It's a self-sustaining cycle of mediocrity.