4 ms·

Former academic here. Have to rather strongly disagree with you. At least in fields I was familiar with, a lot of Ph.D. training focuses on making people into

Former academic here. Have to rather strongly disagree with you. At least in fields I was familiar with, a lot of Ph.D. training focuses on making people into good writers. Clear communication with both peers and the general population is rewarded; it is damn near impossible to get ahead without these skills. I don't know what you mean by "hard to read." A good scientific paper is supposed to be very information rich. It condenses 100 other very dense papers into 4 pages, leaving just a few pages for the new contribution of the current work. Even for a very clear paper, for a field I am well versed in, a good paper takes 10 readings to understand. Because of the information density.

sxg 5y ago
I think the argument is that it shouldn't take 10 readings to understand a very clear and good paper in your field. There's likely an easier way to communicate dense information.
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  You should try writing papers. Most papers take many months to write, hundreds of hours, go through many revisions and rewrites. People try really hard to write good papers. Everyone knows well written papers get cited more. But synthesizing newly discovered knowledge that only a handful you know (and often don't even understand all aspects of), into something others can understand is far harder than you think it is.
billytetrud 5y ago
If something is clearly written, it shouldn't take 10 readings. Information density often is at odds with readability. In programming material, there is a difference between learning oriented explanatory documentation and dense reference documentation. Dense only works after you already understand the concepts of the whole. Before that you need clear, non-dense explanations to learn those concepts. Nearly all academic papers I've read are quite inaccessible to read. So either the phd training you're familiar with is a diamond in the rough, or the training isn't working to help write papers that are written clearly for people who aren't already phds.

sxg 5y ago

I think the argument is that it shouldn't take 10 readings to understand a very clear and good paper in your field. There's likely an easier way to communicate dense information.

abdullahkhalids 5y ago
You should try writing papers. Most papers take many months to write, hundreds of hours, go through many revisions and rewrites. People try really hard to write good papers. Everyone knows well written papers get cited more. But synthesizing newly discovered knowledge that only a handful you know (and often don't even understand all aspects of), into something others can understand is far harder than you think it is.

billytetrud 5y ago

If something is clearly written, it shouldn't take 10 readings. Information density often is at odds with readability. In programming material, there is a difference between learning oriented explanatory documentation and dense reference documentation. Dense only works after you already understand the concepts of the whole. Before that you need clear, non-dense explanations to learn those concepts. Nearly all academic papers I've read are quite inaccessible to read. So either the phd training you're familiar with is a diamond in the rough, or the training isn't working to help write papers that are written clearly for people who aren't already phds.