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You're not wrong. Most authors of academic papers are not good writers. Perversely, regardless of where they are on the spectrum spanning from good to mediocr
by cxr 5y ago
You're not wrong. Most authors of academic papers are not good writers. Perversely, regardless of where they are on the spectrum spanning from good to mediocre to terrible, writers' output is usually made worse when they know they're writing for an academic context—this is why most of the blog posts you're thinking of, with their informal language, make better papers than the papers themselves.
I wish there were a culture of (a) always writing a blog post to accompany any paper, and (b) rewriting historical* papers to make them more accessible. On the latter point, undergrads should probably be doing this for at least one paper per semester, despite the general expectation that they ordinarily do not deal with "research".
* Doesn't have to be distinguished ones; just any paper you come across and feel is too hard for you/your peers to follow without more effort than should be necessary, or any paper you thought was interesting but didn't get its due in public, or ones that did but have fallen out of cross-generational memory.
- patrick451 5y ago>You're not wrong. Most authors of academic papers are not good writers. Perversely, regardless of where they are on the spectrum spanning from good to mediocre to terrible, writers' output is usually made worse when they know they're writing for an academic context—this is why most of the blog posts you're thinking of, with their informal language, make better papers than the papers themselves. This isn't necessarily the writer's fault at all. I have had reviewers complain that the language in my paper was too informal. I wasn't using slang or something like that. But in so many words, the reviewer wanted _more_ academese. It was the last paper of my grad school career and I was sick of academese. In so many words, I told them to pound sand. That was my only paper to never get published.