3 ms·
> They're meant to communicate results to other experts who will understand them much faster than you ever could. And yet I'm still deconstructing papers entir
by gopher_space 2y ago
> They're meant to communicate results to other experts who will understand them much faster than you ever could.
And yet I'm still deconstructing papers entirely within my domain down to the bullet-pointed outline the author used to write it from. We do not need to write like Dickensian wordsmiths and we are not good at it. I'd consider it gatekeeping if I thought people wrote this way out of malice rather than cupidity.
- sigmoid10 2y agoMeh, I consider myself pretty deep in my domains of expertise and even I regularly struggle because I haven't had that much exposition to a specific subject that is not exactly my specialty. You really can't rate these things unless you are literally among the top experts at the forefront of the topic. That's also who I'd have in mind when writing such a paper. Not some well versed enthusiast, not even a PhD student. Depending on your field, you might be able to count the people who can comfortably read and understand your paper on one hand. For everyone else, the effort will rise exponentially for every step they are removed from that specific topic.
- gopher_space 2y agoI'm thinking more about a situation where the author has three bullet points to convey and needs to construct an encapsulating paragraph around them. When I'm parsing the paper I'll need to undo that work.
- sigmoid10 2y agoThat's just what prose is. But admittedly some people are better at reading/writing it than others.