Comment on academic jargon

resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Contramuffin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  To be clear, most scientists struggle with reading many papers. So it’s not a problem with technical specificity, it’s a problem with fundamentally bad writing.

  In science, unparseable writing mainly comes from the fact that people aren’t told that you need to prioritize being clear. It’s the principle behind the curse of knowledge - it’s easy to forget that people don’t know what you know and don’t think the way you think. So you end up writing in a way that only you can interpret. It takes extra effort and time to read back what you wrote and think about how other people might understand what you wrote. But that’s time that a grad student could otherwise spend being further exploited, so QA ends up falling to the wayside

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  • cosmos8188@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Thats true, the whole system of writing is poorly taught. The purpose of writing is to convay the meaning in a suitable manner - but, what exactly is a suitable manner? Well that depends on a variety of factors such as the intended audience, subject, purpose of writing, technicality, etc. There just isn’t a singular lexicon (dictionary) - as such, reverting back to more generally known words is better design than using unrelated lexicons.

    In addition, general lexicons may have issues with ambiguity. But they also can be explicitly defined using contextual cues. The point in writing is so its understandable not extravagant.

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• ieightpi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Yeah I get that people can get defensive when they are overwhelmed by jargon, but thats the beauty of language. We have so many different words that means such complex things. Its what allowed us to keep developing technology based on the layer below it. People need to get over not understanding every single word in a scientist paper, as if it’s an attack on their intelligence.

  And hell I know AI gets alot of hate on Lemmy but that shit is very good at helping break down complex scientific papers with the jargon. I work in medical research and the amount of time it’s saved by helping me understand the jargon has been immense.

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  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I’m not going to jump down your throat for suggesting AI, but I’ll mention that Wikipedia often has a “Simple English” link in the Languages section that’s a godsend for ESL people and scientific/academic subjects for lay people.

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    • ieightpi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Huh damn I had no idea. Thanks, I’ll try this next time.

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• PlzGibHugs@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I pity psychologists. Imagine how many people want to chew their ear off about narcissism, emotional labor, gaslighting, or whatever self-help pop psychologists are grifting about today.

  Honestly, as it relates to academics and papers, psychology isn’t too bad from what I’ve read. There are wildly varying definitions, but papers have had ways to account for that for decades - that being defining terms where needed, and showing your work so others can see the context. For example, if studying depression, they’ll have to specify which scale or metric was used for depression in patients, be it a mood tracker, or a standardize questionnaire. That said, you could always tell when a paper wasn’t well constructed or had little to offer, because thats when the jargon would be front and centre.

  That, and more purely academic papers. They were awful. For example, reading a thirteen-page paper that could wholly be summarised as “Positionality is how people define themselves relative to others. They may have biases based on these definitions.” but written like, “subject-position is based on a subject’s temporal elements to best target the dominant drive in a social confrontation…” I have no problem reading most articles, but those were putting me to sleep.

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