Science mustn’t take refuge in obscurity, insists Matthew Partridge.
Like most young overenthusiastic naive academics, my first academic paper was rejected.
It was a good paper (I thought), it covered the work well and was an important set of results to share with the wider community... the key components of an academic paper. Astonishingly, the reviewers actually agreed on all of those points, which I would have thought was enough to get my paper published (see note about being naive). However, of my two reviewers, one marked it “not suitable for publication” which torpedoed the paper. The reason: “Too descriptively written and lacks the academic complexity I’d expect.”
So, my science was good, the results were great, but it couldn’t be published because it was too easy to read? Yikes, what a start to the world of academic paper writing, and some foreshadowing of a side career in science communication.
It’s also a strange admission from the reviewer that readability is not something they expect. I’ve read a lot of academic papers and I can see that writing in a way that is readable is probably quite far down most authors’ priorities list.
When it comes to writing style, a paper should be two things: precise and clear. There is sometimes a misconception that too much of the second weakens the first. Both are equally important, and all too often people shy away from clarity to avoid it exposing their weakness in precision.
The trick is finding a balance. As anyone teaching academic writing will tell you, you need to understand your audience. Academic papers are intended for a similarly skilled peer audience and should be written as such. But, writing for someone similarly skilled does not mean that it should be overly complex, or filled with needlessly impenetrable language aimed at making it diffi cult to assimilate the conceptual core.
When it comes to writing style, a paper should be two things: precise and clear. There is sometimes a misconception that too much of the second weakens the first
Some complex language is unavoidable and important, particularly for scientific terms. Yet, the language you use around those terms doesn’t need to read like you stapled a thesaurus to your paper. The general complexity of scientific terms, if anything, demands simpler wording around it to allow it any hope of making a jot of sense.
We are all prone to believing that every member of our peer audience are secret super geniuses who will soon discover that we are in fact a dumb-dumb. However, in reality, we’re all dumb-dumbs in our own very particular ways and often need a lot more help understanding stuff than we ever want to admit. So, the best place to start is to assume that your audience are probably just like you and would be quite happy with a little extra explanation, and it’s okay to give it to them.
I am being precise in my wording here; extra explanation, not simplified.
You don’t want to avoid using scientific terms, as they are often highly specific and exist for an important reason. Simplifying your explanations is likely to end up removing information that maybe key to repeating or properly analysing your work. Instead, focusing on using five or six extra words to add additional explanation or context to that term can make your paper far more readable.
I will forever consider my first rejection a badge of honour. I’m very pleased to have started with my academic papers being too focused on description and clarity. As a young academic, I took one look at that feedback and decided that was absolutely the kind of academic I wanted to be.
Dr Matthew Partridge is a researcher, cartoonist and writer who runs the outreach blog errantscience.com and edits our sister title Lab Horizons
