Verbosity in literature is valuable and seductive. Verbiage in science frequently conceals meaning, it is often used to overly boost relevance, and it denotes affectation and a pompous disposition. Please avoid it!
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When I say I didn't believe it, I'd suspected it, but had not ruled out other reasons they might be concluding the work was good. When I finally saw this written out, I lost a lot of (all?) respect for a whole swathe of people. Hopefully though some might eventually come around!
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Yes, that is often the case. People tend to believe that flamboyant discourse hides relevant meaning.
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Not just flamboyant though! Also boring and mind-numbing prose is deemed as good.
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Yes, true. What do you think is the reason for this?
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I have a hunch it's a problem with calibrating yourself versus others. Often things that are important/good are hard, but after PhD it gets less and likely that important things like journal articles are hard to read — this excludes maths, stats, programming!
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But for some reason some of us stay at the calibration: a journal article that is hard to read is hard because I have a gap. That's very unlikely when we're talking about your own field and even related fields if you are anything above 1st/2nd year PhD student.
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What is likely — very likely in fact! — is that some of our peers (including ourselves of course!) might not be very good at explaining complex concepts. Reading and understanding is easy when the writer has done a good job.
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Yes, agree but why people praise incomprehensible writing then? As a way to compensate for their own insecurity perhaps?
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