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!
-
-
Replying to @twitemp1
A troubling corollary of this is scientists (often PhD students but I have seen professors do this too) seem to think opaque prose implies the work = good. So if they read something with unclear phraseology, and so of course they can barely understand it, they infer it's good.
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
I have seen people write about other people's work: "it's so confusing that it must be good" but of coursing using 10x more words to get at this fallacious conclusion. Depressing to think some scientists think like this, and I didn't believe it myself until I saw it 1st hand.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
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!
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @o_guest
Yes, that is often the case. People tend to believe that flamboyant discourse hides relevant meaning.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @twitemp1
Not just flamboyant though! Also boring and mind-numbing prose is deemed as good.
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
-
Replying to @twitemp1
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!
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
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.
-
-
Replying to @o_guest
Yes, agree but why people praise incomprehensible writing then? As a way to compensate for their own insecurity perhaps?
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes - 6 more replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.