Academic Jargon and the Existential Peril of Misunderstanding
Trying to find a balance between accuracy and readability.
This [piece about cultural enforcement techniques in the defense of one-sided cultural authority] showed up in my feed yesterday, and by the Medium.com luck of the draw, it coincides with external life events in such a way that writing on a related subject began to seem worth doing. So here goes.
Full Disclosure: I don’t do academic writing, never have, never will. I avoided it in college by not taking a science major and by being able to make points without falling back on jargon. I was told by an English teacher in first grade or something that when writing I should treat my audience with respect but assume they have no idea what I’m talking about, and that’s the way I try to write, although I do occasionally target one audience or another. But that didn’t save me from having to read academic writing, and if you think it’s bad in the sciences, where everyone mostly agrees what all the words mean, don’t ever try to read academic lit crit. It’s like participating in Lovecraftian horror.
There is a problem in academic writing.
Academic writing means, mostly, writing with the express and single objective of being published in some peer-reviewed outlet. The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. The Journal of the American Psychological Association. Nature (I think). It bears the assumption that the only people who ever read what you write will be just as conversant with the subject material as you are, so when you say something like, “Hanbury Brown and Twiss intensity interferometry,”(source) there’s no need to explain what you mean because your readers already know.
The problem is that making that assumption, making any expectation about your readers, restricts your readership by definition to people who fit your assumptions. It’s a self-sustaining prophecy: you assume all your readers know what you’re talking about, and then only people who know what you’re talking about can read what you write.
Why is that bad? People will give you a lot of different reasons, and a lot of those reasons have their own built-in assumptions about academic writing. Some examples: academic writing exists solely to keep academic writers employed (much like legalese). Academic writing is the way it is so that academic writers can keep saying the same thing and nobody will notice (also much like legalese). Academic writing exists to keep non-white/non-wealthy/non-male/otherwise non-master-race peoples from participating in the scientific/cultural/philosophical development of humanity (ahem…). I’m going to try to avoid most of that stuff, because while it matters, I’m not sure I know enough that I can speak confidently about the politics involved, and since I can’t be constructive, I’d rather just remain silent.
The problem I see, which is only subtly different from the third bit above, is that by writing in an academic tone using academic language you deny the rest of the world access to what you have done.
Science is awesome. Unless you are willing to live naked in a cave, eat raw vegetables you find in the woods, and wipe your ass with leaves for the rest of your life, the awesomeness of science is pretty much undeniable. It has given us literally everything we take for granted today, with the possible exception of rain.
But what you learn in science class is generally between fifteen and a hundred years out of date, and the reason for this is because the world assumes you are too stupid to understand academic writing. This is a really big problem. It’s a problem because it divides the world in to two sets of people: those who can read and understand academic writing, and those who can only access science through a gatekeeper.
At this point, we’ve left the realm of the arcane, of what-does-that-mean-and-why-should-I-care. If you have heard almost anything about the global debate over who gets to access the internet and how, you know what’s wrong with gatekeepers. Put simply: knowledge is power, and gatekeepers control the knowledge, and by controlling the knowledge they control you. Allowing gatekeepers to control access to your work is a bad, bad, bad idea.
In this way, a fifth-grade science teacher who is a creationist and wants to teach the controversy is no different from Comcast wanting to throttle Netflix for a negotiating advantage. Comcast wants to be able to control what you see and do online so that they can directly or indirectly make you buy things. The creationist science teacher wants to control what you see and do in science so that they can make you be like them.
Witness: there’s a really big portion of the population (in America, anyway) who believe that science is full of shit. Scientists and people who take the time to study science on a regular basis find this frustrating, because “why don’t they know better,” but the real reason is not “because we don’t know any better,” it’s because we aren’t allowed to be a part of, or even listen to, the scientific conversation. This means there’s a division; there are the haves, who can do science and read science and be sciencey, and there are the have-nots, who can’t.
Like any group of haves vs. have-nots, the have-nots resent the haves, and with good reason. Why should I listen to you people? You’ll only give me the bits you think are acceptable for me to have. Feed people on nothing but table scraps, and inevitably they’ll go off and develop their own cooking, and they’ll do it using inedible parts of the animal, because that’s all you allowed them to have. And it will taste great, too. And eventually white people will notice and start to appropriate it.
The difference between real food and metaphorical food in this case is that the inedible bits in this metaphor are things like astrology, and climate change denial. Things that are not just provably wrong, but which by their presence and popularity have a real, seriously destructive effect on everything from foreign policy to, oh yes, education.
Can you see where this is going? Science doesn’t think people are smart enough to understand it, so it gives us the bits it thinks we can handle. We think science is an arrogant shithead, so we stop listening to it. Science thinks nobody is listening, so why bother telling us anything? We think science is trying to keep us out of the loop, so we invent a new loop and we exclude science instead. Vicious cycle, meet naivete. Naivete, vicious cycle. Anybody want to play?
Now, the solution for this is actually pretty easy. Take the advice of grade-school English teachers everywhere, and assume your audience has no knowledge. Use language anybody can read, explain the bits that need explaining, AND RELEASE RESEARCH USING OUTLETS THAT ALLOW FREE PUBLIC ACCESS. Seriously. Do it. You could save the world.
Except, it’s not quite that simple.
The Problem With The Problem
I have just laid a lot of badness at the feet of academic writing. But the thing is, it’s not like somebody just woke up one day and said, “hey, you know, we should really start using technical jargon and obtuse semantics so that nobody understands what we’re saying and we can restrict access to just the people we like,” and lo it was done and it’s been with us ever since.
Academic writing (he speculated) arose as a solution to a problem, and here is an example of that problem:
There is no such thing as an accurate two- or three-dimensional model of an atom. There may not be such thing as an accurate six-dimensional model of an atom, whatever that may turn out to be in piddly three-dimensional language. The problem with atoms is that their constituent parts are all so fundamental, so integral to the fabric of the universe, that, when you try to examine them on an individual scale, reality gets all bendy. Subatomic particles (electrons, protons, etc) don’t occupy a discreet point in space and time, for example, which is why phenomena like quantum tunneling exist: electrons, protons, and neutrons have all been observed being in one place and then being in another quite far away (relatively speaking) without moving through the intervening space and time. Teleporting, in essence. This is really cool and interesting, but it means that when you see something like this:
what you are seeing is a convenient lie; it is told in a good-hearted attempt to make the science more easily digestible, but it is untrue nonetheless. The closest you might come to an accurate visual is to imagine something a bit like a planet. The planet is very small and has an atmosphere that stretches out to hundreds or even thousands of times the diameter of the planet; if it were Earth, you could still breathe Earth air while standing on, say, one of the moons of Jupiter. This atmosphere has areas of high and areas of low density; clouds, in other words. The solid part of the planet, the ground and rock, is similarly varied in density; there are big clumps of, say, iron and gold inside the magma of the planet.
Got that visual? Okay, here’s where it gets weird. The planet represents a probability field; you could pick a point anywhere within that field and there might be a proton or a neutron there. The deposits of iron and gold, areas of high density, represent a higher chance of finding a proton or a neutron in those places. Since protons and neutrons don’t occupy a discreet space and/or time, there is no guarantee what will be at any given point until you actually do the experiment and find out. It could be a proton. It could be a neutron. It could be emptiness.
There’s no way to predict for sure, and to top it off, the high-density areas are constantly moving. The same is true for the atmosphere; poke one of those “clouds” and there’s a relatively high chance that you will find an electron. Poke the air in between, probably not. But it is physically impossible to know for sure until you actually do the poking. As a result, in atomic science jargon, the two generalized parts of the atom (the rocky core and thin atmosphere) are typically referred to as “the nucleus” and “the electron cloud”. So when you see models like the one above, even if they’re fancy and science-fiction-ey like the ones in the new Cosmos series, just remember, it should look like a planet with clouds, because that’s as detailed as you can really get.
I hope that made sense; it’s something I really enjoy talking about, but it’s difficult to translate properly and, if I’m honest, my knowledge of the subject is a bit rusty.
The problem with everything I just said is that it’s too fuzzy. I’m a writer, so I’m good at explaining things using metaphor and simile; I connect you quickly to things you don’t understand by linking them to things you do and building sideways from there. But everybody’s mind is different, which means that by explaining the quick-and-dirty way, using literary tools and building on what’s already in your head, the upper limit to how detailed I can be is fairly low.
My model doesn’t account for quantum entanglement, or the uncertainty principle, or any of a hundred other pieces of the science of fundamental particles, all of which ought to inform an early grounding in quantum physics. Imagine the contortions I’d have to go through in order to discuss the bleeding edge of the subject. It will get very messy very quickly, and the fact of that messiness alone makes it more and more difficult to understand, and less and less likely to survive the peer-review process and actually get published, which was the whole point to begin with.
Another problem: If I’m writing academic papers, then by making the assumption in all cases that my readers don’t know what I’m talking about, I increase the amount of writing I have to do in order to get my point across by sometimes a multiple or two, other times an order of magnitude. My twelve-page paper full of dense technical jargon becomes a two-hundred page book because I almost have to start from first-principles. Worse still, my writing will become almost inextricably tied to the language I use, because at some point I’m going to start trying to build on cultural artefacts that don’t exist in other parts of the world.
The technical jargon that makes academic writing utterly incomprehensible to the rest of us is also part of what enables science to be such an international and cooperative pursuit. Technical jargon, at least in theory, is concrete. It only has one meaning, and it carries no cultural baggage, which makes it vastly easier to translate. In my experience this is less and less true the further you get from the “hard” sciences, but that is perhaps a separate topic.
Ultimately, I find the subject (academic writing and its powers and pitfalls) an interesting one, but I’m not sure I have a real solution to the problem of narrowed access. I can think of a few things to try, but it’s not like I’m special; if I can think of them, chances are somebody else has already tried them, and since I don’t see any of my ideas taking the internet by storm it’s a safe assumption that they have been tried and didn’t work.
Here are some ideas I like:
- Experiment.com is a great idea for decoupling scientific research from the universal profit motive, and therefore promoting open access, but it won’t be terribly effective until I start seeing its name plastered all over the internet.
- The Winnower appears to be a well-constructed attempt to promote discussion across that gap between those conversant and not-conversant with the subject material, something that really needs to happen, but most of its traffic comes from one article that was published more than a year ago, and there doesn’t appear to be a lot of new content since then.
- UsefulScience.org is cool, and does a tolerable job at summarizing, but it doesn’t seem to be getting that much play, and because it can’t tackle the entirety of science all at once its function is relegated to that of just another gatekeeper. A benevolent-seeming gatekeeper, perhaps, but a gatekeeper nonetheless, with all of the same associated issues.
But as you can see, none of those is solving the problem, and none of them is getting the amount of attention they need in order to make real progress. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting Wikipedia to start a research arm, not to do research on its own but to summarize and translate current research into vernacular prose so that the rest of us can have access. I don’t know.
I do think that the longer things are allowed to continue the way they are, the worse off we will be in the long run. Believe what you like about what happens after you die, but in this world, here and now, science is all that will save us from our own stupidity. The longer we are kept outside the garden by things like academic writing and private circulation and other barriers, the harder it will be to get inside when the walls finally come down, and the longer it will take to recover from the mistakes we make in the mean time.
