why smart people write bad
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- Опубліковано 10 чер 2024
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why is academia full of bad writers? did school teach us to write badly? how do we get better at writing? In this video, Taha explores how school makes us bad writers, why academics write so weirdly and how we can (potentially) write better!
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Sabrina
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Taha
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CREDITS
Produced by Taha Khan
Video Editing by Joe Trickey
Motion Design by Joe Trickey
Special Thanks to Rachel Jepsen & Marco Lau
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RECOMMENDED READING / SOURCES
Full Interview with Rachel: • a conversation about w...
The Craft of Writing Effectively: • LEADERSHIP LAB: The Cr...
Why Academics Stink at Writing by Steven Pinker: www.chronicle.com/article/why...
The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing: www.theatlantic.com/education...
The Bad Writing Competition: www.denisdutton.com/bad_writin...
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - uh oh did school fail us
00:10 - for if u wanna read more books
01:03 - why is academia written badly?
01:39 - small word do trick
02:15 - taha does an academia cosplay
03:16 - tfw u use the thesaurus too much
03:46 - why nobody can explain bereal to me
04:36 - maybe WE'RE the bad guys
04:58 - what time is it? powerpoint time
07:00 - nerds beefing each other
07:53 - in defence of academia
09:00 - writing by telling stories
09:41 - the best writing advice ever
10:18 - more things to watch!
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Welcome to the joke under the fold!
I bought a pen that can write underwater, it can write other words as well.
Leave a comment with the word "PEN" to let me know you were here ;-)
It's funny how school is one of the most counterintuitive parts of society yet also one of the most important ones.
Yeah its just mind boggling how the facilities meant to show you how to do shit are so backwards in basically any way of actually getting people to learn.
Whats this? Sitting down for several hours oer day slamming information into your brain forcefully is ineffective? Too bad better 100% calculus by next wednesday.
Homework barely helps learn more but instead makes people more exhausted and is also sorta redundant because you go to school to learn in the first place? Dont care, page 50, excersize 5-10, get it done by tomorrow lol.
Sex education helps prevent teenage pregnancy and could help understand yourself better [doubly so for people who are lgbt]? Okay but what if instead we dont do that because we decided to think it does the opposite even though its proven to not, in fact, do the opposite.
More like it has counterintuitive aspects, I wouldn't call school in it's entirety counterintuitive.
@@swagpenguin1644 84.77%, close enough
If it were treated seriously as it should be by those in charge of funding it, running it, and making decisions about it... then I would say it was important.
As it stands now, for the most part, it's just another hurdle forced upon us all.
It should be harder to get teaching credentials
Every single year of school I’ve been through I remember being taught how to write a specific way, writing that way, and then being told that way is completely wrong the next year.
Edit: Congrats on 1 million subs!
EVERY TIME!! it’s the worst 😭
Ha. Just got a 68 after getting 90s the previous term. Professor did NOT like the other prof's style.
As a student, this has me worried
I just stopped listening to what they said around middle school. I figured out the advice was always a one-size-fits-all formula designed to make grading and testing easier, so I just smiled and nodded along and then wrote the same way I always wrote. Just focused on getting my ideas across coherently, making sure they're at least somewhat relevant to the prompt. It's worked well for the most part. Teachers and professors don't like reading boring, formulaic essays either, so as long as you're comfortable with the material you're supposed to be writing about, it's not too hard to come up with something that actually communicates an idea. Maybe not the most original idea, maybe not an idea that anyone except your professor would be interested in... but still, an idea. Not just a 5-paragraph regurgitative monstrosity.
The only problem is that becomes very difficult when you're NOT comfortable with the material, or if it's material you profoundly do not care about. Which is often the case. God only knows how many terrible, bullshit essays I've written just to meet a word or page count...
@@maxpower7649 don’t let it rob you of sleep, but just know it’s gonna happen. what couldn’t get me higher than a B in one prof’s classes got me an A on my first paper the next semester in a diff prof’s class.
I’m a PhD student, so I have to read and write a lot of academic papers. I wouldn’t say that academics write complex text because they’re trying to impress their peers. Rather, it’s the standard in the academic community, and you get corrected if you don’t write that way. One of the comments I got on my master’s thesis was that it wasn’t “formal” enough. i.e. It wasn’t complex enough, so I had to go back and make the writing more complicated.
There are also some good reasons for the complexity. Jargon can be useful for communicating efficiently with other people in the field. You also want to be very precise and not leave anything open to misinterpretation. That said, it often goes too far.
I think the teachers expected us to express more in context. But ended up of repeating all sentences in the same pattern and same words you want deliver. Sometimes reading to many makes your head bloated of information. That is make you stop of getting freedom and fresh idea.
“Often” is an understatement lol, especially in the humanities 😂
Thank you, man. Exactly what I wanted to tell
While there are papers that are written this way, I honestly find they're in the minority (at least in my experience in the humanities). Yes, they're written with words you'd never use in a non-academic context, but then some words are just that much more concise. I think a lot of this can be accounted for by the fact that academic writing is trying to convey an idea as concisely as possible, and sometimes the nuances in meaning between "inconsistent" and "random" (or between "big" and "major") can play big roles in how that idea is delivered. Yeah, there are people like Lacan who are absolutely awful at writing (to the point where he had to beg his contemporaries to read his work), but I've generally found that if an academic phrases something a certain way, there's probably a good reason behind it. There's also stuff like Cixous and ecriture feminine, where the text being hard to read is exactly the point. Again, though, just my example in the humanities.
Isnt reasoning why its written that way is to avoid outta context text. so people wont read and it wont be ah x=y.
I've always noticed how the way we're taught to write in school is completely different from the writing in the texts we're supposed to base our essays on. Just goes to show how much school values looking good to colleges versus teaching kids real-world skills and creativity.
I noticed that too, really hate the school system. No wonder so many students breakdown and crumble near major tests.
A good writer needs to be understood fundamentally, but yeah I don’t know how to write essays lol
Read your bible! (KJV, preferably) ♥
The overly complicated academic writing you described reminded me of a chapter in book. In it the protagonist tries to have an intellectual discussion via text message. He becomes frustrated because auto correct doesn’t know many of the academic word choices so he decides to replace them with simpler words. When he is done his previously very elaborate sentence can be boiled down to „thinking is important“ 🤣
what book is that lmfao
I need to know what book that is
replying to this just in case someone finds this book
also replying for the same reason many others are doing so
@@person9324 Same
Cornell has a Freshman writing requirement. It isn't because incoming students didn't learn the basics of writing, like grammer. It's because we all learned the same 5 paragraph essay format you need for the SATs. Writing needs to change for your target audience. If your target audience is spending 2 minutes per essay while grading them all, then the 5 paragraph essay is good. If you're writing for a professional audience, then removing ambiguitity is more important than clarity. I learned that in law school.
But now, most of my writing is intended to explain complex legal stuff to a wider audience of activists and the style I'm working on is VERY different. I avoid fancy words now.
there's only one SAT, its not the SATs
@@ThomasTheThermonuclearBomb That's true, but colloquially we always called it the SATs when I was young. Don't know why.
My Uni requires a Writing and Rhetoric course, and many majors also require a Technical Writing course, too.
@@IzuOtoroshi Yeah, it is pretty common. Didn't mean to imply this was in any way unusual.
I didn't mean to imply anything, either. Simply noting that I've had a similar experience with stuff like rhetoric and WAC.
I just wanna share this experience I had.
I was trying to explain the punette square (the biology thing: predicting the genes/traits of a child based on the genes/traits of the parents) to a younger friend who was just taught it in school.
I had a pretty hard time trying to get her to see what was happening and she still didn't seem to fully get it.
Cue my other friend, ((CHEWIE, YOURE THE BEST!!)), who popped into the conversation and explained the punette square with respect to minecraft. Hear this. He explained to her how when u place a dirt block next to a grass block, it turns to grass. Grass is dominant over dirt blocks; thus making dirt blocks the recessive trait, and grass the dominant.
It was a stroke of genius. She understood the concept immediately!
tbf, she might think dirt (recessive gene) disappears in the offsprings
@@NoNameAtAll2to be fair, break a grass block-you get dirt. It's recessive, but still there! So I think it works well
Same principle with math for me. Made no sense in school, but when it is applied to compression or gear ratios, it all clicks
Hey that's pretty clever
Pattern recognition like that is a sign of a pretty high IQ.
So glad to hear someone make the case for "bad writing isn't bad, it's just not fitted to your specific needs as a reader"
i took an essay writing class in high school and managed to get an A without turning in a single completed essay. the majority of the class structure was reading a piece of literature and coming up with our own essay subjects relating to the literature - i had undiagnosed adhd at the time so i would come up with a really interesting subject, write the outline, and finish half a draft before giving up. my teacher always really loved my creative thesis statements and ended up letting me just... not turn any completed drafts in lol. i think she must have been someone who really loved literature for what it was, and i like to think she was rebelling against the school structure in what little way she could.
My English teacher loved and hated me for a very similar reason seeing as I never did anyone's homework, not even hers, but I churned out essays she loved. One time I got bored and rewrote Gullivers travels in a more interesting way, making my first fanfiction and commiting plagiarism all in one day. She loved it and graded it as the best, but I'm sure she found my attempt amusing and ignored the legality of it. Found out I've got ADHD this year.
@@bernardkariuki1365 Man, I wish I had a teacher like that
same w my lit teacher, she liked my ideas and analysis but i was rly truly unable to write excessively long essays :( i think i have adhd too but who knows
@@bernardkariuki1365 Legality? What?
@@bernardkariuki1365 fair use probably applies if it was for school and also not for money. Plus there are a ton of retellings of other things and I’m pretty sure gulliver is public domain
In school I was a horrible writer - for all the reasons you say. I was writing to try to sound smart. The thing is, it worked. I consistently got the highest marks in literature even though I really didn't understand the subject matter. I just knew the right buzzwords and phrases that the teachers would like.
That's literally me like 'comprehend' sounds more "sophisticated 😌" compared to 'understand'
Yeah when i take philosophy classes my go to strategy is to write from the POV of someone who thinks the fucking world is out to get them, sorta the emo kid who thinks everyone hates them and nobody loves them.
Man first time it was a fucking joke but after i kept getting A's i rolled with it.
Got congratulated for my hard work a lot of the time, fucking wild i swear.
Might be why I went into STEM. Could never figure out the right buzzwords.
@@ABEL-cd2sp HAHA I MIGHT DO THIS
Please give me a list omg someone please
As a linguist and a writer I approve of this video so hard!!! Everytime I thought “Wait, but he's forgetting…” the next shot would follow up on it. Very, very well done!
To elaborate on the final point: School teaches a prescriptivist writing style, which is a good base style, truly. But without learning how and when to break the rules, we're raising writers who produce mediocre novels. You read a lot of brilliant fanfiction and novel ideas, executed with great plot, but made unreadable by school approved narration :'(
I think a lot of the "rules" serve to help both teachers and students set a benchmark and avoid interacting with the complexities of writing. The war on passive voice is one of such rules that I think helps a lot of students who have a hard time making their ideas clear; when a student doesn't have the experience to employ the effect of passive voice on the way a sentence is read, it's easier to do away with it entirely.
However, the rules can be broken to great effect. Communication is the ultimate purpose of writing whether it be communicating ideas, emotions, or intent. Avoiding conventions is itself communication, as it modifies the way in which an idea is presented. Sometimes we use passive voice not because we wish to "hide" the actor, but because the subject is more important. Sometimes placing the subject at the start retains parallel structure or keeps them in the front of the reader's mind.
I had some great teachers in the last few years, but I'm one of the fortunate ones. Teaching the tools to purpose our writing is seen as a "higher education" goal. However, reading is a major facet of culture. Engagement with the text we read is heightened by our understanding of the tools that formed it. I also think it's important on an intersectional level: every work of media aims to communicate, and the methods often reflect one another. Being a critical writer makes you not only a critical reader but also a critic of all works.
please this comment is so cringey, bro wasn't even talking about fiction man your 33 year old white woman who used to use tumblr to discuss which supernatural character had the biggest booty is showing
Love the higher production quality of this one, the vfx team rlly outdid themselves turning sabrina into a cgi sock puppet, i almost believed taha had hands
I’ve always felt like some literature was written so poorly. Like they care more about word count than they do about getting to the point. It’s annoying 😅
I feel like a lot of that is that it's written for people from a different period...or sometimes emulating people writing for people from a different period, which is.....GROSS.
Lots of old writing was paid per word so yeah they literally wanted to
If you've ever gotten around to reading texts from the Middle Ages, you'll see a "I got Royal Approval to write this book and I'll be damned if I let a single page go to waste" attitude. Had to read through a 12-page rant about imaginary haters in a book about chess.
Hey again
@@albericponcedeleon2696 watdefak lol
I agree with this so much. The worst of the worst is engineering academic papers. Papers are written in sections the bigger words the better. The sentences are so long it becomes dry because you have to make each sentence clear in what you are trying to say and be quotable. It has destroyed my writing
The technical reports from engineering consults (written and reviewed many) are no better. There are variations, but there is a basic reporting style, in my locale anyways. It is stilted, as it is meant only to communicate results and outcomes. Brutal, brutal soul crushing "writing".
The textbooks in my computer science curriculum were some of the most difficult texts I've ever tried to read! I found it so frustrating, and now that I'm programming professionally it makes me sad because I totally could grasp the concepts I struggled with so much then
In my experience, a lot of engineers (or at least, engineering students) just... don't care about flowery writing. Partially because of the weird STEM / arts separation in primary school. To an engineering student, a piece of writing that says exactly what it needs to and nothing more is *efficient*, not dry.
@@elekbuday81 as a first year engineering student, on one of the first engineering specific lectures we were asked who liked to write and who wanted to avoid writing. Put simply, engineering students don't like writing. It's not surprise that engineers would avoid writing that wasn't strictly necessary for their message
@@juliaf_ That's exactly the first thought I had, when the interviewed woman said, that some people make scientific writing easy to understand by writing something close to a story. "That seems so inefficient and like too much work, when just trying to convey knowledge to people that have a baseline understanding of whatever the topic may be".
Like mentioned later in the video: Just knowing your target audience (while still not overusing complicated sentences for the sake of complicated sentences) and writing to them specifically is imho good advice.
I'm still in high school. Here in the UK, we're taught to use very specific writing structures that, if we don't follow, will genuinely knock us down marks. No matter how nice and fluent your writing is, no matter how well you convey the point, if you don't follow that structure you're bound to lose marks. It's why I get such low marks on my English essays, because no matter what I prioritise making my writing fluent and nice to read.
Unfortunately, the bullshit continues at University. I went to Cambridge to study Classics, and one of the things that convinced me to switch to Archaeology was the stuffiness of the Classics department's preferred writing style. Once, I was told my writing sounded both "journalistic" and "too technical." Wait, did I say "my writing"? Let me be clear... Both those comments were for THE SAME ESSAY.
To be fair, I heavily referenced a paper by some archaeologists. I guess I wrote too simply while also using the wrong field's jargon? Idk, I was a fresher. Anyway, I was outta there. I switched to Archaeology (a much more friendly department), got my degree, and gtfo'ed Cambridge as fast as I could. I've since done a Masters in Creative Writing and spent a few years working in publishing. I'm considering a grand return to Archaeology, but I'll never forget that goddamn Classics essay.
@@poilaaliop I recently did my November mock exams and on one of the English papers I got literally 80% of my marks on the last question, which is creative writing. I got 36/40 for that question, including SPaG, because I was able to basically just let my thoughts out in whatever way I chose. The rest of the questions I almost entirely flunked. It's crazy.
That is because in high school the worst writer in your class is the one who needs the structure. The best writer can follow instructions. There is only one teacher to determine if all 100 of their students can create a sentence/paragraph, etc. After school when you become a professional writer you will have an editor with a lot fewer clients and will be able break out of the box.
Am I the only one that read this in a British accent? Lol
We had a gcse english teacher last year who literally told us as we went through the creative writing section that actual creative stories don’t matter, it’s the language and the techniques employed that do. Like i love making stories and i love some good cyclical structure and foreshadowing as much as any other storyteller but the fact that you lose marks for not adding a metaphor is dumb. What if the scene benefits from lots of short straight-to-the-point sentences? What if there’s high tension or the characters don’t have time to think? What if the pov character is narrating and just doesn’t speak like that? etc etc
Hell i was advised not to finish the story once because the practice one had enough of the checklist, which is painful. Especially as i decided not follow that advice (ran out of time for my rescue story to get to the actual rescue goddammit)
I took AP language in high school and it was SUPPOSED to teach me how to communicate ideas of persuasion and literature analysis, but my teacher literally refused to tell us what we were and weren't doing right so I just never learned how to develop an argument. That is, until I started watching video essays in the past few years. Turns out you learn how to improve your writing when you're told what to improve😱
Revolutionary concept, you should write a paper. ALAS, THEY DIDNT TEACH US HOW!
Hint: those mf english teachers actually don't know how to write well
I teach physics, and I've read and reviewed a *lot* of textbooks. Completely unsurprising bottom line: the ones with the most pictures and diagrams with short captions *always* explain things best, both according to me, and to the students I've double-checked with. So maybe if academics want to write better, it might not just be all about the writing; maybe take out a paragraph or two, and put in a nice, useful picture instead.
me like pictures!!
My maths teacher told me that everyone learns best visually which I think makes sense. Language is relatively recent and so learning by reading or listening I follows is going to be relatively unnatural. However we have been learning visually for as long as we have had eyes. Millions of years of evolution to learn by sight compared to around 100,000 years of evolution of learning through speech.
Its like that quote “a picture is worth a thousand words”
I'm not suprised. I've always said knowledge and learning is only as fun as it's application and a huge wall of text with big words is NOT FUN.
Totally agree. The best books in any subject have tables, diagrams and illustrations.
i remember, throughout school, being repeatedly told to stop using the word "and" for example "I opened the door and i felt a cold breeze, and the hallway grew black and distant"
then years later i read Ernest Hemingway and i was like "why is he writing like a child"
After pressing on, i realized Hemingway had one of the most beautiful writing styles ever. Yet, it couldn't be simpler. Hemingway isn't desperately trying to convince you of his greatness with every overcomplicated word or phrase, he's simply telling a story.
I find, to condense something truly beautiful into something small and simple, is where genius lies. Thats why i'll personally always think Shane Mcgowan is a better poet than Lord Byron.
So he’s writing… in earnest?
I did an assignment where I listed two companies, both companies were (something) And (something), The teacher came up and said that it should be a comma and not an "and". SoI told then it is this company (something) And (something) AND the second company (something) And (something), so the changing to a comma is completely wrong. They acknowledged their failure in following reality at that point, I then got high marks.
Prose (and any form of art, really), isn't "supposed" to be a certain way. Just saying that simpler is better isn't necessarily right, and neither is the opposite. Rather, I think we should encourage experimentation.
@@gaelbaca2958 I said I thought it was better. Not better generally.
Using a lot of "and"s still isn't good. Makes your work read eerily like an AO3 omegaverse fic.
As someone who is currently having to write a research paper for my art history class… this is extremely relevant. When you have to reread an article that’s basically just saying “here’s some ways people made religious art back in the day” three times just to figure out what the heck is happening you really start questioning why the heck people are like this.
As a writing professor, this matches a lot of concerns my students have from high school. “So you’re saying everything I learned before was wrong?” No, but there are new audiences and genres of writing that will be written in different ways. Also you are older and smarter now.
Decontextualized writing without an audience besides “my teacher” is such a limited experience of what it means to write. I’m glad for that interview at the end, which really got it. I’m looking forward to seeing the whole thing.
Zoe Bee is a former writing professor with some great videos on this topic.
I was actually sitting in front of my computer, breaking my brain on how to write my university book report, when I got this alert on my phone. Thank you for letting me know it isn't just me, Taha
No audience participation!
I read the paper describing he Dunning-Kruger effect (Unskilled and unaware). It's actually written in a very entertaining way. I try getting academics I know to read it, so that they can see that being boring is not a requirement.
bdg
@@havardhenriksen8890 Getting people to read that paper must be a great way to kill two birds with one stone, since I'm sure the concepts must apply to a lot of those academics.
Bro, have you read Paul Stamets' research papers
From my experience at university, academic writing is the equivalent of legalese. It's an attempt to create a highly specific sentence that is not open to misinterpretation. You also want to be very clear and specific about what your experiment does and does not demonstrate, so you don't accidentally make false claims. I think we arrived at academic writing kind of like evolution does: it isn't perfect and could definitely be improved, but once academics found that it technically does work for its intended purpose (even if inefficiently), we got stuck with it.
+
oh cool i was gonna comment this! you have to define everythinggggg over and over again. ps, never read Mind, Self, and Society by George H Mead… i think half the book is restating the difference between humans and animals. edit: it’s arguments are phenomenal so do read it… just prepare to skim
Yep, _especially_ in philosophy- writers are often shoving someone's whole body of philisophical work, or at least a big chunk of it, into something by just invoking their last name. It's frustratingly dense and hard to "decompress" but the alternative would be that putting your ideas on paper would take a hilariously long word count.
But we have digital methods of conveyance now where the content can be served dynamically. Additional context can be telegraphed and then triggered through endless means. Academic papers probably have to keep the obtuse format in order to keep being put out in journals that go to print
As someone who bled out his gut to complete his Master's Degree, and then loathe every time his Asian parents beg him to get a PhD, I laughed really hard, with tears too, when I saw that academic writing.
Aw man, the horror I had to go through back then. Never again.
This perfectly explains why I, as someone who LOVES to learn, HATED school and didn't aspire to or go to university. I hated having to write to prove knowledge, and the thought of doing that in university after being miserable doing it in high school, is why I preferred and went to college(college in Canada means community college where you receive a diploma in your chosen field, not a degree). I don't regret my choice one bit!
I never built upon the 4th grade rules of, "a paragraph is 5 sentences with a topic sentence and a conclusion." In middle school, no one corrected me. It got so bad by my Freshman year that I had to spend lunch period with my English teacher. I wasn't proud of my writing until I started reading again when I was 21. So maybe the secret to writing well is reading "good writing", like N.K. Jemison
NK Jemisin is great. Fifth Season knocked my socks off writing (and story) wise.
I thought that was a suggestion as a paragraph is between 2-5 sentences, and a conclusion is not necessary as long as you have a topic sentence...
one of my old college professors literally has built into her lesson plan "How to avoid the five paragraph essay"
@@Jessica-sh1js i need this lesson!
@Psydle
I appreciate that your paragraph had 5 sentences, a topic, and a conclusion.
All throughout college, even when I knew I was making sentences way more complex and the creative writer in me was screaming, I always felt this pull to write more "academically" in my papers. It was so annoying
I had a chemistry teacher that always said, “Say what you mean and mean what you say”.
I took this into my writing and kept my notes and documentation short and simple for work and college.
The only time I didn’t do this is during high-school when I was required to write a 1000 words or flil out 5-10 pages for useless reasons
When I first started writing online content as an intern at a tech startup, my manager said to me "You write like a journalist" and it wasn't a compliment.
My bad essay-writing habits picked up in academia haunt me to this day.
I am currently taking a communications course at university. It kinda amazed me how bad high school was at preparing students to communicate. In high school we were constantly told to expand our vocabularies and use big words and blah blah blah. And now in uni they're basically trying to undo that so we can you know... actually communicate to real people.
Very recently took a course on professional writing for my ME degree and found it quite helpful. Writing is about communication, and the way we write will be more effective to some people and less for others. However, being an effective "writer" isn't just about being able to produce "good writing," but tailoring the information to the audience for which it is intended.
For instance, a memo must be dense and short-- it's informational, and it's understood that the information is important. However, the structure of the information must also aim to catch attention and retain it so that the recipient doesn't miss the details that are most important.
Journals and research documents are prefaced with abstracts or executive summaries, both tailored to different readers despite serving similar roles. In an abstract, you target peers who you expect to be familiar with jargon or conventions and summarize the work. In an executive summary, you appeal to executives who may be interested in the information provided but do not have the tools or knowledge to effectively interpret the writing.
I wish this was something that was built up much earlier for me. My writing has transformed a lot over the years, and I owe a lot of that to the teachers I've had. First you learn to write words, and then you learn to construct ideas with them. Many people get left there, but knowing how to improve the way in which you present ideas is very important.
In much the same way, writing "rules" are redundant. They are there to ensure that students become equally capable and coherent out of high school, but ultimately they serve the purpose of directing communication. Communication is the only part that truly matters, and sometimes breaking those rules makes for more effective communication.
This is exactly why I want to be a science educator/writer. There's such a huge barrier between academic papers and the general public, to the point where even when the papers are available for free the ideas being presented are so inaccessible that they might as well have not been written. It's ridiculous.
Honestly, the start of this video hit me so hard bc I'm dyslexic and I just realized 5 seconds ago that if something is written well it almost completely vanishes! School reading is pretty much the only thing that gives my dyslexia problems, everything else feels like a silly little mess up, like when I read someone's text wrong and then we laugh about it or my brain replaces the word clock with the word diary in both meaning and in what I hear and I still get the big picture of what the writer meant.
In my experience, the academic propensity toward obfuscated language has been the root of so many problems in my communication. I spent my childhood paying more attention to my expectations in class than the social expectations that I deal with in real life, which has left me with a complete inability to actually get a point across.
Yep, exactly. My uni writing prof said it as well: the purpose of school writing is to DEMONSTRATE. The purpose of real world writing is to COMMUNICATE. Totally different.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, "demonstrate" is only applicable for student papers where the purpose is to demonstrate knowledge, to prove to the teacher they've learned the content and can generate an argument based on that knowledge.
For academic papers (journal articles, books) they're not written to showcase intellect and achievements, they're written to outline the findings from a scholar's work such as outlining all the information about an experiment, communicating that knowlwdge so that other scholars can build on it.
There can be an element of demonstration though when it comes to demonstrating that the research has value, especially for scholars who want to continue their career researching the same topic further. A paper might seek to demonstrate the efficacy of a statistics method, for instance, or the outcomes of a trial run of a new social program.
@@quilynn i'd say academic papers are real world writings, not school papers that you just want high marks for
the line between these two types of writing is extremely thin, and i'd say the reason people are bad writers in academia is because they don't realize they've already stepped over it
1 MILLION SUBS!!! CONGRATS GUYS!! I remember when it was still called Sabrina and friends! So happy for you three
I remember when it was called nerdy and quirky. Very very old
i remember-
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I remember when she did a Vlogbrothers video when they went on holidays.
Read your bible! (KJV, preferably) ♥
I had to take a standardized English proficiency test to prove I can speak my own native language for express entry immigration to Canada. I got perfect marks in everything except writing (though I still passed) and this breakdown of the person reading your paper doesn’t want you to communicate but rather express knowledge really hit home to me.
I remember going all out on my English essays, often breaking the word limit by hundreds, and losing marks in the process. Then I nerf myself to stay within the word limit, only to be told by my English teacher "Maybe you should stop being so creative, you'll get more marks that way."
I live in a country where being fluent in English can get you a lot of places. And yet my teacher had the audacity to tell me not to be creative XD
I have such disabling anxiety about writing papers that I just won't do it, I'd rather take the hit to my final grade than put myself through that agony.
Welcome to the club. Bonus points if it turns out youre neurodivergent.
Same. For the spooooooooky season my English class decided that it would be a good & fun idea to do a short essay about Halloween. I've been stressing over it for a while now. The thing is, I've always been a gifted student so I mentally can't take that hit... nor doing the paper. I have to trudge through that immense stress for just a 10 pointer.
I didn't expect to be called out.
I’m a writing instructor with some advice. It might sound like therapy or something, but you don’t have to answer my questions here. Maybe you just need to vent and you can ignore me.
Do you know what causes this anxiety? Like, if it’s a fear of being judged on your writing, a mental block in getting started, experiences having to write about things you don’t understand well enough, ADHD paralysis, self-consciousness when reading your own words? It might be something else and a lot of times, people may not be able to put a finger on it.
What could your teachers do to alleviate that anxiety? Provided clearer steps on how to get the work done? Give suggestions on your rough ideas to help you move forward? Not post a grade for it? Provide assignments relevant to your interests or personal goals? Allow for a speech-to-text dictation during the drafting phases? Coach you through editing?
This is a conversation you can almost certainly start with a teacher. Not like “this assignment bores me. Can I write about something different?” But maybe just explaining that you face anxiety with writing and are finding it difficult to do X or you’re worried about being judged on X. Their job is to help you learn strategies to overcome that.
Edit:
I think my last sentence might be about writing teachers specifically. I get that many students are asked to write in ways where writing is just a tool to display knowledge. I would edit that sentence, but I still want it to be true!
100% me
I've had this exact same issue with most school systems for years now.
"Alright, so you have to explain how these two things are connected."
Yeah, makes sense.
"And you have to use these specific examples here."
Yep, perfectly fine.
"But you have to do it in 600 words or more."
Wait, why? I could literally explain that in a single paragraph of like 80 words in a few minutes at most.
"Oh and you have to use these exact guidelines to write your paper, even though they don't apply to the current situation at all, and you've already demonstrated your knowledge on those guidelines through the non-essay questions."
As a current elementary school teacher, I firmly agree. I am extremely passionate about getting my students to write to an audience.
As someone who used to want to be a professor and majored in religious studies, I feel called out. 😂
To be honest, when I think of some of the papers I wrote, I was mainly just emulating the style of the writers I most admired or even just most recently read. I would read maybe 12 books for a paper, and all of them would be 100+ years old, and so naturally my writing style ended up sounding somewhat stiff, old fashioned, and pretentious. I think that's something to keep in mind when thinking about Why Academics Write That Way. They're (consciously or not) writing within the context of a centuries-long tradition that had largely remained an insular culture with little interest in interacting with other groups.
I never went to college because while I was great at absorbing information, I was terrified of essays 😬I graduated high school in 98. Later diagnosed with add and anxiety which I think explains why I struggle with written expression.
my masters tutor always used to tell us simple sentences are more effective and would show us how to simplify our sentences. They’d also give us strict word counts. I think cause they also had learning difficulties they understood super long sentences are hard for most people so no point unnecessarily complicating it.
Fancy seeing you here hiii
@@straww_berryyy 💕💕💕
Long sentences are simply extremely hard to do right
Short sentences reduce the amount of information you can put in, thus there's less you can do wrong, making your writing clearer as you're not wasting words for complex concepts
My professors would ALWAYS give me sh*t for my shorter sentences, but it's just so difficult to maintain an understanding of what is the point of the sentence.
I actually started underlining and circling certain words in my textbook so I can straighten out what the sentence was telling me.
Yup. Medical writer here. My job revolves around taking complex science and making it as short and simple as possible, which pretty much involved unlearning everything I learned in school.
One thing a friend and I discussed about was how scientific papers are written in such a way that it's very hard for someone who's never read scientific papers to read them. We're literally taught to write that way because that is the standard, but it's funny that it only caters to a small group, and they are very boring to read. I won't even read scientific papers I've written that I know I've enjoyed writing because the style is such a bore. I'd rather read a story I've written when I was 13 that I've buried deep in within many files that haven't seen the light of day in many years.
My hs physics teacher handled any writing in such a great way. He told us that when we wrote our lab reports, we should explain concepts in a way that a 5 year old would understand. This ensured we truly knew what we were talking about, and allowed us to build better writing habits :)
As someone who is regularly reading, writing, and reviewing papers, I totally agree! I think there is a lot of jargon, where specific words have very specific meanings (similar to how lawyers read/write contracts). But also don't forget, while the vast majority of papers are written in English, most writer's first language isn't English. So, us non-native speakers often reproduce stuff that we read in order to communicate similar messages. And sometimes, something is easily phrased in our native language and we try to translate it literarily instead of semantically.
This is a very important point and I'm glad someone is talking about it here!!!
In college I had a class on professional communication, which talked about having a "you" mentality. Because in the US and other western cultures, we're generally more self-centered in our communication, they say to take a step back and focus on who you're talking to and use their context instead of your own.
"Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences" by Michael Billig is an educational and entertaining read - especially for humanities students and academics.
From my perspective it's just what we're taught. Trying to get good grades, we try to emulate the material that we are given (and just trying to avoid plagiarism😂, especially when there are a bunch of people writing about the same topic and they get cross checked.) (oh and wordcount)
As an English Major I 1000% agree with everything this video said. I literally find it so difficult to explain even the simplest things now, because I've gotten so accustomed to empty sentences full of fluff . A lot of it has to do with the fact that I literally have to read and write academically EVERY DAY. I used to be a perfectly fine communicator, but now when I'm speaking to family, friends, and coworkers there's this barrier that I just can't seem to understand. My brain can't find the words. This video explained it perfectly! Speaking to people outside of school is kind of alienating these days and I don't even enjoy writing anymore. Great video! A lot of sad truth.
Holy shit you’re literally me
I know I swear I was so much more efficient at communicating in elementary school
I get this. It wasn't until I started teaching ESL/ELL that I became significantly better at communicating. Though, I was always taught in university to be concise and accurate. Still, though, it's freaking hard in the beginning to unlearn all the English Lit and Philosophy academic writing styles. Diluting language is actually harder than just adding flamboyance and bullshit all day long...
Go to law school and then you’re writing will get more simple but more confusing. It’s a trade off.
Hmm I'm kind of the opposite way. I can write quite good (or so I'm told), if I have to do something official I much prefer to write it put since I'm so much more... coherent. When I have to speak with my voice it's like my brain stops working, I stutter, my words don't connect, I've got all these ideas and points but I can never communicate them well. And this pertains to people I know well, not just academic related things.
I had a class in college where one of our first assignments was to write a blog on a class blog site. It's insane how much easier to read/better communicated those blog were compared to when we peer reviewed each others' essays. The difference was that we were writing to a general online audience and had something to communicate to them.
This video was posted while I was researching engineering papers for a uni project. I'm surprised at how badly some of them are written, and still get published in journals!
I wonder if some of it is to avoid plaigiarism? We have this drilled into us as undergrads to phrase ideas in our own words and cite your sources, but there's only so many ways to rephrase something without losing all meaning. Often the original source already expresses it in the most concise way.
It is difficult to express complex ideas with simple language, definitely a rare skill in academia.
Might not be quite the same thing, but I will never be done being salty about this. My high school English teachers, in advanced, "college prep," "basically exactly the standards you'll have to live up to in college" classes, marked me off for making any statements in my papers that weren't backed up by a citation, beating it into my head that my job was to make my points solely by curating other people's thoughts and anything not in quotation marks was for the purpose of setting up explaining why I was using the quotes. Then in college my first English 103 paper came back marked "C-minus! Tell me what YOU think!"
I felt this experience in my soul
I'm glad you pointed out that some parts of the complicated are necessary whilst others are unreasonably complex.
I think this is one of those instances when internet culture actually helps to put a stop to problematic learned behaviors. We pick up internet language things from social media and memes, and then we realize that the way we were taught to write by the education system isn't anything like how we're supposed to be communicating with other people. The more we pick up on internet culture, the less we talk like we're writing a college essay.
- Nev
It is obvious you aren't going to speak like you write an essay, an essay should be concise and avoid vagueness, and sometimes the only way to do that is using technical language that is hard to understand to a person foreign on the topic.
When I was in high school, I was able to get into AP English, and writing essays were so hard for me to do because I would always not write enough when I could get my point across way too "quickly". And people who were concise were considered "bad students" and were shown as the "bad examples"
"In school you're writing to demonstrate knowledge"
I haven't encountered a single English class past elementary school where I had to do this. Usually those are for presentations and worksheets and stuff. Essays are always for analyzing and arguing.
This all very much speaks to my hesitation to go to grad school. Sometimes it seems the deeper you go, the less you are connected to solving real problems and providing knowledge to the public. And I don’t want to lose touch. Instead I’m currently thinking about going in for library science and focusing on this very issue.
As a current grad student focusing on applied research (who also worked at my university writing center--yay for no funding!), I totally understand this feeling. I feel like you have to work at least twice as hard to do work that will help problem-solve. And as for providing knowledge to the public: there are quite a few academics who talk about barriers to "public intellectualism" (researchers who actively try to share their knowledge to the public). One of the main ones is that non-academic publications, like popular non-fiction books, don't count towards tenure, no matter how much time and effort they require! But I still think it's worth it to try to do these things. Don't lose that zeal for helping real people/problem-solving--grad school can try to take it out of you, just don't let it!
Thought number two, it's not just using many words that's the problem, but annoyingly long words, too. I tell my students to make their work flow like water, not like lead. Flow and utility are more important than "sounding smart", because the students ARE smart, so they don't have to do a f*cking intellectual backflip to prove it.
Bonus hate points from me if a teacher expects me to "keep it short and simple" only for the exam to then say "Must be at least two thousand words long" and "contain a segment about quantum relativity of space donuts"
I was taught how to write an efficient and clear essay. Only, I wasn’t taught by any school or teacher but by a tutor who graded essay’s for other teachers. “Make it short and make it sweet…because I have 200 more to grade on the same topic.” I kept the jargon to a minimum and ditched idioms and metaphors (unless it was a creative writing class, then metaphor’s became practically mandatory). Nine times out of ten I get a solid grade, and the few times I didn’t were when the teacher graded the essay and wanted jargon.
I would like to add on another reason as to why some sentences are needlessly complicated: avoiding plagiarism. I find myself having to make sentences more complicated or phrased in unique ways just to make sure I don't end up getting flagged for plagiarism for the one concept that has been explained by thousands of papers written about it before I have.... so that's where I stand
“Use less words to make your point.” That’s been my mantra lately.
I don't think that's a problem of modern academia and schooling only. There are some older texts that are absolutely unreadable and yet considered classics. Kant is the first example that springs to my mind. He was famous for writing unbearably long sentences - sometimes they were over 100 words long and the record is 238 words. There are many other examples of people who lived before the times of standardised education and academia, but made the same mistakes.
I think the main reason could be simpler - being a good scholar is just unrelated to being a good teacher and explaining things in an understandable way. Most people in university has had that experience of joining a class with someone known for their academic work, thinking it's going to be good, but it turns out to be awful. I think that applies to writing as well. It's a completely different skill.
just now getting to this video, and this is an important conversation among public historians. as historians, we are trained in an elitist academic environment, making our writings inaccessible to the public when history is a desperately needed look towards our past and how we can do better. as public historians, graduate school trains us to write in a public facing voice while also maintaining the integrity of our argument and the important jargon we use. thank you for making this. 💙
This video sums up why I hated grad school. We had to read tons or articles each week and some of the writing was so convoluted and dense. Grad school also made me discover I also had ADHD, so that probably didn't help either.
I also got diagnosed with ADHD in grad school! Finally getting on meds made me so mad I'd been forced to go without for so long, because holy shit, I can actually read at a normal speed now??? I can actually keep up with (most of) the reading load... but also convoluted writing is still convoluted and awful, I can just get through it faster now.
I think this can extend way beyond writing: I am not great at math, but I think I could have been. I think the stumbling block was 1. having a very bad math teacher for two years in high school (suck it, Mrs. Palmer), and 2. most, if not all, of my math teachers were instinctually good at math from the beginning. I wasn't learning from someone who themselves had to 'learn' math, I was learning from people whose expectation was that I would 'get it' like they did.
I’m a “gifted” kid (ADHD) and I’ve struggled and suffered in school more than most people because I was never taught how to simply suck at something until I got better, so just so u know it goes both ways
it's more of a problem in anglo-centric universities, because for example in Italy we speak a lot more, a lot of our exams could be both oral and written, so you have to be somewhat decent at speaking - or the professors will fail you.
I actually find this interesting, since in my school all my teachers hated it when kids used elongated sentences and fancy words
(Mini Essay inc.)
I'm 16, currently in sixth form. I have always hated essays - writing them, anyway. This video was great, because it pretty much sums up why (it was also just a good video): As Taha stated, I'm only ever writing to demonstrate what I know.
I hate that. I hate it so much.
I'm generally someone who enjoys education and learning and things, so it's genuinely almost painful to have to write in a format that means my writing just doesn't flow, listing pointless facts and almost random analysis just for the sake of having said enough.
On my own terms, I like literature analysis. I want to communicate my ideas; I want people to understand the complex webs of connection that I can see between the lines of a poem or novel or play.
But I can't.
Because I only have an hour.
Because there are points I know I need to make to get marks.
Because it isn't efficient.
Because that's not what I'm supposed to do.
I hate it. It makes my blood boil.
Psychology GCSE was one of the worse examples I've seen of this. The exam has two essay questions, one synoptic (on multiple topics) question and another, more specific to a single topic and also more valuable in terms of marks question. In one of the two papers this would be a 'debate' question, where you provide your insight on probably some ethical issue in the field. It was made very clear that our actual opinion on the debate didn't matter. It's not a question about ethics, it's a question about the strengths and weaknesses of whatever research method or whatever it is you're analysing. You choose the side that's easiest to argue for.
We were taught a structure for each of these, given example essays that were blunt and so devoid of genuine interest or insight. They felt weird and clunky to read and worse to write.
I think I probably lost a lot of marks in essay questions in my GCSEs.
Not because I didn't know the answers.
Not because I didn't have an opinion.
Instead because my opinion didn't matter, and my ideas didn't matter, and the way I write didn't matter. Only the mark scheme mattered.
...And I didn't like to follow the mark scheme. Because it made my writing weird and clunky! Like the psychology example essays. I rewrote passages after I had written them. The structure of my essays were based around connections and logical flow of thought and flow of text.
I was probably marked down for it, but I know I still wrote better essays doing it my way.
This comment was a better essay then every single essay ever written in an English class.
I enjoyed your writing! And it's because you're passionate and you explain well, i don't have any idea about GCSEs or what they entail but you presented your argument well and very concisely!
The rule for essays we were always taught was that it needed to be exactly five paragraphs, each paragraph having one topic, and that each paragraph needed to have at least five sentences. There was also the opening and the closing which I forge what those are called and don't remember if they were included in the five paragraphs.
Anyway, I always hated it and could never do it that way. And therefore I was deemed to be bad at writing essays.
On the other hand, I'm great at narrative and it's literally my favorite hobby and I hope to write a novel.
Hello. I wanted to comment on a couple things.
First, for accessibility: LOOK UP PLAIN LANGUAGE STANDARDS. These are literally written for accessibility and make use of all the aspects of good writing mentioned in the brief snippet of the interview you conducted for the video. I highly recommend using these for writing in general, since they are meant to make writing accessible to as many people as possible.
Second, regarding academia specifically: While I know this channel tries to avoid much mention of overt politics (with good reason), we can't really ignore the fact that universities grew out of elitism and were explicitly for aristocrats. So many ways in which we "show off our knowledge" through bad writing standards is influenced by this elitist history (even if there are also other reasons for it). They make it less accessible to the "laypeople".
Lastly... thanks for the video! I appreciate it a lot (as somebody going through academia right now), and will probably be sending it to a few academic friends or even teachers. I've been trying to write for communicating the point rather than flaunting technical capacity for lexicographic grandeur, but that's often punished in academic writing. Even page number requirements reinforce this, which is... annoying.
So, once again, thank you. I really enjoy your videos and hope that you are able to keep making them for a long time!❤
This. Politics in academia and their publishing journals are a point of serious contention in which the accessibility to information often losses. Also, I find it important to note that academia is Anglocentric, and you are often pushed to publish in English when it is not your native language. This is not meant to excuse bad writers, that it certainly elevates the barrier of entry for everyone.
@@AlfiereOT Absolutely. Having academia focused on English elevates the barriers of entry for everyone that does not speak English natively. English also can't communicate some concepts as effectively as other languages (though it might communicate other concepts more effectively), since languages tend to be optimized for communicating different concepts depending on the culture that language originated in.
That said, there is a benefit of having one single "academic language" (even if it shouldn't be English). It lowers the barrier of entry to academia to many people by only requiring one language to be known rather than an entire constellation of them. If anything though, I think that just emphasizes the importance of a Plain Language standard in academia - making it easier for translators as well as anyone who has learned the language an article is originally written in.
Plain language standards are a godsend. It's great to see someone write criteria based on something that's actually useful.
@@SkyeWint If you live in the modern, global world - you know English. I learned English when I was 6-8 because I wanted to interact with people outside my shitty putin-aligned country. Encouraging people to learn English is a plus, not a negative - it liberates individuals from nationalism and that is a good thing.
As for language and journals - I recommend reading quantum chemistry journals. They are as simplified in language as possible while avoiding needing to write out multiple paragraphs for a single concept.
Why define what a self-consistent field is alongside the entirety of Density Field Theory if you can write "We used M06-2X level of theory" and everyone understands. If someone doesn't understand, they can look up Chris Cramer's lectures or wikipedia for a quick primer.
It anyone else feel like this comment was hard to understand? No? Ok then.
I said almost the exact words as Sabrina reading a case the other day.
Except, I came to the conclusion it was poorly written not because it was needlessly stuffy and wordy (thought it was this, too), but because the “sentence” I was reading was actually 1.5 sentences. At some point the authors started a sentence, gave up on it, and started a new sentence. They never removed the bits of the orphaned sentence, though.
Every single case from this textbook has been like this, with glaring grammar issues. Copy editors need work. You’d think these textbooks companies could hire a few with how much they charge us.
Or at the very least, the professors who wrote the cases could have had a graduate TA proofread their work…
I recently noticed that I feel like I never fully learned why we format sentences the way we do. In elementary school, no one ever explained the different parts of speech beyond nouns and verbs. My mom was talking to a principal about it and she said that a lot of early schools now tend to teach students more about just trying to convey their thoughts instead of literally how to write sentences and that really bothered me. I'm left with "put a comma when you think there should be a pause" and other unhelpful nonsense.
sorry for rambling lol this bothers me
also PENSSSSS
This was exactly the video I needed for a little pep talk as I dread a weekend of paper writing. Meaning, I’m mentally preparing to contort myself into the performance of “the role of the student,” despite learning little else besides perseverance. It’s a blast-and so useful! Remember, y’all, learning should feel exclusive, punishing and highly-frictional, bc the only knowledge that matters is the kind that was tedious to attain!
The ironic thing is language keeps evolving newer and newer slang, grammatical rules and other funny ways of saying things yet we're constantly told we shouldn't write/say that because it's not proper when 80-90% of our time is spent talking with our friends, family, significant others and other people we know.
This happens across all languages not just English.
It's like teachers don't have all the answers and we're at the forefront of culture.
Part of why you shouldn't write an academic paper with new slang or pop culture references is that they aren't universal. It took me probably a month to figure out that "no cap" in memes meant "i swear I'm not lieing".
One of the pieces of advice in the video is to know your audience, academic papers are all supposed to follow a style suitable to an international audience educated in the field of the paper. This means jargon is welcome/needed but not everyone will be a native speaker. (Even between native speakers slang won't be universal)
The other half of why you don't use slang isn't as well motivated, its because academia has always been elitist and you don't you slang so you don't look like a stupid commoner. (This is the original reason)
This is why I love the UA-cam channel Two Minute Papers. They summarize technical academic papers in an easily digestible format.
I think "writing to demonstrate knowledge" is a good way to describe a lot of academic papers. I've come across so many that are clearly not written with any thought given to the fact that, in theory, *other people should be able to read them* . Its not just sentence structure and being needlessly verbose, either, so many papers are an absolute mess at higher levels of organization as well. They just arent communicated in a coherent way from start to finish.
For a good insight into issues regarding education and grading, the youtube channel Zoe Bee has a fantastic video called 'Grading is A Scam (and Motivation is a Myth)' also, writing reports for corporations and local government is a whole different type of madness. Believe me.
I will go ahead and also recommend you watch Zoe's video or even multiple of her videos to those of you passing by as I think she makes some of the best content on the platform
Isaac Asimov has a few pieces of fiction that he wrote in the style of academic papers to remind himself how to write badly again when he was getting back into professional research. "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" and Pâté de Foie Gras". Valid to write your own ofc, but imo these both have great examples of bad sentences that I wouldn't feel bad using as examples 😂
In my college composition course, we were taught to make the sentences easy to read and split all sentences that are too long into multiple little sentences. My professor said that was how we should write. Clear, concise, and meaningful. She said that people who write too long with too many words often doesn’t have that many things to say. They just want the length.
Then came a research course, and it was like all those academia and I went through a different curriculum for composition. 😂
literally before the video even started I knew what you were going to say. And it's not just writing, it's also every aspect of life. The worst thing that I encounter as an activist is people who want to debate you because they don't actually care and they just think that they know the right answer and they want to show you.
this is literally what has been my uphill battle for the latest 5 years and all of the things I have complained about in the process, I wish the educational community in general could grasp an ounce of what this video has expressed in 10 minutes
This kinda relates to what I majored in: technical communication (translating what engineers/scientists/etc say/write so everyone else understands what they are trying to say/write and so much more). Anything can be written well if you either know how to rework it, try long enough to get it right, or ask the right person for help.
I only ever use fancy words in my writing when I want a really specific connotation, and even then I define the word to make sure people understand it. Otherwise, it would just be "Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness" (A TV Trope).
I only just finished grad school and I'm still trying to figure out how to write. You're absolutely right that school failed us, and it can be pretty overwhelming. I still feel like I'm just randomly flailing around when I try to write. Here is some useful advice I've received.
1. Know your audience:
1a: Know what counts as common knowledge vs what needs to be spelled out (this can vary drastically depending on the audience even if you assume the audience is made up of academics in your general field of study).
1b: Know which details are important to the audience, and which details they won't care about.
1c: Remember that only maybe 1% of readers will bother to look into the part of the research you spent 99% of your time on.
2. Be Concise.
3. Include every remotely relevant argument.
4. Be sure to frequently remind the reader of any pertinent information as they will likely only be skimming your paper.
5. Avoid repetition.
6. Cite everyone who has done anything remotely related to what you do.
7. Avoid using too many citations.
8. Be upfront and transparent about any flaws or omissions in your results/methodology.
9. But always do so in a way that shines your work in a positive light.
10. Repeat 8 and 9 for every paper you discuss, especially the ones with flaws that motivated your current work.
11. Be sure to frequently remind the reader that your work is relevant, but never let the reader notice you doing it.
12. Be as precise as possible. Dot every i and cross every t. Vagueness is a cardinal sin.
13. Did I mention be concise?
It's pretty amazing how quickly a writing sample can get garbled when for every statement, you have to
1. qualify exactly what assumptions you are making,
2. qualify exactly what you are concluding,
3. be very clear about what conclusions do not follow from your statement,
4. include your level of certainty if your statement involves any uncertainty at all (e.g. statistical analysis, broader interpretation of your/other people's results or discussion about future directions of research).
So yeah, there's a reason academic writing is so dense.
So sorry for the second comment but the fact that I got my BeReal notification while you were talking about BeReal made me laugh to the point of crying. Like I said before, you guys never cease make me laugh or genuinely connect with the content. Thanks guys!
This is so accurate! You've explained so well what I experienced but never really understood.
I loved writing when I was a kid, but school taught me to be afraid of attempting to write because they made it so stressful and useless. Any essay I ever submitted has only ever been read *once* - by the teacher marking it. What a waste of time. And I love sharing knowledge but school also taught me that being a teacher or academic would suck (that part about grading crappy essays!)
Omg I’m living for this video. Love how you include humor but also stay serious about these topics
Paused to say props to the blur effect on the jargon definition text. I love how it keeps me from disengaging from the video to read it, and I also love how it matches the degree to which the wall behind is naturally out of focus. It's like it actually popped up on the wall and you filmed it in real life. *chef's kiss*
At my Uni, everyone that's doing a Computer Science or Information Science degree (with some other majors too) is required to take a technical writing class where it touches on this same exact point. Very well made video!
Congratulations on receiving so much support over the years. Thank you for the amazing content.
Ive been pursuing a bachelors part time for the past 6 years or so and started experiencing burnout pretty early on. I stopped giving a shit about how I wrote papers as long as I was understanding the assignment, and my professors have been really receptive to it. I don't recommend doing this, but I wrote a big ass research thesis last semester and I got a positive mark for dropping the word "bullshit" in the middle of it lol
A pretty radical example but I guess it depends on the field and subject. I was an engineering major and even though using slang would not cut it, we were still taught to write concisely, skip jargon and specialized terminology wherever possible and be clear about what we're talking about and why. The sentences shown in the video are mortifying from my point of view, as I've never seen anything even close to this level of nonsense in any of the hundrets of papers I'd read. Goes to show that not all "acedemic writing" is meant to be useful.
I feel like this is why having students write argumentative essays is good. You have to gather information from your own research that backs up your point and your teacher and those who are peer editing your essay have to understand the point that you’re trying to get across. You have to think more about what you’re writing and how to convey it than in your traditional informative essay
I know this comment is old but I just can't help myself jump in.
Argumentative essays are great, but what's more important is making sure the student is writing about something they feel passionate about, as then they will be incentivised to write the most compelling and well-thought out response.
I cannot recall how many times, in an exam, I was asked to write an essay on Shakespeare or some other author I didn't care about, with a random thesis question provided to answer. And all of my responses were robotic and waffly because they were memorised, and had to include every exception a marker might bring up.
I enjoyed this video, and it hits on some of the primary issues in science communication and how we are taught to write. I often do wonder about the external circumstances surrounding academic writing, in the sense that in order to be successful in science, it often asks you to be a great communicator, a great scientist and a great teacher. Meeting these requirements and often having to write in English even if it is not your first language must be a circumstance of contention for the quality of your paper. Food for thought.
I know that it might be weird opinion but i have to share it. I generally liked grammar and poetry lessons (Polish subject in my country). I liked to study about literary periods (romanticism and baroque) and talking (analyzing) about various poetic texts in classes. It means that I developed some kind of interest in philology and linquistics in highschool. As a student though i didn't care so much about writing essays in school and always halfassed it only to get decent grades. I don't treat it like real writing and don't care about it after all.
"The Craft of Writing", was the single best video that improved my writing. Thanks for mentioning it.
This whole discussion is something I’ve encountered in law school. I went into law school with the benefit of having creative writing experience, so while I was not the perfect legal writer, I had a much better understanding of how to think about my words and my audience. And I’ve noticed that even though my classmates have gotten rid of some of the bad techniques of academic writing while learning legal writing, they still are terrible writers. They still infodump and can’t communicate ideas. Writing is really hard to teach and it takes a long time to get good at it. It’s so hard to unlearn those bad techniques too.
I feel school (at least mine with a few good teachers) had a good writing classes, where presenting your reasoning clearly was more important than "demonstrating knowledge". Even the high school / college entry exams measure essays like that.
With that in mind, I used to be a very good writer back then. Fast forward my master's degree dissertation (and even academic internship reports), my advisor stated I wasn't writing well enough _for academia_ . It also doesn't help my doctoral's advisor is a terrible communicator yet... he's a professor and I couldn't even finish my doctorals (for many reasons but still).
Oh man I needed this. Engineering turned me into a terrible writer, I hate how “bad” I am at writing things for work 😅
5:43 THANK YOU!!! You've perfectly summarized why I'm totally happy to spend hours composing a comment/post to answer someone's question online but I can't stand writing a basic 2-page essay for a class
This explains my experience so well! At my high school, we were asked our opinions then told to back them up. This approach shows thought about the topic while also teaching you to communicate a new idea. That's why I feel comfortable writing in non-academic settings compared to my college friends.