My high school science classes taught the "an experiment was conducted..." passive style of lab report writing as mandatory for science writing. That, and the idea of long, clause ridden, sentences. It wasn't until 20 years later when I went into industry that I realized how bad "traditional" scientific writing is. Clear, short sentences. Active voice. No flowery or euphemistic language. All make things so much more readable. But I think many of us were raised to associate simple writing with simple ideas, and taught we had to write things that only smart peopl could understand. I'm happy to see science writing trying to be more readable.
I find that clear and simple writing correlates with high quality work on the technical level. Especially at the top of the respective field.
For example in AI if you read the papers coming from the best labs the writing tends to be on the point, short sentences, almost informal-sounding, actually someone telling you what and why they did and what they found. Not merely conforming to arbitrary rules set up by bitter mediocre "scholars".
But yes, people who are afraid they have nothing to say try to hide it behind long sentences with incomprehensible nested structures and overjargonized vocabulary. Plus equations that are designed to impress rather than enlighten.
> Plus equations that are designed to impress rather than enlighten.
Interesting, I don't think I've seen any discussion before about clear, unpretentious presentation of math. I'll have to consciously evaluate this better as I read papers.
Personally I think mathematical clarity is tougher to evaluate because I would not be confident enough to always know if it's the author or just me.
That sounds like a good indication that the math you are thinking of was written to impress, rather than enlighten, you as a reader. I've seen far too much of that stuff in computer science papers, where dense math seems to be used defensively, rather than to bring clarity.
Yes, I hate it when they handwave over the tough core issues but then flesh out in detailed notation things that are unambiguous even in words, just to be able to define some Greek letter notations, which are then hardly ever referred to again in later parts of the paper.
Unnecessary equations often mean "this is totally a serious, rigorous paper, we do admirable and hard technical work here and deserve respect!".
IMO there's a good reason for passive voice in scientific literature: It's (literally) less subjective and creates some distance between the reader and the matter of investigation, which I personally find very useful. Besides, it's also often unclear who personal pronouns refer to in the first place. I have stopped counting the times I've seen single-author papers with phrases like
> We investigated X
(Who's we?)
and
> From equation (1.2.3) we see that,
(Who is "we"? The author? The author and other readers who are smarter than me? It cannot possibly be "the author and I" because I don't "see that" at all.)
It's just a stylistic tradition in academic papers, similar to the royal "we". It's just a shorthand for "an author, or a group of authors, or the whole team/organization behind the research presented in this paper". You may think it's weird, but all traditions are weird when you think about it too much.
Also, your second "we" isn't even that, I think that's just good old-fashioned generic pronoun (because English normally doesn't allow a sentence without a subject). Basically the same as in sentences like:
> In Elbonia you are not allowed to drive after dark.
> Also, your second "we" isn't even that, I think that's just good old-fashioned generic pronoun (because English normally doesn't allow a sentence without a subject).
I don’t think I’ve ever seen “we” used as an indefinite pronoun. It’s usually “one”, “you”, or “they”, depending on formality and context.
In this context, it seems obvious to me that it stands for the author(s) and the reader, in a (maybe misguided) attempt to reduce the distance between them and involve the reader in the narrative.
> in a (maybe misguided) attempt to reduce the distance between them and involve the reader in the narrative
Thank you for putting it so succinctly, this is exactly what I meant to say: When I'm reading a scientific paper, I don't want to be involved in the narrative. Don't speak to me; let the facts speak for themselves.
This would be easy to do in active voice. I could write "I did this, and I was wondering why that anomaly turned up, so I did yadda yadda" without ever involving a "you".
> (Who is "we"? The author? The author and other readers who are smarter than me? It cannot possibly be "the author and I" because I don't "see that" at all.)
I would tend to prefer “we can see” (or “we can deduce”, or something to that effect) rather than “we see”. In the first case, it’s a statement that it is possible for you to see it too, if you think about it for a while. As you say, the latter is a statement of fact that is often wrong and can come across as condescending.
Not everyone in science is a native speaker of English. In many languages it makes no sense to say "can see", seeing implies the ability. Similarly with "can hear". In fact, as a Hungarian native speaker it was very weird to me when my English teacher insisted I insert "can"s before hear and see in my writing.
What do you mean you "can hear" the loud music coming from the neighbor's flat? Do you in fact hear it or do you just have the ability to hear it and can also switch it off or something? It's a quirk of English that I just had to memorize.
This is a good point. I have been guilty of using "we" when I carried out the experiment entirely alone. I suppose it's a lie intended to increase credibility, but I never really thought about it before.
