How to write consistently boring scientific literature

From AcaWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Citation: Kaj Sand-Jensen How to write consistently boring scientific literature.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): How to write consistently boring scientific literature
Download: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0030-1299.2007.15674.x/pdf
Tagged:

Summary

How to write consistently boring scientific literature by Kaj Sand-Jensen (2007) (or, the tyranny of technical texts in ten simple principles)

Why do academics feel the need to make their style of writing so obtuse, verbose, unnecessarily elaborate, and lacking in any humor and wit? Because #academia. Why should articles be standardized into such a boring style? This article, by way of irony, sarcasm, wit and humor, creates a “what not to-do, to-do list”. Sand-Jensens' ten principles are summarized below:

1. Avoid focus- confusing your audience is the best way to hide novel ideas and disguise brilliance. 2. Avoid originality and personality - you’re a scientist, damnit, not a reality star. You are supposed to have lackluster ideas and a dull personality. Also, make sure to avoid putting too much detail into your methods sections, replicability of experiments is guaranteed to result in innovation and progress. 3. Write l o n g contributions- Exciting research deserves tomes, not haikus. Put those ten syllable long GRE words to good use. 4. Remove most implications and every speculation - you don’t want to point out possible explanations, alternative questions, and gaps in the data. Exploring avenues of new research is not what science is about. Creating the opportunities for collaboration is a bad idea. 5. Leave out illustrations, particularly good ones - A picture can say a thousand words, but efficiency is not the name of the game. See number 3 re word count and number 1 re focus. 6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning - Breaks in logic are crucial if we are to prevent the mass public from understanding the scientific method. Straw-mans, red herrings, and other means of generating fallacious arguments are also excellent tactics towards this end. 7. Use many abbreviations and technical terms - Technical terms, field-specific shorthand, and acronyms will make or break a paper. Be sure to include lots and take care not to define them until at least midway through the conclusion of the paper. 8. Suppress humor and flowery language - Science is not fun. Writing about science should be even less fun. 9. Degrade species and biology to statistical elements - Those in the hard sciences should deal solely in numbers. And data modeling. Lots of modeling. 10. Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements - Cite everything. The strategic use of references is an insider secret that allows scientists to generate multi-page articles with no substance. Best when used in conjunction with principles 1 and 3 (above, section X, see appendix I, ibid, unnecessary references, etc).

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

How is this relevant to scholars, both emerging and established? It has become increasingly apparent that the sciences must make itself relevant to the community that it studies. It is difficult to attract new scholars and generate public interest in science when said audiences are alienated from the research because the data is presented in a tedious and inaccessible fashion.