Like most young overenthusiastic naive academics, my first academic paper was rejected.
It was a good paper (I thought), it covered the work well and was an important set of results to share with the wider community… the key components of an academic paper. Astonishingly, the reviewers actually agreed on all of those points, which I would have thought was enough to get my paper published (see note about being naive). However, of my two reviewers, one marked it “not suitable for publication” which torpedoed the paper. The reason they gave was:
“This paper is too descriptively written and lacks the academic complexity I’d expect”
So my science was good, the results were great, but it can’t be published because it’s too easy to read? Yikes, what a start to the world of academic paper writing… and some amazing foreshadowing of a side career in science communication.
It’s also a strange admissions from the reviewer that readability is not something they expect, nor I assume, something they work towards. I’ve read a lot of academic papers and I can absolutely see that writing in a way that is readable was probably quite far down most authors priorities list which is a shame as I think that an academic paper writing style should be readable (crazy stuff).
When it comes to writing style a paper should be two things, precise and clear. It is sometimes a misconception too much of the second weakens the first. In reality, both are equally important, and all too much people shy away from the clarity to avoid it exposing their weakness in the precision.
The trick is finding a balance between the two.
As anyone teaching academic writing will tell you that you need to understand your audience. Academic papers are for a similarly skilled peer-audience and should be written as such. But, writing for someone similarly skilled does not mean that it should be overly complex, or filled with needlessly impenetrable language aimed at making it vociferously difficult to cognitively assimilate the conceptual core of.
Some complex language is unavoidable and important, particularly for scientific terms. However, the language you use around those terms doesn’t need to feel like you stapled a thesaurus to your paper. The general complexity of scientific terms if anything demands simpler wording around it to allow it any hope of making a jot of sense to anyone.
Thanks to imposter syndrome, we are all prone to believing that all of our peer-audience are secret super genius that will soon discover that we are in fact a dumb dumb. However, in reality we’re all dumb dumbs in our own very particular ways and often need a lot more help understanding stuff than we ever want to admit. So the best place to start is that your audience are probably just like you and would be quite happy with a little extra explanation, and it’s okay to give it to them.
I am being precise in my wording here, extra explanation, not simplified.
You don’t want to avoid using scientific terms, as they are often highly specific and exist for an important reason. Simplifying your explanations is likely to end up removing information that may be key to repeating or properly analysing your work. Instead, focus on using 5-6 extra words to add additional explanation or context to that term can make your paper far more readable.
I will forever consider my first rejection a badge of honour. I’m very pleased to have started at with my academic papers being too focused on description and clarity. As a young academic, I took one look at that feedback and decided that was absolutely the kind of academic I wanted to be.
