/sci/ - Science & Math

>>12281761
>>12285364
I know that this is bait, but I'll bite anyway. People who actually study the humanities (e.g. the people who originally wrote the critiques this poster is mocking) never advocate for pidgin english. The positions I ran into during my "Race, Class, and Writing" seminar were:

>Peer reviewers often fail to comment on obtuse style and overuse of jargon. But these are flaws that can make writing unclear. So, peer reviewers should comment on them during the review process. This would encourage academics to publish articles that the public can engage with more easily.

>There are statistical techniques to show roughly how hard something is to read. Authors should use these techniques, and take their results into account, as they revise their work. Those that do show measurable improvement as writers, and report greater satisfaction with the end result.

>Poor people (and minorities) are less likely to have access to academic work due to paywalls. In addition, they tend to have smaller vocabularies due to lack of access to education. This restricts what they can know, since cutting-edge knowledge is expressed in subscription-only journals with difficult language.

>Publishing work in simple language on free-to-access sites like arxiv.org helps lower the above barriers to entry. Some academics like sniffing their own farts, and resist this solution because it keeps them from feeling superior to non-academics.

>Pop-sci and mainstream news coverage of academic work is often misleading or wrong. This gives ordinary people a false impression of what PhDs are up to, and often leads to widespread misunderstanding of entire fields of study. It's better to have an expert engage directly with the public, when possible, since experts are less likely to misunderstand work in their field.

>Basically, academics should interact with normal people more often.

I dare anyone to argue against this.