Proposal of the day: anyone writing a thesis, proposal or description of their scientific work should first be made to stare at a large sign that goes something like this:
“We are tired of having to work out whether there’s any actual thinking going on inside the nozzle producing these fountains of pompous words. Stop trying to sound clever and just say what needs to be said as clearly and simply as possible. We can see through you.
@helenczerski The thing is: If the funding authority gives me guidelines to describe work packages in a proposal with one sentence per person month I can't just write "We'll implement and test that. This is a huge task and it will probably take six months", I have to produce fountains of pompous words. It is not entirely the scientists' fault.
@helenczerski my MSc thesis was originally around 25-30 pages. My supervisor suggested I make it longer, not to increase information, but to avoid reviewers saying it was too short.
Concise writing is hard and is something that needs more love.
@helenczerski My father (who was also my high school English teacher - it was a small town) once told me that what I was trying to say wasn't deeper than what was in the American Declaration of Independence, the Sermon on the Mount, or any of Orwell's essays, so if they could find a way to express themselves simply and clearly, so could I.
@helenczerski English being my second language, I was always intimidated by the people, usually males (sorry but true) using vocabulary I didn’t know. When I got to grad school and started meticulously looking up words and writing them in the margins, I realized most of these people didn’t know the meanings or concepts either, but they used the words anyway. The spell was broken.
@helenczerski sadly, I've worked with too many managers who think that sort of writing adds an air of scientific gravitas to dismiss it outright.
I'm reminded of the Kurt Vonnegut anecdote where he got a job in a newspaper and his first story was about a house race. After some deliberation, he wrote "the horse jumped over the fence" and quit on the spot.
@helenczerski the first thing my GCSE physics teacher taught the class was the dictionary definition of sussinct and he made sure it was on the front page of our notebooks. I'm eternally grateful to him.
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