Dear Marcel,

I share your observation and scepticism about complex language and thoughts. Sometimes I have an impression, that demonstrated complexity just shall hide the real intellectual emptiness of the presented utterances.

I prefer short and clear statements when ever this is possible.

Part of the truth in this. Not always a solution can only be found using sophisticated reasoning. Sometimes simple reasoning may also be useful. But making a higher formalization of science, we thus develop it, find new solutions, opening new areas of knowledge.

My personal opinion is that there should be a judgement somehow whether the proposed intellectual complexity is truly necessary or not? This necessity for intellectual complexity can be judged by supervisors, referees, editors.....

Dear Marcel,

I share your observation and scepticism about complex language and thoughts. Sometimes I have an impression, that demonstrated complexity just shall hide the real intellectual emptiness of the presented utterances.

I prefer short and clear statements when ever this is possible.

Dear Hanno,

I share the same impressions

I think that complex and complicated tools can/should be used to simplify scientific results. Making things look easy and simple is a sign that the researcher is a master in the field.

Dear Abedallah,

complex and complicated tools don´t need complex and complicated language. They need thorough and detailed analysis and thinking.

And the use of "complicated" results in our normal daily routine is well established. Just remenber your satellite watch or your GPS.

Using field specific terminology can be helpful in the special field you research in. Try to talk about mathematics or medicine. The special jargon facilitates the inter-colleagues-communication. But at the moment, you enlarge the audience circle, you have to translate into a compact and pregnant argumentation and speech.

Otherwise you provoke yawning and disinterest.

Sometimes this may be caused by the journal's style and the author(s)' wish to follow that style to get accepted to that journal, and sometimes by the author(s)' insecurity (e.g. in case of younger researchers) and/or wish to seem more sophisticated.

Writers make things complex to be more esoteric. Esoteric writing appears to be rigorous. Nevertheless, seminal papers in scientific fields are less complex in many cases but are directly related to a breakthrough the most people can understand and to which they can relate. Good science does not have to be complex to contribute greatly.

Dear @Hanno, you are right; a researcher does not need to use complicated language in his research. In Mathematics,  complicated approaches are needed to prove some mathematical results and it is very important to simplify the scientific results.

Dear Marcel,

You were very polite! I would say using unnecessary overcomplicated expressions and often methodology. This is a multisided question.

Some journals (editors) prefer the use of the most sophisticated methodology even if there are much simpler opportunities and so force authors to employ the most modern methods. There is a false picture in many people even in many scientists that the real science should (must) be a very complicated phenomenon and real scientists use very complex and expensive appliances. A real scientist wears glasses and a dazzling white coat with a tie and sits in front of a glistening gauge as big as an instrument panel of an aeroplane. Many think that the knowledge and development of a scientific field or a person depend on the expensiveness and charges of its/his investigations.

This picture lives in many young people’s mind when they think reflecting can be substituted with complicated methodology.

Thus there is a force by the side of editors and a desire to live up to mythical and “reliable” expectations. And I have not even mentioned the expectations to get the highest grants.

There is also a “superficial”, language and style problem. Some scientists like to express themselves very complicatedly using always passive voice and nominative constructions. I note this is language dependent! I note here that some excellent stylists like Kurt Tucholsky and Geoge Orwell showed that the simplest expressions and language structures and possibly active voice should be used.

Here I stress that the impoverishment and stereotype or cliché like scientific style can be the consequence of this exaggerated mode of expression.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Is_there_a_individual_style_in_scientific_writing?_tpcectx=profile_questions

Dear Abedallah,

What I have written on style and expressions does not concern mathematics which has its own language and most of the scientists of other fields are weak in it.

The most prodigious catalyst in the obfuscation of communicative parlance is language.

It is in the author's interest to make the explanation less complex, as then  her/his work would be read by larger number of people. It is rightly said that only a great expert can explain things concisely and in simple language. But I believe, the trend today is more towards simplicity. .

Dear Marcel,

I think the more you solve the research problem in an easy and direct way, the more you are a good researcher. That will make your study clear and Understandable, which will increase the opportunity to use your research as a base for the next studies.

I fully agree with all your constructive remarks!

There is approach called "clinical problem solving" in medical sciences and health sciences. This make short cut in unnecessary, too complex solutions.

Dear Marcel, do you mean PhD thesis publication? In many case such thesis one can find in the google scholar as citation. Or you mena publications in the regular peer-reviewd journal? 

The quality of the PhD thesis is dependent from the tutor, who must at least critically read student text and make corrections towards simple explanations and excellent language.

In the case of the regular journal the responsible person of the quality of the paper is an editor (or referees), but in this case tutor (in most case as co-author of the paper) should also make a contribution to the quality of the publications. .

Dear Taras,

I do not say that a publication from a PhD thesis is of lower quality. I just want to say that the education system may impose more complex approaches to test/educate students, which is then reflected in publications that result from such an education system. 

The failure in this is being classist. We expect people to know all these ideas and terms, even when these are new or difficult concepts for people that are even in our field. We need to take better care in explaining these things, so a foundation is laid before elaborating.

"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan." -- Kurt Vonnegut

Dear @Andras, you are right that Mathematics has its own language and, therefore, it has a unique case in research.

Yes indeed dears, simplifying things and making them look easy  is a sign that the researcher is a master in the field.

@Marcel: Your original question is reasonable to some extend. However, we all realize that nature is complex and hence there is a need to describe complex issues with reference to known facts. This is always incremental in nature during literature creation. Literature pass information to the next generation in human history. Scientific papers in the 70's used simple language. Nonetheless, the status-co changes over time.

Dear Marcel, I agree with you, quality of PhD thesis is dependent from the University/tutor/project. In many case even PhD thesis have a very good quality. But anyway, this is a specific type of the publications. 

Dear @Marcel, a very good question. The importance of the  scientific publications from PhD work is, in general,  in the born of a new researcher.

This might depend on weather writers are talking to each other, a lot of debate in non scientific fields centres around language, the definition of terms and having an understanding of a sometimes deliberately esoteric vocabulary. The other point is weather the research has some intended application. There is a debate in Evidence Based Medicine about the presentation of research to practitioners and patients in away that can be easily and speedily absorbed. Cochrane Reviews and other tools in

Evidenced Based Medicine reviews contain a Plain Language Summary. It could be argued that this should be inherent in the presentation of research, without being an add on.

Dear Jeanan,

What you have written is right and true but only at the level of reflecting and finding the most suitable solutions however expression of thoughts is determined by many collateral facts and beliefs as I listed above in my comment.

Dear Debi,

Agree, it is in the author's interest to make the explanation less complex but it is not the author who approves the text and determines the style of a paper in a journal.

Intellectual complexity is often a substitute for thorough investigative work.  Some authors believe that by introducing complexity, which is often superfluous that they will be taken more seriously.  

A concerted effort to introduce plain language into the law has had a good deal of success.  The removal of jargon and unnecessary codes often indicates how simple some otherwise perceived concepts can be.

There will always be a need for scientific and legal taxonomy/nomenclature but using it for its own sake interferes with understanding rather than intellectualises it.

Dear Barry/All,

Perhaps jargon or terminology tags from science might be placed in an evolutionary framework? What do you think?

Terminology tags: influences of sexual selection?

Scientist use terminology apparently disconnected from research topic handled, such as red or white noise, etc.

+Do these bizarre terminologies simply function as communication tags or codes to better identify study topics shared among highly specialized people?

For instance, people that do not understand these tags or codes do not belong to the highly specialized group, or are excluded from an intellectual point of view.

+ Are these tags or codes invented to impress without additive value from a scientific or education point of view?

+ Are these tags or codes language symbols summarizing concepts that can more easily be memorized?

+ Do these tags or codes help to create communication novelty among the impressive list of existing terminology?

Is it possible that the language contributes to the complexity? I mean, in some languages – maybe French and German - the manners and customs as they are make it become more likely that a text is a little bit more complex than a text in another language. German sentences are often longer than English sentences. My second sentence here might be a bit too long or too much nested for a “good” English sentence. (Apart from possible mistakes).

Dear Martin,

Yes, I think manners and customs are important. Scientific articles written in French or German probably contain much longer sentences than scientific articles written in English. One of the historical reasons might be that more complex languages were historically symbols of intellectual power. But as many agree, simpler/shorter messages are perhaps more attractive than more complex/longer messages to a wider audience/public.  Perhaps this is one of the reasons why across cultures/countries English has/had more success in a science framework than more complex languages.

An interesting question .... I believe every means to disseminate scientific results present their level of complexity.

Is science a tool to make promotion for culture or a tool to better understand the functioning of the world/universe?

Science is for society and not for self. This is the reason for spending tax payers money for scientific advancement across nations. The new paradigm is to engage all sections of the society in science based application to the benefit of society. This is because there is an increased interest in science across communities. The complexity in literature if any, is a reflection of the community and the society at large. Therefore, it is forward moving and positive in nature in global democracies.  Nonetheless, simplicity is the secret of science.

Each scientist will starts her/his career as a citizen to become scientist. Scientific publications should also be intellectually accessible to beginning students. Simplicity in communication will favor this accessibility to beginning students (= citizens). 

Any scientist has responsibilities as citizen. Should the content of scientific publications be made intellectually more accessible to citizens, e.g. through the use of more simplified language ignoring complicated jargon?

Using inaccessible language is a mechanism of exclusivity rather than communication.  Having trained in a world where Ex Turpi Causa, Volenti non fit Injuria and Ingoratio Judex non Excusat were still in the text books I can say I was thrilled when this was all but banned by the Civil Procedure Rules requiring legal arguments to be in plain English.  

When discussing science I still find myself using odd terms like up-regulated and down-regulated and in law often still describe claimants as plaintiffs.  There is still some necessity to use a taxonomy and nomenclature in specialist areas but never an excuse to use language that quite often is confusing even for fellow scientists.  

Speak in plain language, we are in the business of communicating.  If you want to talk in code join a secret society.

Dear José,

one typical occasion to enlarge the audience circle is to sell your scientific products politically. Here you know, why I talk about translation in understandable speech.

Another case is the work in an interdisciplinary working groups, as example combined from medicine, physics, chemistry, biology and law.

You must "translate", telling the really important facts without provoking yawning and my beloved pancake faces.

Why waiting for a project, a political text, a text for citizens (vulgarization) or a text for an interdisciplinary group to make science language more simple? Perhaps increased science language in scientific publications creates job at other levels of communication (vulgarization, journalism....), but do the citizens that are involved in vulgarization/journalism always understand the details of complicated science language?   

I think presentation of a scientific result need not to be complex all the time until if it is a demand of the problem. It may be true that students thesis may come up with complexity...

If a jury reads a thesis A in complicated language using complicated techniques to come up with final solution A and a thesis B in simple language using simple techniques to come up with final solution A, who will get the highest score?

Dear José and Marcel,

you are both right. If you aim to dissemination you must use short phrases,without any  inflated explanations. If you are discussing with collegues of your own field, it would be wasted time to explain and explain. Here you should use scientific stenography without any trivial explanations, because your audience knows them already. You see, Josés lightly modified phrase meets:

"it depends on how they are the members of the committee"

Interesting and enriching debate about hte use of language for scientific publications. I have recently attended a seminar in England and learned (for the first time) about something called "the FOG index". According to the proponents of this concept, for academic writing this index should range between 18 and 25, thus reflecting an increasing complexity of the scientific language used. 

What I found paradoxical is that, if you attempt to read a piece of academic work with a FOG index of 22, you will find it incomprehensible! yet some academics use it?

Is there a relationship between the FOG index and variables like the PhD student is first author or not? Is there a relationship between the FOG index and variables like citation indexes? Etc....

Dear José,I am not recommending the use of the FOG index.!

Dear Marcel, usually the first author is a people who made majority of the experimental work (in experimental science). In some paper you also can find a notification about equal contribution of 2 people. 

In addition, one should also consider this type of journal: http://www.labtimes.org/

Such journals is mainly for general understanding of scientific discoveries, and rather for wide range auditory.

Dear Taras,

thank you for indicating the www.labtimes.org to expose general understanding of scientific discoveries. This is also done in national research organisations (e.g. CNRS, Max-Planck).   

Concerning your first sentence:

The first author might do the majority of the experimental work, but then there is the writing process using more or less unnecessary intellectual complexity depending on who is involved in writing.

There are articles with one author, but there are also articles with more than 100 authors. Is unnecessary intellectual complexity related to the number of authors/co-authors involved? Perhaps this could be investigated with the FOG index?

Maybe you will find the "Flesch test for readability" interesting:

http://www.readabilityformulas.com/flesch-reading-ease-readability-formula.php

I have no regard niunguna opinion, apologies in advance, thanks.

Perhaps the flesh test might be added to software packages like 'Word' to guide authors in writing.

Marcel,

excellent idea! With no extra charge...

Secondary literature is often said to be more complex. Somebody once said that the most complex texts in history are Bible commentaries. I guess comments of the Koran are not much easier. They will have to combine at least two texts, maybe more than two - when other literature has to be incorporated as well. What should one do instead? Footnotes won’t make it better.

Dear Martin,

The fact that secondary literature is more complex also implies that the primary literature was sufficiently complex to allow several interpretations that resulted in numerous more complex discussions, or not?   

Marcel,

simply said, that's smart!

Dear Marcel,

When I think about it again, I am not so sure anymore that only complex texts receive complex interpretations.

Hi Martin,

why? So you think that very simple/short texts can result in complex interpretations because they provide less details?

Perhaps one sentence can be interpreted in several ways depending on background knowledge available? 

Not because they provide less details, but because there are more implications. Take Goethes

“Das Unzulängliche. Hier wird’s Ereignis.“

(Faust II)

In „normal German“ that would be something that is not quite well done (a permanent joke for pupils). But here it means infinity. “Ereignis” is also to be explained in a special way. In order to know all this there is a lot of things to be told about the history of language, life and times of Goethe and so on.

Sentences differ in words, number of words and order of words. Words themselves may allow different interpretations (see Dictionary) 

I'm not convinced that complex texts are the way they are soley because they have to express a complex idea. I work with a lot of medical writers. I remind them that they need to think about what they want to say to their reader. Then write the text in a way that your idea is understood, not in a way that merely tells the reader you have a grand vocabulary and a mastery of grammar and syntax.

When I was in graduate school, a professor told about a scholar (I cannot remember who it was) who said it seemed like some authors used big words and complex sentence structures to conceal the fact that they really had little to say.  The source called it "mouth-talking."

In my field, I remind authors that physicians have limited time to spend reading, and that if an article is difficult to read, it won't get read. If you think what you have to say is important, losing your audience should be the last thing you'd want to do.

@Thomas,

I completely agree with your observation . Your " mouth-talking" reminds me at my favorite expression "bubble speech", big colored outside, empty inside, and if you touch it (of course scientifically) , it collapses.

Thus if you accept that readers have to handle/read many articles, be kind and be simple with writing not to exhaust readers before they have to start to read a new article? Community-based writing?

I suspect there are different reasons for reading long versus short papers. For journal articles, a common approach is to:

Scan titles.

Check abstracts of titles thought relevant to clinical practice.

If article has potential interest, i.e. might change clinical approach, scan conclusions or discussion.

Read introduction and rest of article based on above, i.e. if it might change clinical approach, look seriously at the rationale, the methodology and the results.

The longer articles, or books, would more likely be read by researchers or scholars in the field, or by those studying the discipline. Or they may become reference sources. But these would not be my choice for updating a physician's skill sets.

I also like journal articles that focus on a limited number of key issues. You don't need to answer all relevant or important questions in a single article. Doing so might dilute the impact. It may be easier to learn and retain one or two important points than to learn and retain ten.  

I am also an anthropologist, and while not so active in that field as in the past, I recognize there are fewer journals, and they often have comprehensive reports. These reports are often for reference, and share information on relevant research among active scholars. Also, it is not unusual for archaeolgical projects to span years, and to have published reports significantly delayed. My research from 1978 was published in 2012.

In psychiatry there are over 350 journals worldwide, and though most may not be relevant to the research area I am in, there are still a significant number. And each issue may have a couple of dozen articles. This is different than the journal of the Society of American Archaeology (American Antiquity) with 10 articles in its current quarterly issue, and 12 in the previous issue.

But then the disciplines are different. There are a limited number of archaeologists out there compared to physicians, and many of the archaeologists are actively engaged in research, whereas most physicians are in clinical practice. So the reading needs would differ substantially.

But irrespective of the number of journals or length of articles, I would still argue for the concept of clear, concise language that shows the author was considerate of the task facing the reader in understanding the article. It was an anthropological scholar that was referenced above criticizing colleagues for "mouth-talking."

Dear Martin Schulz,

I read somewhere (or heard, I do not remember exactly where it was) a phrase which is very likely belongs to Goethe:

Step 1.  First, we write long and poorly

Step 2.  Then we write long and well

Step 3.  Then we write short and poorly

Step 4.  Finally, we write short and well

I absolutely agree with this phrase. There are huge distance between Step 1 and Step 4. Meaning of the text for Step 1 and Step 4 are approximately the same, but Size(Step 1) may be many times more than Size(Step 4).

As example, Albert Einstein could not explain his Special Theory of Relativity clearly and understandably, but Hermann Minkowski can explain this theory clearly and understandably. The other example can be a well-known physicist L.D. Landau, Nobel Prize Winner, which can not write his handbooks on Theoretical Physics clearly and understandably. Nonetheless these famous books were written in collaboration with his friend and colleague E.M. Lifshitc which was not a well-known physicist, but he had the talent of writing texts clearly and understandably. Landau discussed with Lifshitc a topic "what write about" and then Lifshitc presented written texts. Thus, Landau was a brilliant scientist but Lifshitc was a brilliant lector.

A good reduction of complexity is our everyday language. Sometimes we have to “unzip” it.

How can we explain the meaning of the word “great-grandparents” to a child?

We can always point to an old photo. But we would not be happy when the child points to any old photo when being asked afterwards. The background of any explanation will be some logical form. I guess we will need three pairs of brackets for the great-grandparents. But we do not have to make them explicit. The less we do, the longer the explanation will be. We have the choice:

Very long explanation: boring

Short explanation: irritating

Very short explanation: upsetting.

What’s fascinating: The degree of complexity may be the same in all three cases.

Person A has mental world AM in mind and wished to describe it with words. Because written texts cannot capture the details of mental world AM, the texts given a biased version, so world AM is described as world AW. Person B reads the text about world AW and forms a mental world BM, person C reads the text about world AW and forms a mental world CM, etc.....

It might not be difficult to tell a child,

Mother: "do you know who your grandmas and grandpas are? They are my mommy and daddy and your daddy's ninny and daddy. Well I also have a grandma and grandpa. So does your dady. These are your great-grandmas and great grandpas. My grandmas are your great grandmas."

Later step parents might be described. Now if you want complex, your going to need to get into 2nd/ 3rd/etc. cousins once/twice/etc. removed. I give up on that. Even Einstein had difficulty explaining relativity.

Dear José Antonio,

You got what I mean. Even when we want to be short, we still have to stress some features against some other features.

There is a nice example with a rabbit running past. An old aborigine (in the broader sense of aborigine) says “Gavagai”. When you do not understand the language of the aborigine, you will never be sure if he meant the rabbit, a part of the rabbit, the running of the rabbit, “a lot of rabbits here” or anything else.

So it is possible that the child understands that some features of the photo are decisive, but not which features.

Look at these great-grandparents of y. Aren’t they lovely?

(  or  of (  or  of (  or  ))) of y.

I found them in a very old book, of course…

Person A has mental world AM in mind and wished to describe it with words. Because written texts cannot capture the details of mental world AM, the texts will give a biased version, so world AM will be described as world AW. Person B reads the text about world AW and forms a mental world BM based on an interaction between what is read and what has been memorized in the past (e.g. because of education environment B), person C reads the text about world AW and forms a mental world CM based on an interaction between what is read and what has been memorized in the past (e.g. because of education environment C), etc.....

How can people increase mental matches between mental world AM, mental world BM, and mental world CM using a written text as current education environment and memorized information from past education environments? One approach might be to better match the education environments across people (e.g. Martin's lexicon to reach consensus about terminology used)?

Were children, parents, grand-parents, grand-grand parents exposed to the same education environment? No. But children can memorize photos/images of grand-grand parents and compare them with other old photos/images to look for matches/mismatches. No written texts involved, but perhaps a couple of oral sentences helping to better memorize who the grand-grand parents were...

The complications only need to be explained when the child is old enough to understand. If the child has a "step"- grandfather, there is a time when he/she is ready to learn, "grandma used to be married to your other grandpa" or "my dad died and your grandma later remarried, and now he is your grandpa." That's what I mean about joural articles being generally limited to explaining only a couple of concepts. Once the reader understands those, the next article may expand on that knowledge. Similar with children--build on little steps of information. Answer questions they ask, of course, but aim to build on that.

So too with "Gavagai." when language is learned at first, not all of the subtleties are understood. Sure, some people never learn the correct usage of "por" and "pero" in Spanish. The person learning the aborigal language should eventually come to understand. The Gavagai site explains how infants learn language, and it is an incremental process, through repetition and context. Adults have a harder time with those processes, hence they learn new languages with more difficulty. They have to associate the new word with one in their own language, if there is a cognate.

For a young child seeing the old photo, perhaps a first explanation could be, "He is my daddy's grandpa." If another great-grandparent is living, it is easy to say, "That's great-gramma. She's gramma'smother, so you would call her great-grandma."

Dear Martin/José/Thomas.All,

your reactions let me think again.

Concerning the rabbit story, I created a similar situation with my son a while ago. I showed him my hand and asked him, what do you see?  Because my question was not precise enough, I could always say he was right or wrong. If he answered 'hand', I could have said 'finger', 'nail', 'skin', etc.. .

True, and a lot would depend on what was meaningful to the person writing the text. Their purpose in composing text may have nothing to do with what assumptions we make on reading it. And our attempts at a complex explanation could be way off base. But if we know who the person is that the child points to, we don't need to know the context of the writer--all we need to say is, That person is you daddy's grandpa." The child may not have an adequate understanding of the photo's context to be able to grasp any more of an explanation.

Say that you respond, that is a picture taken of your great-grandpa when he was a soldier in WWII." Now you have to explain what a soldier is, what war is, what WWI was, and perhaps even where the picture was taken. All this would perhaps be meaningless to the child. If it's teenager, then the full explanation may readily be understood. If the information on the photo is too complex for the mother to understand, then any explanation to the teenager may be problematic--if it conveys misinformation based on the reader's lack of understanding of the writer's intent. 

Dear all,

I wished you could see the little picture in my hand. My great-grandma! – Now I turn my hand.

What do you see? – I will tell you in my next post.

MM = Medium Martin

Dear José Antonio,

I fully agree.

José Antonio,

I also have a related question running on RG:  Do we actually need (or understand) more than basic statistics for routine investigation?  Of course, there are times when complex issues require complex reasoning & expression, but I also feel that we are often encouraged to be overly complex, with the assumption we are being clever  ;-)

Some have argued against my position, but it goes something like this:

Most PhD work is littered with statistical markers (SD, ANOVA, p=, N=, two-tailed lesser-spotted thingamajig), but they often refer to simple relationships, that may be better understood (& evaluated) if they were written in plain language. Anything above basic statistics has a specific use (a bit like the need to speak Latin, programme in Python, perform extraordinary feats of mental maths etc.). So why all this emphasis on being a statistical genius & how many of us (beyond those with the job title 'Statistician') are genuinely conversant with the field ? Is statistics used like a badge of 'cleverness' ? I only use Latin for established phrases, I use a calculator for clever maths, I prefer percentages and plain words to explain how variables relate to each other & I use SPSS to do the clever statistics thing (if I don't do percentages on a calculator). Despite what is claimed not all fields are actually 'scientific' and I think that the output of our research should be designed for clarity and usability. In my experience, the over use of statistics does not promote this outside of genuine hard science. Am I 'worthy' of being in the Ivory Tower? Can anyone share articles which explore how the average person understands (or wants) heavy statistics and if plain language could demonstrate a point more clearly?

Excellent points, Jose. It is important to know the audience, and use vocabulary appropriate to the audience. And you are also correct--it is not the jargon that obfuscates. It is unnecessarily complex sentence structure and the vacuous, I might even say pretentious, word choice.

It can, indeed, hide ignorance on the subject, but can also creep in innocently. If we take care to let a peice of writing sit for a few days, and then reread it, we may be able to see it from the reader's perspective. I find that professional editors in the medical field can be afraid to rewrite/rephrase or even reorganize an manuscript. I suspect some authors sit at their keyboard, typing out their thoughts--but never go back to see how it reads. I'm not afraid. Though I may not have the knowledge or expertise soem of my authors have, I do have subject matter expertise and enough experience to know that I  can't understand what they are writing, then it's likely the general reader will also have difficulty.

Nicholas, I understand and agree. I have had statisticians tell me that they do not like physicians "practicing statistics" any more than we would want them to practice medicine. But if the statistics are reported in a scientific journal, they need to be reported in a way the reader can understand and accept their validity and their implications. And many basic statistical applications are well suited for the research scientist to use.

Sophisticated and complex style in publication or scientific methods does not assure the right solution for subject problem/ case. Reality is simple when solution is desired. Innovation is the idea to get the most out of the resource investment and getting the fruitful outcome with little complexity.

Agreed that statistics is a different thing from language, but it is also a means by which we express things in scientific writing. With overly complicated references to these statistics (instead of a clear interpretation of what they mean & how they relate to the issue at hand), I would say that this form of expression can also make an otherwise interesting publication, unnecessarily intellectually complex (however 'clever' the author or reader may be).

Thank you very much for all your constructive 'easy to understand' remarks.

I also think that statistics is not always needed in a scientific publication. You can expose a table with numbers/frequencies in a publication, you can describe the content of the table without presented results of statistical analyses, and you can led the reader decide how to interpret/analyse the data presented in the table the writer described/discussed.  

I am an editor for a systems thinking journal. While APA format is required, we prefer that authors use the simplest words they can and still ensure scientific integrity. It is not just specialists in an area who access articles in a field. Today, there is more crossover and integration between specialties and different fields of study. Simplicity can help.

Dear Marcel, thank you for invitation to this thread. I agree and especially admire and respect scientific publications written with understable language, and rhetoric in line with the scientific paradigms. I do not expect, therefore poetry in research reports, publications in medical sciences, as well as hard statistics  in qualitative, cultural reports. I think, that the finesse of a simple and clear writing should be constantly mastered by the researchers working in different paradigms, both positivist and constructivist.

If scientists write in a way comprehensible only to themselves, perhaps they may have a weak scientific writing skills.

You asked me in the message about: what is my latest inspiration?

I read recently Italian cultural anthropologist Franco La Cecla and his work about the anthropology of the man (male) and masculinity. The author has adorable writing skills. 

Dear Marcel,

This is a very significant question.  I agree with Vyachevslav.  Certain fields of culture have specialized language. Law, for instance, has "words of arts," that is, legal terms with which lawyers understand each other.  Medicine has anatomical and pathological terminology which does not admit substitution.  Poetry and literary criticism make use of expressions drawn from rhetoric and stylistics.  Musical scores have their own language which composers are at pains to convey to performers.  In these instances of specialized terms, use of plain, everyday speech will actually obscure understanding.  Everything depends on the circle of readers that an author is addressing. If he is addressing specialists, formal, technical language is appropriate.  If, however, he is addressing laymen, he must define his terms as he proceeds.  In this case, a glossary of terms would be appropriate.

Steve - I agree.  Even if we have 'technical' phrases and terms (more often nouns), we need to join them up in plain, non-pretentious language.  I think what irks most people is when language structures are used that would have been more familiar 100 years ago ... .  We adopt standard phrasing to conform to our peers, but research is often inter-disciplinary, so we have to think of others - who are we writing for?

Excellent remarks! Should specialists only write for specialists in a specialist journal?

"Should specialists only write for specialists in a specialist journal?," you ask, Marcel. To this I would respond that everything depends on the character of the research problem being addressed in the article.  Some research problems-- we must confess-- interest the specialists alone, and this rigor is necessary for increasing the depth of a discipline. Other research problems encompass interests for several different fields.  In that case, a balance must be struck between academic rigor and stylistic transparency.  Such research problems are necessary for increasing the breadth of several disciplines.  In the latter case, specialists can communicate with non-specialists in non-specialist journals. In my judgment, a great scholar has the flexibility to publish for the specialist journals and for the generalist reviews alike.  Husserl did in philosophy, Einstein in physics, Debussy in music.

It is not only intellectually complex that is the problem, it is also unnecessary "formalisation". For mathematics Poincare had describe the situation nicely:

Poincare´ had argued that: to formalise a mathematical proof is to destroy it, at least as a piece of mathematics.

Searching for rigorous expressions we finally lost out intuition and understanding. Present day mainstream mathematics is written only for a small group of specialists, leading in a mass of non understandable results.

The bottom line is: Is there a synthetic language in which one can do research and at the same time communicate his results to others easily and understandable?    

I deal with the question of writing for specialists or writing for a general audience quite regularly. This is in the area of psychiatry now, but has been in anthropology in the past. Basic research in psychiatry is often directed at the specialist audience, and specific types of studies dealing with more limited topics (pharmacodynamics or pharmacology) may be directed to either research scientists or a subgroup of psychiatrists. Other topics may be more relevant to the general internist or family practicioner as well, and need to be communicated in a way that is understandable by that community. These are for peer-reviewed journals, but if you are to reach the general public (and there are advocacy groups that advance the position that medical research should be made available to the public), then the authors have to consider how to report their results in a manner understandable to the general public. If the writing is too complex or too esoteric for the intended audience, one fails to communicate.

What can be the role of journalists that have to report on a great variety of topics? Perhaps it happens that journalists transmit messages about science topic A more successfully to a wide audience than the scientists that work on science topic A as long as journalists understand what scientists want to say...

High-flown language is a reflection of the status; not the quo, dear Marcel!

People might be very smart without being able to express it through writing or speaking. This is obvious when the most intelligent scientist in the world would be asked to express herself/himself in a foreign language s/he does not truly master!

However, dear Marcel, writing skills are strong indicators of being smart. 

Wasn't it Sir Isaac Newton who only wrote in Latin, so hardly anyone could really understand what he was saying? For the longest time, as a child, I thought he wasn't the brightest guy, because his basic laws seemed rather ridiculous. Then, one day I read what he wrote instead of relying on my teachers' interpretations, and I found that he had quite profound ideas that actually did make logical sense, they were just being poorly interpreted by people who couldn't understand him. I've found the same to be true of Albert Einstein's ideas. 

On one hand, maybe people don't have the background or aptitude to understand these complex thoughts, but on the other hand, maybe it's just the words that are conveying more education than meaning. 

In situations where scientists are studying topics of high relevance to society such as climate change impacts, water or agricultural conservation topics, it is of the utmost importance to speak clearly and communicate with the general public and non-scientists. Will these people be reading our journal articles? Probably not, but we do need to know how to communicate our ideas in plain English in order to educate the public with the most recent and pertinent information about issues that affect them.

The answer is not easy because it depends on what is considered  as "complex language/ reasoning/ methods". For some almost everything is complex, for others is vice versa... To reach a balance satisfying all at the same time is a difficult task. If it is to much sophisticated, there is a risk that only few will understand the message, if it very popular, you may enter into profanization of the discussed topic...