Over the weekend, there’s was a big outpouring of writing on ex-Twitter about academic publishing and prestige, the epicenter of which seemed to be the state of Maine, with worthwhile threads by Tyler Austin Harper (one, two) and Paul Schofield (both at Bates) and another by Aaron Hanlon (at least partly at Colby). There’s also one by Ted McCormick, who screws up the Maine thing by being in Montreal. There’s also a late entry from Kate Wagner of The Nation, whose geographic location no longer matters because the theme is shot.
I replied to the first of Harper’s threads with a long tweet series of my own, which was mostly written in a conference room in Urbana, IL, where I was between meetings during a visit to the University of Illinois to do a public lecture for their World Quantum Day outreach event. There was more than a little synchronicity between the discussion on ex-Twitter and my day in the Midwest, since a bunch of my meetings involved people asking me advice about communicating science to the public. So I had already spent a good chunk of my day improvising answers to questions about some part of the core issues here, and was primed to tweet through it.
(Of course, I’m getting to blogging about it four days late because I was in Illinois, then got home at midnight Sunday so was a useless zombie all day yesterday, even before I had to spent a couple hours at the orthopedic urgent care with The Pip (who sprained his wrist in gym; he’ll be fine). But, you know, better late than never? Maybe?)
Like a lot of academic debates, this is actually like three different arguments standing on each other’s shoulder’s in a trench coat. In the interests of not just repeating what’s already been said, I’ll try to separate these out a little bit, because I have points of agreement and points of disagreement with all of them. I have at various points been more strongly in one or the other of the camps that these things tend to sort themselves into, and have settled out (for the moment) in what might seem like a weird place, but I think that seeming weirdness is mostly an effect the muddling together of different arguments.
Argument One: Jargon in Writing
The starting point for all of this is the observation that most academic writing is kind of obscure and technical. This is most true in the STEM disciplines, particularly on the more mathematical end, where some papers have almost as many equations as English words. Even in not-STEM fields, though, academics writing for other academics tend to be somewhat opaque to outsiders, relying rather heavily on specialized jargon, either in the obvious form of unfamiliar coinages or the subtler form where what look like ordinary English words actually have precise shades of meaning in particular contexts. (The simple physics example being how in everyday speech “velocity” and “speed” mean more or less the same thing, but in physics “velocity” includes the direction and “speed” does not.)
This is very much a correct observation— most specialist writing is hard for outsiders to follow. It’s also absolutely appropriate and, indeed, inevitable. Any line of work more complicated than digging holes and immediately filling them back in will develop its own set of jargon because the people doing that work will need an efficient way to communicate with each other about details that don’t matter to anyone not deeply involved in that process. Actually, for all I know, there’s a set of jargon terms used by dig-and-fill teams; it wouldn’t surprise me.
This is a very familiar argument from back in the heyday of ScienceBlogs, where we used to have regular arguments (sometimes in public, sometimes in back channels) between scientists and journalists about the best ways to communicate results. To oversimplify a bit, scientists often feel that journalists oversimplify things and lose essential shades of meaning in the process, while journalists feel that scientists are excessively concerned with precision about things that don’t actually matter.
There was a side branch of these arguments that used to drive me absolutely fucking nuts, in which some credentialed journalists would piously lecture scientists about the pernicious use of jargon, and that even one unfamiliar word would lose readers. Then they would fall into using what are very much jargon terms— semi-cute alternate spellings like “hed” and “lede” and whatnot to designate elements of articles in a precise way that mostly flies over the head of people who aren’t in that business. Pointing out that they were also using jargon terms in alienating ways was not well received…
In general, I end up thinking that there’s nothing wrong with using jargon terms in science writing, provided you’re clear about when you’re using them, and take the time to define them as you go. If you’re careful about it, and work the definitions in smoothly, this is actually hugely beneficial to the readers, giving them a tool to better understand other writing in the field. “Avoiding jargon” can actually become counter-productive, when taken to an extreme.
Generally speaking, I think limiting the use of jargon is a Good Thing even in specialist contexts— a lot of writers, particularly relatively young students, will drop into a mode where they bury the reader in a blizzard of cryptic terms in the impression that this more effectively demonstrates their expertise. Actual deeply knowledgeable experts don’t do this so much, and that’s all to the good. Writing clearly and well is not generally an impediment to publishing technical work, and most people in a technical field can tell you right away who the clear thinkers and good writers are. But jargon serves a useful purpose, and is not in itself a problem when writing in a specialist context.
Argument Two: Public Communication Is a Skill
There’s a clause in that next-to-last paragraph doing a lot of heavy lifting, namely “If you’re careful about it and work the definitions in smoothly.” Careful and judicious use of jargon, with smoothly integrated definitions is a Good Thing for public communication, but not every person trying their hand at public communication is sufficiently careful, or able to integrate the definitions in a way that flows well for the audience. The number of people who think they’re doing this right is also a large multiple of the number of people who are actually good at it.
And that’s a key point, here: Public communication requires a particular set of skills, and those are not perfectly identical to the set of skills required to be good at communicating to a specialist audience. To say nothing of the skills required to, you know, do original research in whatever area, which are completely independent of the other two.
This is sometimes a hard point to convince people of, because there’s an impression that because both specialist and public communication involve prose, they ought to overlap more. It’s a little easier to convince people of the core issue if you change genres— most people will more readily accept that public speaking is a different matter than writing, or that going on TV is a different matter than giving a conference talk. But there’s a persistent belief that “writing is writing,” and anyone who can do one form well ought to be able to do any other.
I’ve been doing this a very long time now, and I’ve come around to the belief that that’s not actually true. There’s a skill to translating complicated technical work into a form that can be communicated to a non-technical audience that doesn’t follow naturally from the skills used to communicate to a specialist audience. It’s not just a matter of changing vocabulary, but also a difference in how the ideas are organized, and the tone of the presentation, and a host of other subtle factors.
Some people find the things you need to do to communicate well to a general audience congenial, even enjoyable, and they’re well positioned to succeed. Others find the whole business awkward and alien, and will only ever manage it with a level of concerted effort that may not be worth it given their other goals. They’d be better off concentrating on the technical stuff, and leaving the public-facing communication to people who enjoy it and are good at it.
Again, there’s nothing actually wrong about this, it’s just something that needs to be recognized and accepted. Public communication is a skill, not everyone has it, and that’s fine.
Argument Three: Academic Hierarchies Reward Particular Things
This is sort of the entry point to the whole argument in the academic ex-Twitter context, namely the fact that academic systems are set up to reward specialist communication in the form of university-press monographs and journal articles, and not articles pitched to a broader audience. If you’re a junior faculty member trying to get tenure, you’ll get more credit for a technical publication that maybe a couple dozen people who aren’t colleagues or blood relatives read than you will for a trade-press publication that’s read by orders of magnitude more people.
This is obviously a thing that is directly relevant to my interests, given what most of my written output has been over the last {mumble} years. It also plays a role in the fact that my formal title is still “Associate Professor”—one of the factors that has led me to not go up for promotion to full professor is the thought that my general-audience books might be deemed not really scholarly, at which point I would be ready to Burn It All Down.
I’ve mellowed quite a bit on this over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I still think we should be a bit more expansive about what “counts” as scholarly work in terms of evaluating colleagues for tenure and promotion. And if you buy me a beer or two, I’ve got a whole cathartic rant I can do about how the current structure is largely the work of petty people with narrow skillsets trying to hoard prestige for only the things they’re good at, and avoid rewarding things that they’re not good at.
That said, I’ve kind of come around to thinking that this is okay, in large part because of my position on Argument Two. That is, given that I think there’s a meaningful difference in the sets of skills needed to communicate well for other specialists and the skills needed to communicate well to a broader public, I also think it’s reasonable for those things to have reward structures that are (somewhat) separate. It’s fine that academic prestige goes mostly to technical work, because there’s a different prestige hierarchy for public communication.
This is a slightly different phrasing of the reply thread I wrote in Illinois. I’ve come around to being mostly-okay with the fact that (some of) my colleagues think my popular-audience books are less worthy of academic recognition than narrower technical publications would be, because my public-facing work has other channels for recognition. In the most crass form, I’ve been paid actual money for writing my books, and at least some of the articles I’ve written have been directly compensated. Less concretely, the public communication I do has opened a lot of other opportunities— getting invited places to give lectures, being asked to do op-eds or book reviews or review articles, doing talking-head spots for a bunch of TV shows. I have a video clip on my computer in which Alex Trebek says my name (pronouncing it correctly, even) because my book was an answer on Jeopardy!, and that’s an incredible thing.
I’ve also gotten some formal academic-ish recognition for this— I’m a Fellow of the American Physical Society because of my public communication work. There’s a parallel prestige and reward system for public-facing work, and I’ve been fortunate enough to do very well through that. All of this leaves me less jealous of the prestige attached to other, more narrowly academic endeavours that I’m unlikely to get.
Of course, the key caveat here is that these hierarchies should be parallel and not interfere with each other. Public communication doesn’t necessarily need to be rewarded with academic prestige, but it shouldn’t be an active impediment to it, either. There’s obviously a bit of a limit in that there are only so many hours in the day, and effort toward public communication reduces the time available to spend on specialist work. But to my mind, that’s okay as long as public communication isn’t directly punished— somebody with a solid record of publication shouldn’t be denied tenure because they also wrote feature pieces for some popular magazine.
Obviously I can’t claim any comprehensive knowledge of this, and my own tenure case is long in the past, but my general impression is that this is less of a problem than you will sometimes hear asserted. It would be a Bad Idea to focus on public writing to the exclusion of technical publication, to be sure, but my impression is that the number of people who would actively punish an otherwise-reasonable candidate for doing public-facing work is very small. A bunch of op-eds won’t lift you over the (ill-defined) threshold of scholarship needed for tenure, but they won’t push you under it, either.
(The one possible exception would be public-facing work that stakes out a controversial position on a divisive issue. But that’s a separate shipping container full of worms that I’m not interested in opening here.)
So, that’s where I land on the whole question of recognition for public-facing communications. Which may seem like a weird and wishy-washy place to be, but makes sense to me, at least when you take away the trench coat and unstack the arguments within the overall debate.
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Really, really well articulated, Chad. I especially like the delineation of the 3 distinct issues, the defense of occasional use of jargon, and the recognition that your "popular" writing comes with non-academic perks that may offset the lack of academic credit that you get for it.