I had a Rabi-like professor in grad school. He was world renowned theoretical physicist, but he was a terrible teacher. His office was across a courtyard from where he taught, and I was convinced that he dropped his notes one day on his way to class, and that they had been blown around by the wind. He picked them up, but he never sorted them back into the correct order.
The notion that good writing is a talent not a skill feels like letting people off too lightly. Anyone who can earn a PhD should be able to learn to put ideas in a coherent order, and make them clear. It may take talent to do it at a level deserving a Pulitzer, but not at the level required to spare the reader physical pain. Plus, what we tell our students really is true: good communication skills really will mean more people will read (and cite!) your paper, and you will do better at job applications, and get more grants, and on and on.
I suspect that this may have something to do with discipline. Some of the best writers I've encountered are professional historians. There's one in particular where I've repeatedly claimed that if they published their grocery list, I'd read it. I've read and enjoyed their writing about bits of history I'd no previous interest in.
There are, unfortunately, historians who are not of that quality. But they don't make it all the way down to incoherent, which seems to fit what you said about Neils Bohr.
One of my biggest revelations moving from academia to business/industry is that in academia the burden is on the reader to parse what the author wrote. Everywhere else the burden is on the author to clearly and succinctly communicate the key message to the reader.
I had a Rabi-like professor in grad school. He was world renowned theoretical physicist, but he was a terrible teacher. His office was across a courtyard from where he taught, and I was convinced that he dropped his notes one day on his way to class, and that they had been blown around by the wind. He picked them up, but he never sorted them back into the correct order.
The notion that good writing is a talent not a skill feels like letting people off too lightly. Anyone who can earn a PhD should be able to learn to put ideas in a coherent order, and make them clear. It may take talent to do it at a level deserving a Pulitzer, but not at the level required to spare the reader physical pain. Plus, what we tell our students really is true: good communication skills really will mean more people will read (and cite!) your paper, and you will do better at job applications, and get more grants, and on and on.
I suspect that this may have something to do with discipline. Some of the best writers I've encountered are professional historians. There's one in particular where I've repeatedly claimed that if they published their grocery list, I'd read it. I've read and enjoyed their writing about bits of history I'd no previous interest in.
There are, unfortunately, historians who are not of that quality. But they don't make it all the way down to incoherent, which seems to fit what you said about Neils Bohr.
One of my biggest revelations moving from academia to business/industry is that in academia the burden is on the reader to parse what the author wrote. Everywhere else the burden is on the author to clearly and succinctly communicate the key message to the reader.