when i was a baby PhD student, i used to find so many scientific papers difficult to follow and thought that meant i just didn't understand what was in them. several years later, i'm pretty sure that those papers were just badly written.
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Yeah leaving my "I'm not clever enough to understand this" age behind has been a sobering experience. Turns out I am clever enough, there's just not much to understand in many papers (or what little actual insight is there is swamped by obfuscating rhetoric).
I remember the 1st, 2 I had to read for my degree were hard to read and nearly put me off. After a few atempts I put them aside and the 3rd one was much better!
the first one i had to read, the prof tutoring me actually admitted that she'd made a poor choice in recommending it, because under all the confusing language, it didn't really seem to say very much
I think of the most valuable lessons I ever learned is that if someone thinks their work is too complicated for a layperson to understand, it means they’re bad at explaining things.
My wife works in a PhD program but was a magazine editor for a decade prior. Helping a friend-now professor to write and edit her dissertation is actually what got her got in the door and now she’s got author credits on papers for doing the same thing. She’s told me about some real howlers. lol
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