The Age of Unnecessarily Complicated Academic Writing Is Over

“The fact is that effective communication is hard. Clear writing is hard. For the typical undergraduate—and no doubt the typical academic scholar or scientist—it is easier to string together vague buzzwords in meandering sentences than it is to say something clearly and concisely.”

Academia has failed in many respects. It has become too expensive, too ideological, and, frankly, it produces too much useless or misleading research. Perhaps most egregiously, academia has even failed at its most basic task: to teach students to write and communicate effectively. Higher education encourages students to favor jargon-heavy, needlessly complex prose over clear language. The consequence is a particular type of bad writing described by Steven Pinker as “highfalutin gobbledygook.”

Pinker and other prominent intellectuals have long griped about this bad writing problem in academia. Even Albert Einstein advocated for clear writing over the needlessly complex, declaring, “If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough.” Nevertheless, academia is so accustomed to highfalutin gobbledygook, it is doubtful anything short of a miracle could ever fix the problem.

Fortunately, we live in the era of miracles—technological miracles, at any rate. Unless there is some genuine value to needlessly complex writing in academia, it seems inevitable that ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools will eliminate incomprehensible academic papers. The benefits of this will not only save students from pumping out incoherent slop in the name of higher learning; it will also potentially help to improve academia’s terrible reputation with the public.

In the mid-2010s, I worked as an editor for FindLaw. The writers under my purview were all lawyers, which generally meant that they were accomplished communicators. But no matter their competence level, I insisted that they periodically pass their writing through the Hemingway Editor before submitting. This simple web-based application provides a readability score (e.g., “Grade 6”) and highlights in red any sentence that is overly complex. If a writer finds that his prose is over Grade 8 and has more than a few red-highlighted sentences, then generally it is too complex for lay readers and needs editing.