Henry Oldenburg, a well-known editor for academic journals,
supposed that the purpose of an academic journal is to provide a place for
researchers to deliver and communicate knowledge to others. Researchers usually are professional people who are well educated and knowledgeable in a scientific area. As we often notice, most academic journals are written in an official style. However, we can notice that official style is not always beneficial for academic journals because it can be unclear for non-expert readers. I am going to analyze the abstract from the academic article— “Taking an educational psychology course improves neuroscience literacy but does not reduce belief in neuromyths” to show my opinion. My discovery
can prove that official style helps to improve credibility of academic journals,
but it also makes articles complicated and difficult for the public to understand.
Although some writers have made the same argument as mine, my paper is more
focused on how the long sentences and jargon challenge people’s understanding. This
focus will help you better realize the argument against official style in
academic writing.
This academic article was published in PLOS ONE, which is a peer-reviewed
open-access scientific journal issued by the Public Library of Science (PLOS). On
the PLOS website, we can find that “In addition to journals, PLOS advances
innovations in scientific publishing through social media, online communities
and the award-winning PLOS Blog Network” (PLOS). Thus, the target audience of
this website is not only the experts and scholars, but also the public. To show
the different results of official style in academic articles, we can divide possible
readers into two big categories: experts and scholars, and ordinary readers who
have limited knowledge. Within these two big categories, we can break it down further.
The website PLOS ONE categorizes this article as “neuroscience, literacy,
psychology, cognitive neuroscience, teachers, learning, cognitive psychology
and education” (PLOS). According to the categories, we can
infer that some readers are students, self-learners and teachers. Some readers
are experts from neuroscience, literacy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience,
cognitive psychology and education. |
For experts, they have higher education, and are used to
reading articles with official style, so it is not a big challenge for them to
understand a comprehensive article like the one I have chosen. According to an article readability
test on the website “Readable,” the average grade level for the chosen
paragraph is 17.6, and the Flesch reading ease is 12.0, which means this
article is hard for the public to read and understand. Why is this text so hard
to read? We can find that this paragraph consists of six complex sentences, and
five of them exceed 30 syllables. Long sentences make people feel tried, which
also challenges their patience. Here is the abstract for the article:
Educators are increasingly interested in applying neuroscience findings
to improve educational practice. However, their understanding of the brain
often lags behind their enthusiasm for the brain. We propose that educational
psychology can serve as a bridge between basic research in neuroscience and
psychology on one hand and educational practice on the other. We evaluated
whether taking an educational psychology course is associated with increased
neuroscience literacy and reduced belief in neuromyths in a sample of South
Korean pre-service teachers. The results showed that taking an educational
psychology course was associated with the increased neuroscience literacy, but
there was no impact on belief in neuromyths. We consider the implications of
these and other findings of the study for redesigning educational psychology
courses and textbooks for improving neuroscience literacy.
Containing
infinitive phrases, noun substitutes, relative causes, and coordination,
complex sentences help to show authors’ professionalism. For example, the
sentence: “Educators are increasingly interested in applying neuroscience
findings to improve educational practice” uses an infinitive phrase. “Their
understanding of the brain” is a noun substitute in this sentence. In addition,
the most frequently used strategies are relative clauses and coordination. However,
using both of them at the same
time will make the sentence difficult to understand.
To further explain the barriers that long sentences can pose
for ordinary readers, we analyze a long sentence with both relative cause and
coordination in this text. For instance, “We propose that educational
psychology can serve as a bridge between basic research in neuroscience and
psychology on one hand and educational practice on the other.” In this
sentence, “that” leads to an object clause. In this object clause, a
coordination phrase serves as a complement to the object. For experts, this
complex sentence saves their time as they can understand it quickly. However,
as a student and member of public, this sentence made me feel confused the
first time I saw it. To understand the meaning of the sentence, I had to spend
time thinking about the structure and logic of the sentence. I decided to
separate the sentence to help me understand it. Then, the sentence turns into:
“we think that educational psychology can be served as a bridge between neuroscience
and psychology. At the same time, educational psychology can also be served as
a bridge between neuroscience and educational practice.” The complex sentences improve
the professionalism of the article, but they also present a comprehension
challenge for common readers like students, self-learners, and ordinary
teachers.
The jargons used in the text also bring challenges to some
experts and common readers as well as long sentences. For instance, the word “neuromyths”
is confusing jargon. Ordinal readers like me need to search for the meaning of
this word. Similarly, we can infer that some experts who are not focused on the
study of neuroscience will also need to use dictionaries to find the meaning of
“neuromyths.” Through reaching, we can learn that “neuromyths” refers to
people’s misunderstanding of neuroscience knowledge (OECD.org). Therefore,
this word is very important in the text, which displays a significate problem
in the spreading of common knowledge of neuroscience. By reading the given
paragraph, we can find there are some problems for educators to improve their educational
practice. One of the problem refers to the misunderstanding of common neuroscience knowledge. If we cannot understand this jargon, it will be hard
for us to realize the purpose of the whole text. From this perspective, we can
find that jargons create reading barriers for both experts and ordinary readers
who are not in the specific profession.
However, we can notice that the academic article caters more
to expert readers than to ordinary readers. Why does the article not care very
much about common readers? We can find the answer in the purpose of this
article. In the abstract, the authors have already told us that this article is
written for researching whether an educational psychology course was associated
with the increased neuroscience literacy. The reason why writers want to
research it is that educators have some misconceptions about neuroscience while
they desire to apply neuroscience findings to improve educational practice. To
solve this problem, the writers suggest redesigning educational psychology
courses and textbooks for improving neuroscience literacy. Consequently, this article
is to prove the effects of educational psychology course on neuroscience
literacy. We can conclude that the target audience for this article is the
university course researchers and course-setting staff. Information and results
in the article can help them to decide what kind of knowledge should be
included in educational psychology courses. Because common readers are not the
target audience, the writers ignore the legibility of the article. They put experts
in a more important place, so they chose to use the official style to cater to expert’s
satisfactions.
However, this
article is not only useful for experts who research how to design and arrange a
course. It also helpful in making teachers aware of their misconceptions in neuroscience.
The possible readers for this article also include students and self-learners
who have limited ability to understand complicated sentences. From this point
of view, the author should improve the readability of the article to benefit
the public. In fact, we can find that many academic articles are not only
beneficial for one group of people, but also for different groups of people
with different education levels. Therefore, academic articles for only an academic
audience is not effective or as effective as it would be if it is written to a
broader audience. This view is reflected in the website of the chosen academic
article. As we have analyzed before, the PLOS website has set its target
audience as both the public and experts. It spreads knowledge through a variety
of Internet channels, indicating that it desires to improve the availability of
different articles. We can infer that the purpose of the website is promoting
the spreading of knowledge by giving the wider population learning opportunities.
In this respect, reducing the use of official style strategies can increase the
readability of academic articles and thus accelerate their spread.
On the one hand, official style makes articles look more
professional and enhances their credibility. On the other hand, official style
makes information difficult for readers with limited knowledge to understand.
In my opinion, writers should use less complex sentences and jargons to improve
the creativity of academic articles because knowledge should be able to share
to the public. On the contrary, some people will hold on that long sentences
and jargons should be fully used to ensure professionalism and credibility. In
this situation, should writers keep on using official style? What strategies
should be maintained and what strategies should be abandoned? Based on my
analysis, some official style strategies like complex sentence may be
maintained to give readers more information to show details but should not be
over used. Other strategies such as jargon should be used less to make
sentences easier for the public to read. This advice may be useful for writers
who are going to write for mixed audience. The effects of other strategies can
be analyzed in the future to see whether it can help writers produce documents
like laws and contracts.
Yingning Cao
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