Timeline for Why do researchers sometimes use extremely complicated English sentences to convey their meaning?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
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| Feb 21, 2017 at 13:24 | comment | added | user25972 | @IlmariKaronen I was mainly referring to this part: "Indeed, that sentence looks as if it was deliberately obfuscated to hide its meaning, or possibly the lack of any." It's true that I took OP's sentence at face value, assuming it was taken from a context that lent it credibility and it wasn't meant to be complete "lorem ipsum". Thank you for clarifying. | |
| Feb 21, 2017 at 10:55 | comment | added | Ilmari Karonen | @user25972 Actually, what I was trying to get at is that I'm pretty sure the OP's example sentence doesn't convey any meaning. It's just random word salad. It might have been a meaningful sentence before somebody mutilated it with a thesaurus, but if so, any meaning it used to have has been all but destroyed. (If I had to guess, I'd say the original meaning might have been something like "The algorithm combines a global breadth first search with a local depth first search." But that's just a wild guess.) | |
| Feb 21, 2017 at 9:48 | comment | added | user25972 | Great answer, and an excellent point addressing the superficial nature of such writing style, normally at home in marketing and sales. I just saw this in a car brochure: "The mature design of the exterior cocoons a human-centric cabin made for the pleasure of driver and passengers alike." Information conveyed: "Interior is user-friendly". The word choice and redundancy is there to elicit positive feelings and tries to bring the reader's attention to things beyond the actual information conveyed - marketing texts and OP's example from academia alike. | |
| Feb 20, 2017 at 8:20 | comment | added | Dronz | Yes, that example seems to be a joke. It looks like the sort of thing SCIgen and related programs come up with. | |
| Feb 20, 2017 at 3:49 | comment | added | iled | I believe this answer addressed one point that the others didn't: sometimes it looks like some researchers feel obligated to fill their writing with ornamental gibberish, so to praise their writing or some other sort of narcissism. | |
| Feb 19, 2017 at 13:19 | history | answered | Ilmari Karonen | CC BY-SA 3.0 |