Are academic publications meant to be "dry"?

Question

Are academic publications meant to be "dry"?

Or are there examples of "nice to read" papers?

Is this subjective?

Answer 1

Are academic publications meant to be "dry"?

If by dry you mean unpleasant to read, then no. If you mean efficient and without superfluous “fluff,” then yes.

Or are there examples of "nice to read" papers?

Of course, much in the same way that there is “nice to listen to” music. Writing comes in a variety of styles.

Is this subjective?

Yes.

Answer 2

Academic publications are meant to be informative on things that are, for most people, difficult to understand. If those things were easy to understand then they would likely have been discovered long ago and not the subject of current research.

Scientific and other scholarly works are written, primarily, for experts who are interested in the progress made, not in entertainment. They want the essence.

Some writers are good at explaining the scientific works to a more general audience, however. Carl Sagan comes to mind. But what they write aren't really scholarly works, but popular ones.

And some scientific writers are, of course, terrible writers that even the experts find difficult to decipher.

Scientific papers are also limited in length generally, so long narratives leading up to conclusions is pretty much impossible. If every paper were written like a novel, then one might expect to have them be "nice to read".

But think about any long (non-scientific) work; Harry Potter for example. If you extract the essence of the work and reduce it to 8 pages, you will probably find the result pretty "dry".

Answer 3

Different texts have different purposes. If you buy a novel, then you want to be entertained. If you read a scientific article you want information. Standards for scientific articles are there to make this transfer of information efficient even if the author is not a great writer. I think it is a good thing that these standards are very strong and deviations are very rare, since most people who think of themselves as good writers, are actually pretty bad.

Answer 4

Definitely. The more adjectives you have in your paper, and/or bombastic your statements are, the less people believe you. We have enough of those in the media.

Answer 5

This has been stated a few times already, but I would expand on what @mlk said in a form of comment.

Most people, myself included, are pretty bad at writing. One might think "oh how great would it be if scientific papers were more like posts people write on blogs or Facebook, it would be so much easier to read", but this turns a blind eye to how bad most of these blogs actually are. Many of them are utterly incomprehensible, even! The trick here is then that one does not read all the blogs or consider them all while making this comparison - why'd they do that? Instead, they are reading good ones. This is not an option for something that people do as a part of their job.

Maybe if we had another few years of mandatory journalistic studies for all academicians, it would be better. But don't you find this is a bit ridiculous requirement to have? "Be good at writing or don't do science", huh?

The issue is further exacerbated by the need to write in a non-native language, which English is for many - again, myself included. I wish I could write better and am trying my best, but learning a small subset of language and producing dry texts full of clichés is just easier. By easier, I mean less prone to mistakes that could alter the meaning a lot. Saying something like "I feel myself great today" is awkward but is actually more innocent than leading someone to write off tens of thousands of dollars in reagents/equipment because you've provided some murky instructions.

It is more of a necessity, then, rather than a goal. People with decent command of language and confident in their skills often write quite engaging papers, and it is definitely a plus. You may even find that great, Nobel prize-level scientists are, in general, a fair bit better at delivery than their less accomplished colleagues.

Some people just don't care and it still work - one notable example of this I know of are YOLO papers; here's one example https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.02767. Google Scholar shows almost 10k citations for this one; CS/ML/AI field is a bit unique admittedly but still, sticking to formal guns didn't matter at the slightest for that one.

Even then, one thing stands out: it may be flavorful but has to be unambiguous and comprehensible. Formal writing accomplishes both. Writing "the substrate was whirling like clouds enclosing on the Malmo coast in August" may be engaging and might even provide some helpful ideas to some people about how did it actually look like, but for most, it would be incredibly not helpful.

A tangential: there are popsci outlets presenting research in a more digestible way, but the people writing those articles naturally talented and/or formally educated in writing.

TL;DR: It would be great to have more engaging and readable articles but it is too much to ask.