Papers typically have ginormous abstracts that should actually broken into multiple paragraphs.
I suspect you think this because papers are generally written for a specialist audience in mind. I skim many abstracts in my field a day to keep up to date with literature, and I think they’re quite readable even though many are a couple hundred words long. This is because generally speaking authors are just matter-of-factly saying what they did and what they found; if you don’t get tripped up on jargon there’s really nothing difficult to comprehend. If anything, your 69 word version reads more like a typical abstract I see day-to-day than the more verbose version you had earlier; way too much filler to be a good abstract. For example, sentences like these ones rarely show up in abstracts:
This post summarizes and reviews the key claims of said agenda, its relationship to prior work, as well as its results to date. Our hope is to make it easier for newcomers to get up to speed on natural abstractions, as well as to spur a discussion about future research priorities.
Or, put more bluntly, papers really just aren’t textbooks or press articles. They are written to be understandable to specialists in the field, and maybe adjacent fields (a PRL paper would be written to address all physicists, for example), but there’s simply no effort made towards making them easy to understand for others. Look at what I consider to be a fairly typical abstract: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05078
It’s really just ‘We designed A. It works like this. We describe A and associated subsystems in detail in the paper. We characterise A by doing B, C, D, and E. The performance agrees with simulation.” There are bad abstracts everywhere, of course, but I disagree that they’re the norm. Many abstracts are quite reasonable, and effectively just say ‘Here’s what we did, and here’s what we found’.
I buy that people who read abstracts all day get better at reading them, but I’m… pretty sure they’re just kinda objectively badly formatted and this’d at least save time learning to scan it.
Like looking at the one you just linked
The ATLAS Fast TracKer (FTK) was designed to provide full tracking for the ATLAS high-level trigger by using pattern recognition based on Associative Memory (AM) chips and fitting in high-speed field programmable gate arrays. The tracks found by the FTK are based on inputs from all modules of the pixel and silicon microstrip trackers. The as-built FTK system and components are described, as is the online software used to control them while running in the ATLAS data acquisition system. Also described is the simulation of the FTK hardware and the optimization of the AM pattern banks. An optimization for long-lived particles with large impact parameter values is included. A test of the FTK system with the data playback facility that allowed the FTK to be commissioned during the shutdown between Run 2 and Run 3 of the LHC is reported. The resulting tracks from part of the FTK system covering a limited—region of the detector are compared with the output from the FTK simulation. It is shown that FTK performance is in good agreement with the simulation.
Would you really rather read that than:
The ATLAS Fast TracKer (FTK) was designed to provide full tracking for the ATLAS high-level trigger by using pattern recognition based on Associative Memory (AM) chips and fitting in high-speed field programmable gate arrays. The tracks found by the FTK are based on inputs from all modules of the pixel and silicon microstrip trackers.
The as-built FTK system and components are described, as is the online software used to control them while running in the ATLAS data acquisition system. Also described is the simulation of the FTK hardware and the optimization of the AM pattern banks. An optimization for long-lived particles with large impact parameter values is included. A test of the FTK system with the data playback facility that allowed the FTK to be commissioned during the shutdown between Run 2 and Run 3 of the LHC is reported.
The resulting tracks from part of the FTK system covering a limited—region of the detector are compared with the output from the FTK simulation. It is shown that FTK performance is in good agreement with the simulation.
I think once you think about breaking it into paragraphs, there are further optimizations that are pretty obvious (like, the middle paragraph reads like a bunch of bullet-points and would probably be easier to parse in that format).
I predict this’d be at least somewhat good for the specialists who are the primary audience for the thing, as well as “I think it’s dumb for papers to only be legible to other specialists. Don’t dumb things down for the masses obviously, but, like, do some basic readability passes so that people trying to get up-to-speed on a field have an easier time”.
I genuinely don’t see a difference either way, except the second one takes up more space. This is because, like I said, the abstract is just a simple list of things that are covered, things they did, and things they found. You can put it in basically any format, and as long as it’s a field you’re familiar with so your eyes don’t glaze over from the jargon and acronyms, it really doesn’t make a difference.
Or, put differently, there’s essentially zero cognitive load to reading something like this because it just reads like a grocery list to me.
Regarding the latter:
I think it’s dumb for papers to only be legible to other specialists. Don’t dumb things down for the masses obviously, but, like, do some basic readability passes so that people trying to get up-to-speed on a field have an easier time
I generally agree. The problem isn’t so much that scientists aren’t trying. Science communication is quite hard, and to be quite honest scientists are often not great writers simply because it takes a lot of time and training to become a good writer, and a lifetime is only 80 years. You have to recognise that scientists generally try quite hard to make papers readable, they/we are just often shitty writers and often are even non-native speakers (I am a native speaker, though of course internationally most scientists aren’t). There are strong incentives to make papers readable since if they aren’t readable they won’t get, well, read, and you want those citations.
The reality I think is if you have a stronger focus on good writing, you end up with a reduced focus on science, because the incentives are already aligned quite strongly for good writing.
I predict most people will have an easier time reading the second one that the first one, holding their jargon-familiarity constant. (the jargon basically isn’t at all a crux for me at all)
(I bet if we arranged some kind of reading comprehension test you would turn out to do better at reading-comprehension for paragraph-broken abstracts vs single-block abstracts. I’d bet this at like 70% confidence for you-specifically, and… like 97% confidence for most college-educated people)
A few reasons I expect this to be true (other than just generalizing from my example and hearing a bunch of people complain about Big Blocks of Text)
Keeping track of where you are in the text.
If you’re reading a long block of text, and then get distracted for any reason, you have to relocate where you left off to keep reading. A long block of text doesn’t give you any hand-holds for doing that.
Pausing and digesting
I (and I think most people) can only digest so much information at once. Paragraph breaks are a way for the author to signal “here is a place you might want to pause briefly and consolidate your thoughts slightly before moving on.”
The paragraph-break is a both a signal that “now is maybe a time to do that”, and it also helps you avoid losing your place after doing so (see previous section)
Skimming
Often when I start reading a paragraph, I’m like “okay, I roughly get this. I don’t really need to fully absorb this info, I want to move on to the next bit.” This could be either because I’m hunting for a specific set of information, or because I’m just trying to build up a high-level understanding of what the text is saying before reading it thoroughly. Paragraphs give me some hand-holds for skimming, because they typically group information in a sensible way.
In the example you link, I think there’s basically with sections of text, one of which saying overall what the topic is, one of which saying “what things do we describe in our paper”, and one roughly describing what the overall results of the paper was. Having it separate paragraphs helps me, say, skip the results summary if I’ve already gotten a sense for what the overall paper was about.
Sure, it could easily be that I’m used to it, and so it’s no problem for me. It’s hard to judge this kind of thing since at some level it’s very subjective and quite contingent on what kind of text you’re used to reading.
I suspect you think this because papers are generally written for a specialist audience in mind. I skim many abstracts in my field a day to keep up to date with literature, and I think they’re quite readable even though many are a couple hundred words long. This is because generally speaking authors are just matter-of-factly saying what they did and what they found; if you don’t get tripped up on jargon there’s really nothing difficult to comprehend. If anything, your 69 word version reads more like a typical abstract I see day-to-day than the more verbose version you had earlier; way too much filler to be a good abstract. For example, sentences like these ones rarely show up in abstracts:
Or, put more bluntly, papers really just aren’t textbooks or press articles. They are written to be understandable to specialists in the field, and maybe adjacent fields (a PRL paper would be written to address all physicists, for example), but there’s simply no effort made towards making them easy to understand for others. Look at what I consider to be a fairly typical abstract: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05078
It’s really just ‘We designed A. It works like this. We describe A and associated subsystems in detail in the paper. We characterise A by doing B, C, D, and E. The performance agrees with simulation.” There are bad abstracts everywhere, of course, but I disagree that they’re the norm. Many abstracts are quite reasonable, and effectively just say ‘Here’s what we did, and here’s what we found’.
I buy that people who read abstracts all day get better at reading them, but I’m… pretty sure they’re just kinda objectively badly formatted and this’d at least save time learning to scan it.
Like looking at the one you just linked
Would you really rather read that than:
I think once you think about breaking it into paragraphs, there are further optimizations that are pretty obvious (like, the middle paragraph reads like a bunch of bullet-points and would probably be easier to parse in that format).
I predict this’d be at least somewhat good for the specialists who are the primary audience for the thing, as well as “I think it’s dumb for papers to only be legible to other specialists. Don’t dumb things down for the masses obviously, but, like, do some basic readability passes so that people trying to get up-to-speed on a field have an easier time”.
I genuinely don’t see a difference either way, except the second one takes up more space. This is because, like I said, the abstract is just a simple list of things that are covered, things they did, and things they found. You can put it in basically any format, and as long as it’s a field you’re familiar with so your eyes don’t glaze over from the jargon and acronyms, it really doesn’t make a difference.
Or, put differently, there’s essentially zero cognitive load to reading something like this because it just reads like a grocery list to me.
Regarding the latter:
I generally agree. The problem isn’t so much that scientists aren’t trying. Science communication is quite hard, and to be quite honest scientists are often not great writers simply because it takes a lot of time and training to become a good writer, and a lifetime is only 80 years. You have to recognise that scientists generally try quite hard to make papers readable, they/we are just often shitty writers and often are even non-native speakers (I am a native speaker, though of course internationally most scientists aren’t). There are strong incentives to make papers readable since if they aren’t readable they won’t get, well, read, and you want those citations.
The reality I think is if you have a stronger focus on good writing, you end up with a reduced focus on science, because the incentives are already aligned quite strongly for good writing.
I predict most people will have an easier time reading the second one that the first one, holding their jargon-familiarity constant. (the jargon basically isn’t at all a crux for me at all)
(I bet if we arranged some kind of reading comprehension test you would turn out to do better at reading-comprehension for paragraph-broken abstracts vs single-block abstracts. I’d bet this at like 70% confidence for you-specifically, and… like 97% confidence for most college-educated people)
A few reasons I expect this to be true (other than just generalizing from my example and hearing a bunch of people complain about Big Blocks of Text)
Keeping track of where you are in the text.
If you’re reading a long block of text, and then get distracted for any reason, you have to relocate where you left off to keep reading. A long block of text doesn’t give you any hand-holds for doing that.
Pausing and digesting
I (and I think most people) can only digest so much information at once. Paragraph breaks are a way for the author to signal “here is a place you might want to pause briefly and consolidate your thoughts slightly before moving on.”
The paragraph-break is a both a signal that “now is maybe a time to do that”, and it also helps you avoid losing your place after doing so (see previous section)
Skimming
Often when I start reading a paragraph, I’m like “okay, I roughly get this. I don’t really need to fully absorb this info, I want to move on to the next bit.” This could be either because I’m hunting for a specific set of information, or because I’m just trying to build up a high-level understanding of what the text is saying before reading it thoroughly. Paragraphs give me some hand-holds for skimming, because they typically group information in a sensible way.
In the example you link, I think there’s basically with sections of text, one of which saying overall what the topic is, one of which saying “what things do we describe in our paper”, and one roughly describing what the overall results of the paper was. Having it separate paragraphs helps me, say, skip the results summary if I’ve already gotten a sense for what the overall paper was about.
Sure, it could easily be that I’m used to it, and so it’s no problem for me. It’s hard to judge this kind of thing since at some level it’s very subjective and quite contingent on what kind of text you’re used to reading.