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 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.