In March I wrote a short piece on the importance of writing good article, chapter and thesis titles, and making them work for you and your metrics. The article was based on the logic of contemporary search behaviours and my own experience and thinking about the issue. I was very pleased, therefore, a couple of weeks ago to come across a piece of research which confirmed my argument but also extended it to the text used in the articles.
I expected to see reference to the article ‘Marketing ideas: How to write research articles that readers understand and cite‘ across all my networks but it didn’t happen so I thought it worth writing a short piece to bring it to your attention. (The article is behind a paywall – your institutional library should have access – but if you want a slimmed down version, there’s a report in Inside Higher Ed titled ‘The Case for Writing Plainly‘ that’s free to access.)
The article reports on two experiments in which 1,640 articles drawn from marketing journals were subjected to a text analysis and the authors report in their abstract that ‘articles with more abstract, technical, and passive writing are harder for readers to understand and are less likely to be cited.’
The authors, who are all based in the United States, suggest that when we write as scholars, we tend to write unclearly ‘because we forget that (we) know more about (our) research than readers, a phenomenon called “the curse of knowledge.”’ This curse leads to ‘abstraction, technical language, and passive writing’ and makes our writing less accessible and appealing to our readers.
It may be different in STEM subjects and others with a very specific form of language but when I talk with doctoral students in the Humanities and most of the Social Sciences I advise them to try to write in such a way as to satisfy the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ test. (The man on the Clapham omnibus – or more properly nowadays the ‘person on the Clapham omnibus’ is a legal fiction. It is used in English law and involves ‘a hypothetical ordinary and reasonable person … (who would be able to) decide whether a party has acted as a reasonable person would‘.)
In using this test for their doctoratal writing, I ask them write imagining that, if they accidentally left a copy of their thesis on the top deck of a double-decker bus and it was picked up by this hypothetical person with a reasonable level of education, the person would be able to understand their thesis and its arguments.
Its not always possible to do this, but its not a bad thing to aim for as it helps our work become more accessible and, as this piece of research indicates, thereby more noticed, with increased citation scores, and leading, as a result to its have more impact.
Why not give it a whirl? You may be pleasantly surprised!!
Doctoral education to go!! 