why smart people write bad 

It's funny how school is one of the most counterintuitive parts of society yet also one of the most important ones.

Every single year of school I’ve been through I remember being taught how to write a specific way, writing that way, and then being told that way is completely wrong the next year. Edit: Congrats on 1 million subs!

I’m a PhD student, so I have to read and write a lot of academic papers. I wouldn’t say that academics write complex text because they’re trying to impress their peers. Rather, it’s the standard in the academic community, and you get corrected if you don’t write that way. One of the comments I got on my master’s thesis was that it wasn’t “formal” enough. i.e. It wasn’t complex enough, so I had to go back and make the writing more complicated. There are also some good reasons for the complexity. Jargon can be useful for communicating efficiently with other people in the field. You also want to be very precise and not leave anything open to misinterpretation. That said, it often goes too far.

I just wanna share this experience I had. I was trying to explain the punette square (the biology thing: predicting the genes/traits of a child based on the genes/traits of the parents) to a younger friend who was just taught it in school. I had a pretty hard time trying to get her to see what was happening and she still didn't seem to fully get it. Cue my other friend, ((CHEWIE, YOURE THE BEST!!)), who popped into the conversation and explained the punette square with respect to minecraft. Hear this. He explained to her how when u place a dirt block next to a grass block, it turns to grass. Grass is dominant over dirt blocks; thus making dirt blocks the recessive trait, and grass the dominant. It was a stroke of genius. She understood the concept immediately!

The overly complicated academic writing you described reminded me of a chapter in book. In it the protagonist tries to have an intellectual discussion via text message. He becomes frustrated because auto correct doesn’t know many of the academic word choices so he decides to replace them with simpler words. When he is done his previously very elaborate sentence can be boiled down to „thinking is important“ 🤣

Cornell has a Freshman writing requirement. It isn't because incoming students didn't learn the basics of writing, like grammer. It's because we all learned the same 5 paragraph essay format you need for the SATs. Writing needs to change for your target audience. If your target audience is spending 2 minutes per essay while grading them all, then the 5 paragraph essay is good. If you're writing for a professional audience, then removing ambiguitity is more important than clarity. I learned that in law school. But now, most of my writing is intended to explain complex legal stuff to a wider audience of activists and the style I'm working on is VERY different. I avoid fancy words now.

I've always noticed how the way we're taught to write in school is completely different from the writing in the texts we're supposed to base our essays on. Just goes to show how much school values looking good to colleges versus teaching kids real-world skills and creativity.

So glad to hear someone make the case for "bad writing isn't bad, it's just not fitted to your specific needs as a reader"

In school I was a horrible writer - for all the reasons you say. I was writing to try to sound smart. The thing is, it worked. I consistently got the highest marks in literature even though I really didn't understand the subject matter. I just knew the right buzzwords and phrases that the teachers would like.

i took an essay writing class in high school and managed to get an A without turning in a single completed essay. the majority of the class structure was reading a piece of literature and coming up with our own essay subjects relating to the literature - i had undiagnosed adhd at the time so i would come up with a really interesting subject, write the outline, and finish half a draft before giving up. my teacher always really loved my creative thesis statements and ended up letting me just... not turn any completed drafts in lol. i think she must have been someone who really loved literature for what it was, and i like to think she was rebelling against the school structure in what little way she could.

As a linguist and a writer I approve of this video so hard!!! Everytime I thought “Wait, but he's forgetting…” the next shot would follow up on it. Very, very well done! To elaborate on the final point: School teaches a prescriptivist writing style, which is a good base style, truly. But without learning how and when to break the rules, we're raising writers who produce mediocre novels. You read a lot of brilliant fanfiction and novel ideas, executed with great plot, but made unreadable by school approved narration :'(

Love the higher production quality of this one, the vfx team rlly outdid themselves turning sabrina into a cgi sock puppet, i almost believed taha had hands

I’ve always felt like some literature was written so poorly. Like they care more about word count than they do about getting to the point. It’s annoying 😅

I agree with this so much. The worst of the worst is engineering academic papers. Papers are written in sections the bigger words the better. The sentences are so long it becomes dry because you have to make each sentence clear in what you are trying to say and be quotable. It has destroyed my writing

I'm still in high school. Here in the UK, we're taught to use very specific writing structures that, if we don't follow, will genuinely knock us down marks. No matter how nice and fluent your writing is, no matter how well you convey the point, if you don't follow that structure you're bound to lose marks. It's why I get such low marks on my English essays, because no matter what I prioritise making my writing fluent and nice to read.

I took AP language in high school and it was SUPPOSED to teach me how to communicate ideas of persuasion and literature analysis, but my teacher literally refused to tell us what we were and weren't doing right so I just never learned how to develop an argument. That is, until I started watching video essays in the past few years. Turns out you learn how to improve your writing when you're told what to improve😱

I was actually sitting in front of my computer, breaking my brain on how to write my university book report, when I got this alert on my phone. Thank you for letting me know it isn't just me, Taha

I teach physics, and I've read and reviewed a *lot* of textbooks. Completely unsurprising bottom line: the ones with the most pictures and diagrams with short captions *always* explain things best, both according to me, and to the students I've double-checked with. So maybe if academics want to write better, it might not just be all about the writing; maybe take out a paragraph or two, and put in a nice, useful picture instead.

As someone who is currently having to write a research paper for my art history class… this is extremely relevant. When you have to reread an article that’s basically just saying “here’s some ways people made religious art back in the day” three times just to figure out what the heck is happening you really start questioning why the heck people are like this.

As a writing professor, this matches a lot of concerns my students have from high school. “So you’re saying everything I learned before was wrong?” No, but there are new audiences and genres of writing that will be written in different ways. Also you are older and smarter now. Decontextualized writing without an audience besides “my teacher” is such a limited experience of what it means to write. I’m glad for that interview at the end, which really got it. I’m looking forward to seeing the whole thing. Zoe Bee is a former writing professor with some great videos on this topic.

From my experience at university, academic writing is the equivalent of legalese. It's an attempt to create a highly specific sentence that is not open to misinterpretation. You also want to be very clear and specific about what your experiment does and does not demonstrate, so you don't accidentally make false claims. I think we arrived at academic writing kind of like evolution does: it isn't perfect and could definitely be improved, but once academics found that it technically does work for its intended purpose (even if inefficiently), we got stuck with it.

i remember, throughout school, being repeatedly told to stop using the word "and" for example "I opened the door and i felt a cold breeze, and the hallway grew black and distant" then years later i read Ernest Hemingway and i was like "why is he writing like a child" After pressing on, i realized Hemingway had one of the most beautiful writing styles ever. Yet, it couldn't be simpler. Hemingway isn't desperately trying to convince you of his greatness with every overcomplicated word or phrase, he's simply telling a story. I find, to condense something truly beautiful into something small and simple, is where genius lies. Thats why i'll personally always think Shane Mcgowan is a better poet than Lord Byron.

As someone who bled out his gut to complete his Master's Degree, and then loathe every time his Asian parents beg him to get a PhD, I laughed really hard, with tears too, when I saw that academic writing. Aw man, the horror I had to go through back then. Never again.

This perfectly explains why I, as someone who LOVES to learn, HATED school and didn't aspire to or go to university. I hated having to write to prove knowledge, and the thought of doing that in university after being miserable doing it in high school, is why I preferred and went to college(college in Canada means community college where you receive a diploma in your chosen field, not a degree). I don't regret my choice one bit!

This is exactly why I want to be a science educator/writer. There's such a huge barrier between academic papers and the general public, to the point where even when the papers are available for free the ideas being presented are so inaccessible that they might as well have not been written. It's ridiculous.

I never built upon the 4th grade rules of, "a paragraph is 5 sentences with a topic sentence and a conclusion." In middle school, no one corrected me. It got so bad by my Freshman year that I had to spend lunch period with my English teacher. I wasn't proud of my writing until I started reading again when I was 21. So maybe the secret to writing well is reading "good writing", like N.K. Jemison

I had a chemistry teacher that always said, “Say what you mean and mean what you say”. I took this into my writing and kept my notes and documentation short and simple for work and college. The only time I didn’t do this is during high-school when I was required to write a 1000 words or flil out 5-10 pages for useless reasons

When I first started writing online content as an intern at a tech startup, my manager said to me "You write like a journalist" and it wasn't a compliment. My bad essay-writing habits picked up in academia haunt me to this day.

All throughout college, even when I knew I was making sentences way more complex and the creative writer in me was screaming, I always felt this pull to write more "academically" in my papers. It was so annoying

Yep, exactly. My uni writing prof said it as well: the purpose of school writing is to DEMONSTRATE. The purpose of real world writing is to COMMUNICATE. Totally different.

Honestly, the start of this video hit me so hard bc I'm dyslexic and I just realized 5 seconds ago that if something is written well it almost completely vanishes! School reading is pretty much the only thing that gives my dyslexia problems, everything else feels like a silly little mess up, like when I read someone's text wrong and then we laugh about it or my brain replaces the word clock with the word diary in both meaning and in what I hear and I still get the big picture of what the writer meant.

I had to take a standardized English proficiency test to prove I can speak my own native language for express entry immigration to Canada. I got perfect marks in everything except writing (though I still passed) and this breakdown of the person reading your paper doesn’t want you to communicate but rather express knowledge really hit home to me.

1 MILLION SUBS!!! CONGRATS GUYS!! I remember when it was still called Sabrina and friends! So happy for you three

I am currently taking a communications course at university. It kinda amazed me how bad high school was at preparing students to communicate. In high school we were constantly told to expand our vocabularies and use big words and blah blah blah. And now in uni they're basically trying to undo that so we can you know... actually communicate to real people.

In my experience, the academic propensity toward obfuscated language has been the root of so many problems in my communication. I spent my childhood paying more attention to my expectations in class than the social expectations that I deal with in real life, which has left me with a complete inability to actually get a point across.

As a current elementary school teacher, I firmly agree. I am extremely passionate about getting my students to write to an audience. As someone who used to want to be a professor and majored in religious studies, I feel called out. 😂 To be honest, when I think of some of the papers I wrote, I was mainly just emulating the style of the writers I most admired or even just most recently read. I would read maybe 12 books for a paper, and all of them would be 100+ years old, and so naturally my writing style ended up sounding somewhat stiff, old fashioned, and pretentious. I think that's something to keep in mind when thinking about Why Academics Write That Way. They're (consciously or not) writing within the context of a centuries-long tradition that had largely remained an insular culture with little interest in interacting with other groups.

I have such disabling anxiety about writing papers that I just won't do it, I'd rather take the hit to my final grade than put myself through that agony.

I've had this exact same issue with most school systems for years now. "Alright, so you have to explain how these two things are connected." Yeah, makes sense. "And you have to use these specific examples here." Yep, perfectly fine. "But you have to do it in 600 words or more." Wait, why? I could literally explain that in a single paragraph of like 80 words in a few minutes at most. "Oh and you have to use these exact guidelines to write your paper, even though they don't apply to the current situation at all, and you've already demonstrated your knowledge on those guidelines through the non-essay questions."

I never went to college because while I was great at absorbing information, I was terrified of essays 😬I graduated high school in 98. Later diagnosed with add and anxiety which I think explains why I struggle with written expression.

My hs physics teacher handled any writing in such a great way. He told us that when we wrote our lab reports, we should explain concepts in a way that a 5 year old would understand. This ensured we truly knew what we were talking about, and allowed us to build better writing habits :)

my masters tutor always used to tell us simple sentences are more effective and would show us how to simplify our sentences. They’d also give us strict word counts. I think cause they also had learning difficulties they understood super long sentences are hard for most people so no point unnecessarily complicating it.

Yup. Medical writer here. My job revolves around taking complex science and making it as short and simple as possible, which pretty much involved unlearning everything I learned in school.

One thing a friend and I discussed about was how scientific papers are written in such a way that it's very hard for someone who's never read scientific papers to read them. We're literally taught to write that way because that is the standard, but it's funny that it only caters to a small group, and they are very boring to read. I won't even read scientific papers I've written that I know I've enjoyed writing because the style is such a bore. I'd rather read a story I've written when I was 13 that I've buried deep in within many files that haven't seen the light of day in many years.

"Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences" by Michael Billig is an educational and entertaining read - especially for humanities students and academics.

As someone who is regularly reading, writing, and reviewing papers, I totally agree! I think there is a lot of jargon, where specific words have very specific meanings (similar to how lawyers read/write contracts). But also don't forget, while the vast majority of papers are written in English, most writer's first language isn't English. So, us non-native speakers often reproduce stuff that we read in order to communicate similar messages. And sometimes, something is easily phrased in our native language and we try to translate it literarily instead of semantically.

In college I had a class on professional communication, which talked about having a "you" mentality. Because in the US and other western cultures, we're generally more self-centered in our communication, they say to take a step back and focus on who you're talking to and use their context instead of your own.

This video was posted while I was researching engineering papers for a uni project. I'm surprised at how badly some of them are written, and still get published in journals! I wonder if some of it is to avoid plaigiarism? We have this drilled into us as undergrads to phrase ideas in our own words and cite your sources, but there's only so many ways to rephrase something without losing all meaning. Often the original source already expresses it in the most concise way. It is difficult to express complex ideas with simple language, definitely a rare skill in academia.

From my perspective it's just what we're taught. Trying to get good grades, we try to emulate the material that we are given (and just trying to avoid plagiarism😂, especially when there are a bunch of people writing about the same topic and they get cross checked.) (oh and wordcount)

I'm glad you pointed out that some parts of the complicated are necessary whilst others are unreasonably complex.

As an English Major I 1000% agree with everything this video said. I literally find it so difficult to explain even the simplest things now, because I've gotten so accustomed to empty sentences full of fluff . A lot of it has to do with the fact that I literally have to read and write academically EVERY DAY. I used to be a perfectly fine communicator, but now when I'm speaking to family, friends, and coworkers there's this barrier that I just can't seem to understand. My brain can't find the words. This video explained it perfectly! Speaking to people outside of school is kind of alienating these days and I don't even enjoy writing anymore. Great video! A lot of sad truth.

I remember going all out on my English essays, often breaking the word limit by hundreds, and losing marks in the process. Then I nerf myself to stay within the word limit, only to be told by my English teacher "Maybe you should stop being so creative, you'll get more marks that way." I live in a country where being fluent in English can get you a lot of places. And yet my teacher had the audacity to tell me not to be creative XD

When I was in high school, I was able to get into AP English, and writing essays were so hard for me to do because I would always not write enough when I could get my point across way too "quickly". And people who were concise were considered "bad students" and were shown as the "bad examples"

This all very much speaks to my hesitation to go to grad school. Sometimes it seems the deeper you go, the less you are connected to solving real problems and providing knowledge to the public. And I don’t want to lose touch. Instead I’m currently thinking about going in for library science and focusing on this very issue.

“Use less words to make your point.” That’s been my mantra lately.

just now getting to this video, and this is an important conversation among public historians. as historians, we are trained in an elitist academic environment, making our writings inaccessible to the public when history is a desperately needed look towards our past and how we can do better. as public historians, graduate school trains us to write in a public facing voice while also maintaining the integrity of our argument and the important jargon we use. thank you for making this. 💙

Might not be quite the same thing, but I will never be done being salty about this. My high school English teachers, in advanced, "college prep," "basically exactly the standards you'll have to live up to in college" classes, marked me off for making any statements in my papers that weren't backed up by a citation, beating it into my head that my job was to make my points solely by curating other people's thoughts and anything not in quotation marks was for the purpose of setting up explaining why I was using the quotes. Then in college my first English 103 paper came back marked "C-minus! Tell me what YOU think!"

I had a class in college where one of our first assignments was to write a blog on a class blog site. It's insane how much easier to read/better communicated those blog were compared to when we peer reviewed each others' essays. The difference was that we were writing to a general online audience and had something to communicate to them.

Thought number two, it's not just using many words that's the problem, but annoyingly long words, too. I tell my students to make their work flow like water, not like lead. Flow and utility are more important than "sounding smart", because the students ARE smart, so they don't have to do a f*cking intellectual backflip to prove it.

I was taught how to write an efficient and clear essay. Only, I wasn’t taught by any school or teacher but by a tutor who graded essay’s for other teachers. “Make it short and make it sweet…because I have 200 more to grade on the same topic.” I kept the jargon to a minimum and ditched idioms and metaphors (unless it was a creative writing class, then metaphor’s became practically mandatory). Nine times out of ten I get a solid grade, and the few times I didn’t were when the teacher graded the essay and wanted jargon.

"In school you're writing to demonstrate knowledge" I haven't encountered a single English class past elementary school where I had to do this. Usually those are for presentations and worksheets and stuff. Essays are always for analyzing and arguing.

I think this is one of those instances when internet culture actually helps to put a stop to problematic learned behaviors. We pick up internet language things from social media and memes, and then we realize that the way we were taught to write by the education system isn't anything like how we're supposed to be communicating with other people. The more we pick up on internet culture, the less we talk like we're writing a college essay. - Nev

Hello. I wanted to comment on a couple things. First, for accessibility: LOOK UP PLAIN LANGUAGE STANDARDS. These are literally written for accessibility and make use of all the aspects of good writing mentioned in the brief snippet of the interview you conducted for the video. I highly recommend using these for writing in general, since they are meant to make writing accessible to as many people as possible. Second, regarding academia specifically: While I know this channel tries to avoid much mention of overt politics (with good reason), we can't really ignore the fact that universities grew out of elitism and were explicitly for aristocrats. So many ways in which we "show off our knowledge" through bad writing standards is influenced by this elitist history (even if there are also other reasons for it). They make it less accessible to the "laypeople". Lastly... thanks for the video! I appreciate it a lot (as somebody going through academia right now), and will probably be sending it to a few academic friends or even teachers. I've been trying to write for communicating the point rather than flaunting technical capacity for lexicographic grandeur, but that's often punished in academic writing. Even page number requirements reinforce this, which is... annoying. So, once again, thank you. I really enjoy your videos and hope that you are able to keep making them for a long time!❤

Omg I’m living for this video. Love how you include humor but also stay serious about these topics

(Mini Essay inc.) I'm 16, currently in sixth form. I have always hated essays - writing them, anyway. This video was great, because it pretty much sums up why (it was also just a good video): As Taha stated, I'm only ever writing to demonstrate what I know. I hate that. I hate it so much. I'm generally someone who enjoys education and learning and things, so it's genuinely almost painful to have to write in a format that means my writing just doesn't flow, listing pointless facts and almost random analysis just for the sake of having said enough. On my own terms, I like literature analysis. I want to communicate my ideas; I want people to understand the complex webs of connection that I can see between the lines of a poem or novel or play. But I can't. Because I only have an hour. Because there are points I know I need to make to get marks. Because it isn't efficient. Because that's not what I'm supposed to do. I hate it. It makes my blood boil. Psychology GCSE was one of the worse examples I've seen of this. The exam has two essay questions, one synoptic (on multiple topics) question and another, more specific to a single topic and also more valuable in terms of marks question. In one of the two papers this would be a 'debate' question, where you provide your insight on probably some ethical issue in the field. It was made very clear that our actual opinion on the debate didn't matter. It's not a question about ethics, it's a question about the strengths and weaknesses of whatever research method or whatever it is you're analysing. You choose the side that's easiest to argue for. We were taught a structure for each of these, given example essays that were blunt and so devoid of genuine interest or insight. They felt weird and clunky to read and worse to write. I think I probably lost a lot of marks in essay questions in my GCSEs. Not because I didn't know the answers. Not because I didn't have an opinion. Instead because my opinion didn't matter, and my ideas didn't matter, and the way I write didn't matter. Only the mark scheme mattered. ...And I didn't like to follow the mark scheme. Because it made my writing weird and clunky! Like the psychology example essays. I rewrote passages after I had written them. The structure of my essays were based around connections and logical flow of thought and flow of text. I was probably marked down for it, but I know I still wrote better essays doing it my way.

I don't think that's a problem of modern academia and schooling only. There are some older texts that are absolutely unreadable and yet considered classics. Kant is the first example that springs to my mind. He was famous for writing unbearably long sentences - sometimes they were over 100 words long and the record is 238 words. There are many other examples of people who lived before the times of standardised education and academia, but made the same mistakes. I think the main reason could be simpler - being a good scholar is just unrelated to being a good teacher and explaining things in an understandable way. Most people in university has had that experience of joining a class with someone known for their academic work, thinking it's going to be good, but it turns out to be awful. I think that applies to writing as well. It's a completely different skill.

This was exactly the video I needed for a little pep talk as I dread a weekend of paper writing. Meaning, I’m mentally preparing to contort myself into the performance of “the role of the student,” despite learning little else besides perseverance. It’s a blast-and so useful! Remember, y’all, learning should feel exclusive, punishing and highly-frictional, bc the only knowledge that matters is the kind that was tedious to attain!

I would like to add on another reason as to why some sentences are needlessly complicated: avoiding plagiarism. I find myself having to make sentences more complicated or phrased in unique ways just to make sure I don't end up getting flagged for plagiarism for the one concept that has been explained by thousands of papers written about it before I have.... so that's where I stand

I only just finished grad school and I'm still trying to figure out how to write. You're absolutely right that school failed us, and it can be pretty overwhelming. I still feel like I'm just randomly flailing around when I try to write. Here is some useful advice I've received. 1. Know your audience: 1a: Know what counts as common knowledge vs what needs to be spelled out (this can vary drastically depending on the audience even if you assume the audience is made up of academics in your general field of study). 1b: Know which details are important to the audience, and which details they won't care about. 1c: Remember that only maybe 1% of readers will bother to look into the part of the research you spent 99% of your time on. 2. Be Concise. 3. Include every remotely relevant argument. 4. Be sure to frequently remind the reader of any pertinent information as they will likely only be skimming your paper. 5. Avoid repetition. 6. Cite everyone who has done anything remotely related to what you do. 7. Avoid using too many citations. 8. Be upfront and transparent about any flaws or omissions in your results/methodology. 9. But always do so in a way that shines your work in a positive light. 10. Repeat 8 and 9 for every paper you discuss, especially the ones with flaws that motivated your current work. 11. Be sure to frequently remind the reader that your work is relevant, but never let the reader notice you doing it. 12. Be as precise as possible. Dot every i and cross every t. Vagueness is a cardinal sin. 13. Did I mention be concise? It's pretty amazing how quickly a writing sample can get garbled when for every statement, you have to 1. qualify exactly what assumptions you are making, 2. qualify exactly what you are concluding, 3. be very clear about what conclusions do not follow from your statement, 4. include your level of certainty if your statement involves any uncertainty at all (e.g. statistical analysis, broader interpretation of your/other people's results or discussion about future directions of research). So yeah, there's a reason academic writing is so dense.

The rule for essays we were always taught was that it needed to be exactly five paragraphs, each paragraph having one topic, and that each paragraph needed to have at least five sentences. There was also the opening and the closing which I forge what those are called and don't remember if they were included in the five paragraphs. Anyway, I always hated it and could never do it that way. And therefore I was deemed to be bad at writing essays. On the other hand, I'm great at narrative and it's literally my favorite hobby and I hope to write a novel.

I think this can extend way beyond writing: I am not great at math, but I think I could have been. I think the stumbling block was 1. having a very bad math teacher for two years in high school (suck it, Mrs. Palmer), and 2. most, if not all, of my math teachers were instinctually good at math from the beginning. I wasn't learning from someone who themselves had to 'learn' math, I was learning from people whose expectation was that I would 'get it' like they did.

Paused to say props to the blur effect on the jargon definition text. I love how it keeps me from disengaging from the video to read it, and I also love how it matches the degree to which the wall behind is naturally out of focus. It's like it actually popped up on the wall and you filmed it in real life. *chef's kiss*

I said almost the exact words as Sabrina reading a case the other day. Except, I came to the conclusion it was poorly written not because it was needlessly stuffy and wordy (thought it was this, too), but because the “sentence” I was reading was actually 1.5 sentences. At some point the authors started a sentence, gave up on it, and started a new sentence. They never removed the bits of the orphaned sentence, though. Every single case from this textbook has been like this, with glaring grammar issues. Copy editors need work. You’d think these textbooks companies could hire a few with how much they charge us. Or at the very least, the professors who wrote the cases could have had a graduate TA proofread their work…

it's more of a problem in anglo-centric universities, because for example in Italy we speak a lot more, a lot of our exams could be both oral and written, so you have to be somewhat decent at speaking - or the professors will fail you.

For a good insight into issues regarding education and grading, the youtube channel Zoe Bee has a fantastic video called 'Grading is A Scam (and Motivation is a Myth)' also, writing reports for corporations and local government is a whole different type of madness. Believe me.

Thank you! Reflecting on this video that I was taught in school and uni to write to express my knowledge. Now I know the audience is truly the priority and possible to reach. I've been stuck on writing to get information across in my job and this really helped ☺️

I actually find this interesting, since in my school all my teachers hated it when kids used elongated sentences and fancy words

The ironic thing is language keeps evolving newer and newer slang, grammatical rules and other funny ways of saying things yet we're constantly told we shouldn't write/say that because it's not proper when 80-90% of our time is spent talking with our friends, family, significant others and other people we know. This happens across all languages not just English. It's like teachers don't have all the answers and we're at the forefront of culture.

this is literally what has been my uphill battle for the latest 5 years and all of the things I have complained about in the process, I wish the educational community in general could grasp an ounce of what this video has expressed in 10 minutes

This video sums up why I hated grad school. We had to read tons or articles each week and some of the writing was so convoluted and dense. Grad school also made me discover I also had ADHD, so that probably didn't help either.

This is why I love the RU-vid channel Two Minute Papers. They summarize technical academic papers in an easily digestible format.

So sorry for the second comment but the fact that I got my BeReal notification while you were talking about BeReal made me laugh to the point of crying. Like I said before, you guys never cease make me laugh or genuinely connect with the content. Thanks guys!

Isaac Asimov has a few pieces of fiction that he wrote in the style of academic papers to remind himself how to write badly again when he was getting back into professional research. "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" and Pâté de Foie Gras". Valid to write your own ofc, but imo these both have great examples of bad sentences that I wouldn't feel bad using as examples 😂

I recently noticed that I feel like I never fully learned why we format sentences the way we do. In elementary school, no one ever explained the different parts of speech beyond nouns and verbs. My mom was talking to a principal about it and she said that a lot of early schools now tend to teach students more about just trying to convey their thoughts instead of literally how to write sentences and that really bothered me. I'm left with "put a comma when you think there should be a pause" and other unhelpful nonsense. sorry for rambling lol this bothers me also PENSSSSS

This explains my experience so well! At my high school, we were asked our opinions then told to back them up. This approach shows thought about the topic while also teaching you to communicate a new idea. That's why I feel comfortable writing in non-academic settings compared to my college friends.

This was fantastically edited and made - well done everyone involved :)

This is so accurate! You've explained so well what I experienced but never really understood. I loved writing when I was a kid, but school taught me to be afraid of attempting to write because they made it so stressful and useless. Any essay I ever submitted has only ever been read *once* - by the teacher marking it. What a waste of time. And I love sharing knowledge but school also taught me that being a teacher or academic would suck (that part about grading crappy essays!)

I think "writing to demonstrate knowledge" is a good way to describe a lot of academic papers. I've come across so many that are clearly not written with any thought given to the fact that, in theory, *other people should be able to read them* . Its not just sentence structure and being needlessly verbose, either, so many papers are an absolute mess at higher levels of organization as well. They just arent communicated in a coherent way from start to finish.

In my college composition course, we were taught to make the sentences easy to read and split all sentences that are too long into multiple little sentences. My professor said that was how we should write. Clear, concise, and meaningful. She said that people who write too long with too many words often doesn’t have that many things to say. They just want the length. Then came a research course, and it was like all those academia and I went through a different curriculum for composition. 😂

Congratulations on receiving so much support over the years. Thank you for the amazing content.

This kinda relates to what I majored in: technical communication (translating what engineers/scientists/etc say/write so everyone else understands what they are trying to say/write and so much more). Anything can be written well if you either know how to rework it, try long enough to get it right, or ask the right person for help.

grats on the big 1 mil, and hears to a million more! you guys deserve so many more than that just based off of your narration and all the research that goes behind every video.

I feel like this is why having students write argumentative essays is good. You have to gather information from your own research that backs up your point and your teacher and those who are peer editing your essay have to understand the point that you’re trying to get across. You have to think more about what you’re writing and how to convey it than in your traditional informative essay

I enjoyed this video, and it hits on some of the primary issues in science communication and how we are taught to write. I often do wonder about the external circumstances surrounding academic writing, in the sense that in order to be successful in science, it often asks you to be a great communicator, a great scientist and a great teacher. Meeting these requirements and often having to write in English even if it is not your first language must be a circumstance of contention for the quality of your paper. Food for thought.

I know that it might be weird opinion but i have to share it. I generally liked grammar and poetry lessons (Polish subject in my country). I liked to study about literary periods (romanticism and baroque) and talking (analyzing) about various poetic texts in classes. It means that I developed some kind of interest in philology and linquistics in highschool. As a student though i didn't care so much about writing essays in school and always halfassed it only to get decent grades. I don't treat it like real writing and don't care about it after all.

literally before the video even started I knew what you were going to say. And it's not just writing, it's also every aspect of life. The worst thing that I encounter as an activist is people who want to debate you because they don't actually care and they just think that they know the right answer and they want to show you.

I really love watching all three of you make videos. You guys always pick such interesting topics, and I find that this topic is a bit close to my heart. I want to be an academic and I don't want to be an academic that can't be understood so I'm saving this video and hoping I can learn to strike that balance between necessary jargon and "this is coherent enough to read."

At my Uni, everyone that's doing a Computer Science or Information Science degree (with some other majors too) is required to take a technical writing class where it touches on this same exact point. Very well made video!

I feel school (at least mine with a few good teachers) had a good writing classes, where presenting your reasoning clearly was more important than "demonstrating knowledge". Even the high school / college entry exams measure essays like that. With that in mind, I used to be a very good writer back then. Fast forward my master's degree dissertation (and even academic internship reports), my advisor stated I wasn't writing well enough _for academia_ . It also doesn't help my doctoral's advisor is a terrible communicator yet... he's a professor and I couldn't even finish my doctorals (for many reasons but still).

5:43 THANK YOU!!! You've perfectly summarized why I'm totally happy to spend hours composing a comment/post to answer someone's question online but I can't stand writing a basic 2-page essay for a class

I am in love with this channel. I need to watch all your videos. Really, thank you for the great material. I feel learning a lot more here then I ever did at school or university.