副标题:We analyse two centuries of scholarly work本篇主要说文章有越来越难度的趋势(经济学人衡量的方式不知道算不算科学,作为第二语言有时候很简单的词语对我来说也很难)
事件背景:发表庆祝其博士学位帖子If it was Ms Louks’s research topic (“olfactory ethics”—the politics of smell) that caught the attention of online critics, it was her verbose thesis abstract that further provoked their ire.帖子的可读性:Ms Louks’s abstract had a reading-ease rating of 15, still more readable than a third of those analysed in total.那真的超级难读了
经济学人分析文章难度的数据:To track academic writing over time, The Economist analysed 347,000 PhD abstracts published between 1812 and 2023. The dataset was produced by the British Library and represents a majority of English-language doctoral theses awarded by British universities.
经济学人分析句子和单词长度衡量可读性:A score of 100 roughly indicates passages can be understood by someone who has completed fourth grade in America (usually aged 9 or 10), while a score lower than 30 is considered very difficult to read. An average New York Times article scores around 50 and a CNN article around 70. This article scores 41.看来经济学人自己也知道自己的文章难读了
责任不全在作者:Other studies of academic writing have similar findings: scientific jargon and acronyms are on the rise. The blame does not fall solely on authors. Specialisation and advances in technology require more precise terminology and a doctoral thesis often covers some of the most obscure research topics越来越难读的话也不适用传播学吧