In a somatic society which promotes visible, idealized forms of embodiment, men are increasingly being interpellated [sic] as image-conscious body-subjects. Some research suggests that men negotiate appearance issues in complex and varied ways, partly because image concerns are conventionally feminized. However, little research has considered how overweight men construct body projects in the context of weight loss, or how men talk to each other about weight management efforts. Since sources of information and support for overweight men are now provided online, including dedicated weight loss discussion forums, our analysis focuses on one such forum, linked to a popular male-targeted magazine. We conducted a thematic analysis of selected extracts from seven threads on the forum. Our analysis suggests a widespread focus on appearance, as well as the use of emotion categories when describing difficult bodily experiences. Invariably, however, such talk was carefully constructed and constrained by hegemonic masculinities founded on discipline, work-orientation, pragmatism and self-reliance. The findings are discussed in relation to magazine masculinities and aesthetics, as well as literature on male embodiment.Phew. Now I think it's fair to say that this is a typical example of what might be called the "social sciences style" of writing. That's why I've chosen to blog about it; nothing I'm going to say is a criticism of this paper as such, but rather of the whole genre.
Why do social scientists write like this?
This paper is about a really interesting topic - the mixed messages men get about what it means to be "a man" or "manly" in today's society. Very topical, not at all 'niche', and important in lots of ways. So why is it written in a way which makes it impenetrable to all except specialists?
I don't think it has to be that way. I've rewritten this abstract, and I've tried to say the same thing without the jargon:
Modern men face a dilemma: society tells them that they ought to have an attractive body, but they are also warned that being concerned about beauty and body image is a feminine trait. However, little research has considered how overweight men think and talk about weight loss. Online weight loss forums offer a window onto such issues, so we analyzed seven threads from one such site, linked to a popular men's magazine. We found that while men took part in (often emotional) discussions of their own appearances and bodies, they always framed such talk strictly within conventionally "masculine" terms such as discipline, work-orientation, pragmatism and self-reliance. We discuss this, in the context of men's magazines treatment of masculinity and male beauty, and relate this to previous work.Whether I've succeeded, I'll leave others to judge, but I think I have and there's no trick to it - I just read the original, tried to understand it, and wrote down my thoughts.
I'm not saying that the original abstract was "badly written". I suspect it was quite expertly written but that the purpose of writing it was less to communicate ideas clearly, than to satisfy some set of criteria of what 'serious social science' should be like.
If I'm right - isn't that a shame? The ideas here deserve a wide audience, so why aren't they aimed at one?
Bennett E, and Gough B (2012). In pursuit of leanness : The management of appearance, affect and masculinities within a men's weight loss forum. Health (London, England : 1997) PMID: 22815334
44 comments:
I agree, but it can be difficult to break the stylistic issue on one's own. I've written papers in such a style which have immediately aggravated reviewers by 'not being written in an academic style' - change the wording and hey presto!, the paper with the same info in it flies through even though I felt it was a poorer read. We need a change across the whole field which encourages accessible writing.
IPBS once asked to write a comment on an jargon heavy phenomenology article. The focus ended up being on authors' obligation to write coherently, especially when offering alternative approaches to the mainstream (an equal problem for the ecological psychology crowd and some behaviorists). The article starts with a simple premise:
The biggest problem with cognitivism is that it is very useful.
If you have trouble accessing it, let me know and I'll set up another link.
pbhpsych, Wow. I can't believe a reviewer would complain that a paper is written in a non-academic style! What field was this in?
"your writing doesn't look sciencey enough" is a criticism I could only imagine hearing in a field that is worried about its standing as a 'science'.
But also, Neuoskeptic, come on. You write an easy to read blog post like every other day. Just because it's easy for you to rewrite their intro doesn't mean it would be easy for everyone.
Spot on! This is exactly the kind of thing http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/ campaigns on, and has become a sought-after award for many public/private organisations.
The style critiqued here seems (to me) to be symptomatic of how academia has become much too segregated into silos of specialism. To much depth and not enough breadth. This might be one reason that more multi-disciplinary subjects and research institutes seem to be in the ascendency.
I agree completely. As a scientist who reads social science research occasionally I find a lot of it completely impenetrable. Surely if social scientist s improved their writing they'd get more citations and their impact factors wd go up. There's a real incentive!
Part of the problem is that scientists write for scientists, however wider dissemination of the information is limited by this.
As a journalist I would say if the abstract is so dense as to be incomprehensible without looking up every other concept (also written in impenetrable prose)it is much easier to go on to other work that is more easily translated for the mainstream press and lay public.
Pity you didn't enter into the content. Most 'real' males don't post on such men's fora. That's for metrosexuals.
So what the paper does is measuring the behavior of a tiny select group of the male population, those in between male and female but still mostly heterosexual with enough money to afford skin products.
If anything it proves that social science is a misnomer. There is nothing scientific about it.
Robin, you said, Part of the problem is that scientists write for scientists, however wider dissemination of the information is limited by this.
Maybe the problem is the inferiority complex gripping social scientists because they are not "real" scientists.
Good heavens, we were arguing about whether or not psychology is a science when I was first in grad school in 1968!
There is nothing especially "social science" about the difficulty in comprehending this abstract, it is an example of typically scholarly writing - common across science and social science. Our friend neuroskeptic has been able to rewrite it to be easier to read because he is a good writer. Good writing is simply very difficult, and rare even in academia (where there is the additional challenge of obeying disciplinary conventions)
Definitely. The most important class I've taken in grad school so far was a professional communication course heavily focused on writing skills. Unfortunately, only ~4 grad students were in the class. It illustrates the focus we (don't) put on clear communication.
I gave my summer undergraduate some feedback on his presentation, with the biggest criticism being his excessive use of jargon. "But that's how professors talk!" was his defense. Students think in order to sound smart they must sound pompous. Our models suck.
Sure, why call it gravity if we could call it "the reason things fall to the ground".
Sociology is a science. And like any science, it takes an effort to understand the correct meaning and implications of vocabulary. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate information to the layman. Deal with it.
Each area of academia has it's own esoteric jargon, that requires a background in the field to understand, be it psychology, physics, literature or engineering. Succinct communication at this level in any field appears dense and impenetrable to the lay reader.
Sociology isn't science since it doesn't deal with empirical repeatable evidence. Sociology (and the rest of the ologies) is an abstract concept based on behavioral observations. As such as far away from science as you can get. The observer plays a role in the process.
I don't really understand the point of this. The rewritten abstract is a simplified version of the first, with all the limitations that 'simplified' implies. Sure, it's easier for someone who's not familiar with the discipline to understand, but
a. it's not equivalent to the longer abstract ('somatic society' has gone missing, 'hegemonic' is not the same as 'conventional' etc.)
and
b. since the article's in a specialist journal it's, er, not completely unreasonable for the authors to expect the readers to understand the specialist language!
Every human activity has specialist, technical language, from cookery (wtf is 'deglazing'?) to chemistry. It's not the preserve of the social sciences; it's not even the preserve of academia.
What this article highlights is simply what we consider to be common technical language, and what we consider to be uncommon. Oh, and a lot of bigotry about the value of social sciences.
Sociology seems always uses the longest word possible, whereas physical sciences use most confusing acronym necessary. But both have their reasons for being the way they are.
Sociology does place a lot of value on linguistic precision.
They study the use of language in intricate detail in order to come to their conclusions. So is it really any wonder that they are so careful in their communications?reviewers will no just be scrutinizing their data, but their paper in order to scan for biases in the researchers themselves. In an academic discipline such as this, the revelation of such biases can bring the research into question.
Anonymous: "Sociology is a science. And like any science, it takes an effort to understand the correct meaning and implications of vocabulary."
But there's a difference between, say, chemistry and sociology. Chemistry has a technical vocabulary largely because chemists talk about things that other people don't. A chemist has to use (say) the unusual word "heterocyclic" because ordinary people never talk about that thing, making the word unusual.
But sociology is about everyday life, and everyone talks about the objects of sociology all the time, so that doesn't apply.
Anonymous: "The rewritten abstract is a simplified version of the first, ...it's not equivalent to the longer abstract ('somatic society' has gone missing, 'hegemonic' is not the same as 'conventional' etc.)"
Well, 'somatic society' is gone from my version of the abstract because it doesn't appear in the full paper.
Given that the authors did not consider it important enough to write about, I don't think it ought to be in the abstract...!
Likewise, I got rid of "interpellated" because that word appears only once in the full paper.
As for "hegemonic" not being the same as "conventional", I'll grant you that point.
But there are plenty of other bits where I'd really struggle to defend the original wording:
"promotes visible, idealized forms of embodiment, men are increasingly being interpellated as image-conscious body-subjects."
vs
"society tells [men] that they ought to have an attractive body"
I put it to you that those two fragments denote the same thing.
P.S. "Oh, and a lot of bigotry about the value of social sciences."
Mmm. I said that this article - and by extension, social sciences - was interesting, topical, important and deserved a wide audience.
My whole point is that it's a shame that it's written in an inaccessible way because it's valuable.
I am sorry, but there is no reason why anyone should write like that, and I say this as a humanities scholar, used to a very similar epidemic of mambo-jambo. "Gravity" is a term that cannot be translated without explaining its meaning analytically when you use it in the constext of a particular discipline, like ´metaphor´or ´suburbanization´. But ´visible, idealized forms of embodiment´ is just a long mouthful that can be easily translated as ´body image´. The same with ´construct body projects in the context of weight loss´ and most of it and, to be honest, this is not the worst example that one can find of pointless academic obscurity. If anythiong this just complicates the reading to anyone who is not exposed to this baroque language everyday and hides the importance and relevance of the actual research.
Funniest post I've read in a long time! Since my background is in anthro and psych, I completely understand what you're talking about. YES it is typical of social science writing. Why? It's the science complex, by which I mean, social scientists have a complex about being scientists. They want to be scientists, but deep down we feel like we really aren't. The writing style is all about sounding sciency and smart. If we used plain English we'd sound like cultural critics, jounalists, and bloggers. God forbid!
petrossa: "Sociology (and the rest of the ologies) is an abstract concept based on behavioral observations. As such as far away from science as you can get."
Cosmology? I concur. A large fraction of the science is as far away from anywhere as you can get.
Not all social scientists are like that.
As to why, many think, mistakenly, that the ability to use long words and complicated sentences is a sign of intelligence. Some use complicated construction to hide the fact that they have nothing to say.
Neuroskeptic, I have a comment on your post and on your last comment.
Staying away from particulars and blanket statements is important in an abstract, I think. But your first sentence states the entire group of modern men face a particular dilemma, "Modern men face a dilemma: society tells them that they ought to have an attractive body, but they are also warned that being concerned about beauty and body image is a feminine trait." Maybe it's a generational or cultural thing but most of the modern men I know don't have this dilemma. The dilemmas of a couple dozen men on a Men's Health forum can hardly make a statement about whether this is a dilemma for modern men in general.
Second, I have an unrelated comment on your comment saying "My whole point is that it's a shame that it's written in an inaccessible way because it's valuable." The shame is that PubMed and nearly every other academic journal is ACTUALLY inaccessible to most people (as in, you need paid log-in info to view it). What's the point of making the language more accessible if the general public will never read it because it's reserved for academics?
"bigotry" anon, here! That comment was directed at the comments more than the post, and I think stands.
re. this
"promotes visible, idealized forms of embodiment, men are increasingly being interpellated as image-conscious body-subjects."
vs
"society tells [men] that they ought to have an attractive body"
no, those are emphatically NOT the same. You've lost a lot of information between those two sentences - information which might not matter to you, but could be interesting or provocative to a reader, or which might give a reader an idea of the sort of paper the authors were trying to write and what sort of literature they were using (that's what 'somatic society' is doing in the abstract, I bet).
“visible, idealized forms of embodiment”. Firstly, ‘embodiment’ does not mean merely ‘having a body’ or ‘body image’. Secondly, the ‘visible’ matters, so when you say ‘society tells men’ you’re not making clear that you’re emphasising the use of the visible, rather than, say, the written word. (e.g. Society might ‘tell’ men not to worry about their body image using words in lovely body-accepting articles in magazines, and then undermine it by only presenting buff, attractive men in all the adverts in that magazine; a sociologist needs to be able to distinguish between those two sorts of ‘tells’). Likewise with all the other ‘technical’ words you’ve lost: ‘image-conscious’ matters, because what society is ‘telling’ is not just ‘you ought to have an attractive body’ but also ‘you need to care about your body-image (and those of other people too)’ (which is the source of the dilemma the paper is investigating, so is quite important!).
It’s not just gratuitous use of jargon. It means something. The rewritten ‘simple’ abstract roughly conveys the meaning of the first, but in doing so it has lost a lot of information and subtlety. There are good reasons to use words like ‘embodied’ and ‘somatic’ (and for an excellent explanation of the meaning and value of other ‘technical’ soc sci words, hegemonic and discourse, there’s this brilliant post: http://www.overthinkingit.com/2012/07/18/video-games-political-correctness).
Andy Balmer has some good comments on this over at his blog.
Thanks for the link to my blog. I think it's interesting that this is stirring up some debate. It's good to see different opinions on both the social science and natural science side. As regards the well-entrenched discussion of whether social sciences are indeed sciences, I would point to the many different ways of thinking about sociology that sociologists have themselves put forward. Zygmunt Bauman considers sociology to be 'responsible speech' and Pierre Bourdieu says sociology is a 'martial art'. The question of what constitutes a science is an important one, but so is the issue of why we wish to demarcate in the first place. There are plenty of good reasons to try to separate out science from non-science, but there are some less obvious and more problematic reasons for that work as well. I shall stop there, or else I'll be writing a further post!
Strangely I don't agree with NS because I understood the article. 'embodiment', 'aesthetics' are laiden terms in philosophy. The article makes perfect sense to me academically. My only critique is their attempt to conduct scientific evidence based experiments which then come off as mediocre psychology. It's a fine line. I noticed this particularly in philosophy much akin to neuroscientists testing everything and attributing to brain regions and thinking their research is hot but devoid of academic substance. - Those trained in philosophy try to remain relevant by conducting experiments but then come off as ridiculous.
Scientific observation is prescriptive, empirical whatever, it's different to the arts which rely on discourse, traditional academia, language based, hermeneutics. Science just records stuff and picks out trends. It never really has answers but just plenty of solutions to problems some relevant or not. It doesn't really teach you how to think about problems, in that respects it's not fulfilling yet you can immerse yourself in plenty of detail and learn to appreciate those details. Stuff like philosophy, morality, ethics, aesthetics, enlightenment, economics, this is where the hardcore stuff happens. Politics, nation states rely on these thinkers to shape the future.
This is a great post! As a researcher who tends to write shorter and simpler sentences, I have frequently come up against co-authors who will try to "offer comments/suggestions" for editing my prose, which will invariably make it far more convoluted than it needs to be. Of course, there are times when you do need technical language to express certain concepts, but we could save a lot of time, space, confusion, and probably paper, if we all just expressed our thoughts more simply.
Just a few points:
- yes your version is easier to understand for a layperson
- but, as mentioned, you lose information. Examples have been given. Interpellation is a technical term, I think by J Fiske (Hailing and Interpellation). Whether this is actually used in the paper is another matter.
Because tech terms in humanities tend to sound like ordinary Language, many people assume they understand them, but often they are wrong.
- I think a mix of both versions would be best.
About sociology:
People tend to think sociology is just "talking about stuff". But, most sociology is strictly empirical.
Access to scientific work via open internet publication systems will drive the snake-oil-supporting jargon out of publications. Gone will be the day when writing is the focus of academic work. Information will be king and many many emperors will be exposed as never having been clothed.
Sorry but I can't agree with you on this one Neuroskeptic. I spend most of my time reading neuroscience papers full of easily-simplified jargon that would drive a lay reader insane. Much of this content would be more accessible if the specialist language was removed, but then specialists would complain of a lack of specificity of ideas.
For what it's worth, I had absolutely no trouble understanding the article abstract you posted sans translation. If this criticism applies to the social sciences, then it applies to all academic disciplines.
Personally, it sounds like you just have it out for social scientists. Now, that may be well deserved, but criticizing other academic disciplines for esoteric writing when your own has so much is a bit of a low blow, don't you think?
I can vouch much required writing in academia to be, indeed, poor. However, I think this is a problem across the field, not just in social science/humanities. I've seen dissertations by molecular biologists that were nearly unreadable, but the thing is that with the hard sciences, people expect a certain amount of jargon, or at least don't expect its findings to be so readily intelligible as a Popular Science article. As the overwhelming majority of responses here seem to bring out, there's a tendency to be less tolerant regarding social science jargon because people assume lay expertise on its subject matter (heck, I watch TV, I know all there is to know about sex, language and culture), but also because it is perceived as economically useless: you can't - or so it is believed - translate the findings into military dominance/economic influence like 'tech' related disciplines; hell, you can't even make it into an entertaining read for lay people, so what's it good for, right? But these same criticisms can be leveled at the more fundamental sciences. Sure, there are the Steven Hawkingses of this world, who have been capable of popularizing to an extent specialist and not necessarily commonsense subject matter. i guarantee, an average theoretical physics article will be as jargon laden and abstruse as any from the domain of social sciences as you'll find. But then usually people don't have the gal to call Stephen Hawking a sexually neurotic spaz projecting his own psychological fixations onto his subject. Again, unlike social scientists, whom the general public know from the get go to be full of crap, despite having no first hand knowledge of current debates in social science. We know it's crap if I can't read it without having to look up a term every now and then, right?
hey, i completely disagree with you. what did you say, social scientists write "in a way which makes it impenetrable to all except specialists?" Come on, it is impenetrable to all except to none, not even the true God.
I am not saying that 'embodiment' is not a technical word, but, and i think that that is the most valid point of this post, you don't need that level of qualification in an abstract. That, if anything, will detract non experts from reading your book. You can discuss embodiment and embodied congnition and what have you in the bopok itself, but as a summary of your research findings you don't need that level of precision, at least if you want to be read by anyone outside of your tribe. And yes, I agree that this is not the worst case of excesive use of jargon and that it affects other disciplines as wel, including mathematics, physics etc.
Re what is a science... Well, I don't care too much to be honest: I am quite happily to be considered a humanities academic if you think that social and human sciences are not really sciences because they deal with human rather natural phenomena. But that's a question for philosophy of science, which is probably not a science either...
Anonymous said, "Sociology is a science. And like any science, it takes an effort to understand the correct meaning and implications of vocabulary. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate information to the layman. Deal with it."
I actually do deal with it everyday. You missed the point.
Research funds don't just fall out of the sky like manna from heaven. If you cannot communicate the value of your research in easily understandable terms why should those "laymen" aka politicians fund your research?
And if your work isn't important enough to explain to "laymen" aka taxpayers why should they fund you?
If your work cannot be communicated easily and understandably in the social sciences why should society pay attention?
Sociologist here (put DOWN the pitchforks and torches!). I'm not here to defend my discipline's horrid writing. Rather, I'd like to use my sociological skills to analyze this problem of impenetrable academic language.
The original abstract is class "in-group" behaviour, which is the concerted effort to reflect the speech, comportment and "habitus" of those dominant within this group.
I myself am a clear writer, as I was a journalist. I have been accused by fellow sociologists of writing too simply. Really what they object to is my refusal to bow down to fellow sociologists, in favour of educating the public. In this sense, I am upending the hierarchy, which we can all agree usually results in resistance.
So for those of you who a) think sociologists cannot write and b) think sociological analysis is not systematic or infused with theoretical rigour, I suggest you think again. I just used SOCIOLOGY to explain this.
sladner: Well said, thanks.
Because if we don't get our research published in niche discipline specific journals we don't fulfill our REF commitments and we lose our bloody jobs! iclurni
I would argue that social "science" needs to become more at ease with its own identity, and reiterate what others have said about how such academic bluster serves as a smoke screen to misdirect attention away from what is essentially now a hermeneutic, philosophical discipline.
Social "science" retains a methodological approach, but IMO it is precluded from being a "traditional" science overall, which is not a criticism. The worst parts of social science are those that work in an ecologically invalid laboratory setting and utilise statistical inference.
The critical perspectives in modern sociology and social psychology are vital to the field as a whole and offer the most useful insight into society and the mind. Writing in an accessible, engaging fashion would serve it tremendously.
People are correct that some information may be lost in the simplified rewrite. The issue is whether that information is important enough to justify a less readable summary. Is the information truly important, is it a "difference that makes a difference".
People sometimes try to use more precise technical words to appear more "scientific". Often less precise non-domain specific words would convey the same meaning to those familiar with the subject who "read between the lines" to infer the the domain specific usage of the generic term while still making it somewhat understandable to those outside the specific niche.
Sometimes the use of more precise words is done to give a false sense that there is added information being conveyed when in reality there is no useful information lost using more generic words, or the information lost as I said is trivial and unimportant.
I agree with your ideology regarding simpler writing styles, but your rewriting of the abstract contains some grammatical errors. First, you use the word 'so' as a conjuction:
Online weight loss forums offer a window onto such issues, so we analyzed seven threads from one such site, linked to a popular men's magazine.
Second, you did not include an apostrophe in a posessive:
We discuss this, in the context of men's magazines treatment of masculinity and male beauty, and relate this to previous work.
"Men's magazines" should really be written as "men's magazines'".
Regarding the comment I just made, I have noticed that I made the mistake of writing what should have been "you used" as "you use".
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