We love our work very much.

We're work lovers. Just say it.

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, why is academic writing so bad?

Why don't we turn it into a mad libs?

All you have to do is drop down menus and fill in the blank.

Also, what does your perfect day look like?

And what's preventing you from having more of them?

It's sunny and 77 degrees today, going up from a high of 76 yesterday.

Angela, we have a listener question from one David Bowling.

Here is my question, David writes.

Why is academic writing so bad?

Part of the answer, he writes, must be that the incentives make it bad.

That is to gain tenure and to get published in academic journals, one is rewarded for

the denseness of one's writing, not whether it can be easily understood. Also, conciseness and clarity are not rewarded. Rather, they are penalized. Is conciseness a word? I think concisness is a word, but it's not the most concise of words, is it? I was thinking it was concision somehow. I feel like we should be able to do it in

fewer than three syllables. All right. Anyway, let's assume that conciseness is a word and move on.

David Bowling continues, how did this come to be? Has it always been like this, or is this a recent

development? Is it possible to change the incentives so that the good research is rewarded and

bad writing is not. Is there any current

effort to change the incentives? Wow, David Bowling has a lot of questions. I like him.

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