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8:52am June 22, 2014
gingerautie asked: Hi! About the EPF article. That language is seriously impenetrable, and I'm a hyperlexic psychology student. I'm fighting through it, and getting like 80%? But my mentor is a phd student who's doing autism research, and she gets a lot of this stuff better than I do. From what I can get of the article, this theory is seriously important, and probably the actually accurate explaination. Which means it's important for autistic people to be able to read. So, I'm going to go through it, with my [1/2]

amorpha-system:

amorpha-system:

youneedacat:

clatterbane:

withasmoothroundstone:

Yeah.  I wasn’t kidding about the language.  I can only get bits and pieces.  But the bits and pieces I can see, tell me there’s something seriously important in there that’s getting missed everywhere else.  Everywhere else.  I only wish they could have released a plain English translation.  It might not help that English is not the first language of many of the researchers.

I am usually decent at wading through. But that one I am having to come back to later and try again. Glad in a way that it’s not just me, but in some others really not so glad. :-|

Yeah.  For me, it’s taken years.  And years.  And years.  Ever since it was released, pretty much.  And I still only understand parts of it.  Someone said they might be able to translate it into plain English or plainer English at least, later this summer, which would be amazing, but if they can’t, that’s understandable too.

It looks like I MIGHT be able to get through it, if I go slowly.  I read some fairly dense scientific papers when we were at university, and I’ve read and understood some rather neuroscience-heavy debunkings of brain sex differences BS.  The thing is, it all depends whether it’s just heavy on legitimate technical scientific jargon, or if it’s loaded with “rhetoric” of the sort that effectively locks us out of most gender theory and, unfortunately and ironically, an increasing amount of disability theory these days, when it’s all coming from academia and its in-talk (like that “Rhetorical Gendering of Autism and the Incrementum” paper or whatever the heck it was called, that we could seriously only read by using find-and-replace to substitute various words with “IN SPACE” and similar things).  

As a general rule of thumb, I can get through the first if I go slowly, but the second is just completely impenetrable to us.  And when we can pick meaning out of it, it generally seems to be a bunch of self-evident (to us, anyway) facts padded out to unnecessary length with that “rhetoric” stuff.  But it looks from what little I’ve read that the stuff involved here is legitimate scientific terminology, so I might be able to do something with it.

-Julian

Oh yeah, reblogging this to add a few things I thought of later, as a note to everyone who may be trying to get through it and is “feeling stupid” for not understanding the language being used:

There are, in fact, a lot of scientists who are good scientists and practice good methodology and all that, but are not particularly good writers, as far as making their material readily understandable.  When we were at university, I read several papers where I understood most or all of the technical terminology, but it still felt like the sentences were dense with something that was blocking me from understanding the meaning of the overall thing.

The mark of a good science writer is being able to juggle around a lot of technical vocabulary and explain it all in a way that’s understandable to people outside the field, if they know the meanings of the technical terms which are being used.  There’s a way of writing that’s.. I want to compare it to legalese, but the thing is, from everything we’ve heard from people in the legal field, legalese is almost sort of like a separate dialect. (One which is also interesting from a linguistic standpoint, since it preserves a lot of older meanings of certain words, which no longer mean the same thing outside the legal system, and archaic syntax, with stuff like “Comes now the plaintiff and states…”, etc.) And scientific papers where I could understand the terminology but struggled with the overall gist of the thing didn’t seem so much like a separate dialect to me as just.. people not being able to explain themselves very clearly, even when the research was sound.  

tl;dr: A lot of good scientists are bad writers, when it comes to making their writing understandable even to people familiar with the field.  Inability to understand it can say more about them than it does about you.

(There might also be an issue where a paper can come out disjointed if it has a lot of co-writers working on it.  I often found papers written by one person, or by a collaborating team, to be more understandable than papers with five or six co-authors.)

-Julian