“Academics are just like anyone else,” Farmer continued. “The more effort we make them go through to understand what we’re saying, the more likely they are to give up in frustration and look for a paper that is clearer.”
Co-author Nooshin Warren, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, said, “You know, in talking to people about this, they would either say, ‘Yes, know we need to write clearly, and we do write clearly,’ or the other way around: ‘No, if I’m writing for academics, I need to sound smart.’ So empirically being able to prove, with evidence, that this problem exists will bring attention to it.”