Academic language…you have to wonder
My colleague, Ian MacMillan, brought to my attention the abstract for a paper on sleep deprivation and team performance which appeared in the most recent edition of one of our academic journals. It reads, as follows:
We introduce the construct of sleep deprivation to the team-level management literature by integrating theory and research on sleep deprivation and group behavior. We propose that sleep deprivation has a negative monotonic, but nonlinear, influence on team decision-making accuracy and problem solving. We then propose that task, structural, and social characteristics accentuate or attenuate the influence of sleep deprivation on team decision-making accuracy and problem solving.
Quite a set of statements.
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- Posted: Tuesday, May 12, 2009
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Rita, we are not allowed to use the “h” word in our house, but if you don’t tell my wife and kids I will confide to you that I HATE this academic language. It’s awful and so difficult to read! Do journals require folks to write this way?
If they had written instead,
We assert that sleep deprivation harms group performance. We study how task, structure and company cultures contribute to sleep deprivation. Finally, we look at how companies can make changes in these areas to reduce deprivation and thereby improve performance.
Would it have been approved by the journal?
I can’t tell you whether that particular article would have been approved by the journal, but I do know that often, when you put academic findings in plain language, they seem to lose a lot of their so-called sophistication. One of my favorites is a $300,000 study that found that biotechnology companies whose IPO’s were underwritten by more prestigious investment banks raised more capital than IPO’s that were underwritten by less prestigious ones. Well….duh!
Or the $150,000 study that spent months studying family businesses only to find that succession is often an issue.
My colleauges and I out of despair coined the “six smart people” test—if six smart people in a room could predict the findings without you doing the study, work harder to find something less obvious to study.
We study the structure and company cultures contribute to sleep deprivation. We look at how companies can make changes in these areas to reduce deprivation and thereby improve performance.
My friend and I are doing a science fair project and we would like to know what effects sleep deprivation has on your reflexes and how we could test those effects.
I read your article.We study how task, structure and company cultures contribute to sleep deprivation. Finally, we look at how companies can make changes in these areas to reduce deprivation and thereby improve performance.
There is a word used in the academic level. It refers to the language level of a text, for example it defines if a text is academic, or sophisticated, or business, or casual. Or it may be used in defining the level of language used by the low-class people or high class people, as they use a different language.
It’s really an interesting topic,thanks for the post.
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