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This question is a reformulation of a previous one that I deleted. I'll try to be more specific.

I'm a student in the field of International Relations, a sub branch of the Political Sciences. Reading works in the Social Sciences, I'm becoming progressively aware that convoluted language and pedantry are a significant problem in academic writing.

Sometimes the text is as hard as philosophy, whilst expressing common, everyday knowledge of the field.

Other times, language is okay, but the author is pedant.

Now, I wanted to know:

How often - if at all - professional academic reviewers face this issue?

If they do, will a thesis or paper ever face problems due to language usage?

Post Script:

Writers have personal tendencies. One may write in excess detail, repeat themselves, lose focus, etc.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about affected, convoluted, artificial, forced and conceited use of language, as well as pedantry in its most evident forms.

As it turns out, I think I didn't make a good use of the "mannered" word. I edited the question to say "convoluted" instead.

I'm not a native speaker, so I think I failed to capture my intent here, anyways, a question was linked to this one that ultimately answers to much of my doubts.

Aygwqx
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    Your question itself is difficult to understand, due its use of "mannered" language. – mirrormere Jan 27 '21 at 14:51
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    @mirrormere I honestly don't see it that way. Could you please point it out for me, so maybe I can edit it? – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 14:53
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    @mirrormere In fact, I read my question again, it seems quite straightforward. To me it feels like you're trolling me when you say that. – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 14:58
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    What some see as pedantry, others see as accurancy – user2768 Jan 27 '21 at 15:19
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    What does mannered language mean? I presumed it was a technical term, and I was curious of the meaning, so I searched, but to no avail. – user2768 Jan 27 '21 at 15:23
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    "This question is a reformulation of a previous one that got deleted." - No, your previous question didn't "get deleted", you deleted it rather than responding to feedback in the comments. It's better to [edit] your questions and have them reopened. – Bryan Krause Jan 27 '21 at 16:00
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    Are you writing ironically in this style that bothers you? – Azor Ahai -him- Jan 27 '21 at 16:57
  • @BryanKrause I edited it to say I deleted it, which indeed was the case.

    I thought it would be less work to write another one then to edit that one.

    As to the "feedback", I consider feedback what you're doing here, namely, call to attention specific issues with the question. That was definitely not what most of those comments were, and the reason I didn't even bother responding.

     – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 16:59
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    @AzorAhai-him- No. Definitely not, – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 17:01
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    @EzequielBarbosa The feedback posted on the last version included that your question should be more concise, that it seemed more of a rant than a question, and a specific language critique in word placement. When an entire question has a problem (like when it is written in several paragraphs when it could be reduced to 3 sentences) it may not be possible to point to a more specific issue, as the issue is with the whole structure. As Azor Ahai points out, if anything it looks like you're trying to write in the style you abhor which seems troll-ish to me. It puzzles me this was not intended. – Bryan Krause Jan 27 '21 at 17:06
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    @BryanKrause I'm honestly not getting your point. I the fact I wrote another question makes it clear I read the comments and agreed with them. I just felt some of the comments were more attacks than feedbacks.

    Apart of that, I am yet to see it pointed where I use the same style I seem to abhor, which I specifically pointed out to be about writing text that's extremely hard to understand. I even compared it to philosophical text. I don't see how my original question relates to that at all, and you rather seem to be the troll.

     – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 17:17
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    For example, you've chosen to use the word "mannered" which many reading your question, myself included, a native English speaker, did not find clear. Could you have asked instead: "Do academic reviewers (peer reviewers, thesis committees) encounter authors making text extremely hard to understand, either by using uncommon vocabulary or excess detail? How do these language choices affect acceptance/rejection of submitted works or theses?" and meant the same thing? – Bryan Krause Jan 27 '21 at 17:35
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    I originally had thought that you had asked about convoluted, poor writing in papers, which is unfortunately not necessarily uncommon. After you clarified that you are truly asking about "mannered speech" in the dictionary sense, I can only wonder which field you are talking about because in the four stem fields I've read papers in (some more, some less), I never noticed any of it. Maybe you should at least indicate the field you are talking about. – gnometorule Jan 27 '21 at 17:36
  • @BryanKrause here we're starting to get productive. You gave an actual feedback there. i'm not a native speaker. I've been studying English for 14 years now, I think I speak, write and understand it very proficiently, but I did not have much contact with the language in the world out there...

    So granted, that's my fault, my knowledge of the language is not perfect, nor do I presume or intend it to be...

     – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 17:38
  • @gnometorule I've seen plenty of it. I think one of the earliest examples was from an anthropology article (in my own language) where they use words, apparently archaic, that are simply in none of the academic dictionaries in the language. Others are greek words, transcribed into portuguese. 4 of those first words are annotated in my notebook, they are nouns whose meanings I'm yet to discover. – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 17:42
  • @gnometorule another example is a text I read yesterday. It's an IR theory text that approaches a canonical topic in the field, namely the conflict between realist IR theory and others that came later.

    The guy is going to say something as simple as "To understand how IR theory defines the boundaries between what's possible political action and what's beyond that line (ldealisms, speculations ,etc.) makes you more aware of the conflict between realism and the new IR theories". He literally spends half a page, 23 lines, to say just that and nothing else. And that goes on in the whole text.

     – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 17:46
  • Hi, I was being sincere, I must excuse that my comment sounds confrontational in hindsight. I am from a very different field (CS) and wanted to point out your question is difficult for me to understand. This is not a failing on your part, but rather a measure of the distance between the literature that we read, conventions and registers vary more you we think. You'll rarely see reviewers directly commenting on this, they will most often either like the language register or they will have trouble understanding it, leading to reviews that misunderstand the text due to the communication barrier. – mirrormere Jan 27 '21 at 18:00
  • @mirrormere it's okay. There also seems to be a consensus here that mannered seems to apply to what I wrote myself.

    I carefully chose this word and it still seems I conveyed the wrong meaning. Not being a native speaker has its own problems...

     – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 18:02
  • I voted to re-open because I can understand this version better than the other one. By "mannered", do you mean formal? – Nobody Jan 28 '21 at 02:36
  • @scaaahu no, not formal, as discussed above, I think I made a bad choice with this word. I was talking about convoluted, sometimes cryptic text – Aygwqx Jan 28 '21 at 13:18
  • I guess you partially answered why this happens yourself. As some commenters pointed out, your own question is in some places worded in a fairly convoluted way (e.g. "affected, convoluted, artificial, forced and conceited" is not a phrase most people would use in casual conversation). It might be related to being non-native and thus lacking the sense for which words are everyday English and which ones are from higher language registers. Many writers are non-native speakers and will thus use convoluted words and sentence structures just because most of the English they read looks like that. – TooTea Jan 28 '21 at 14:33
  • Related: Is “flowery language” frowned upon in engineering and STEM related research? – cag51 Jan 28 '21 at 16:47

1 Answers1

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How often - if at all - professional academic reviewers face this issue?

All the time.

(as a side note - there are very few "professional" academic reviewers because in general academic reviewers are not paid).

If they do, will a thesis or paper ever face problems due to language usage?

Very, very, rarely. For a start, what you see as pedantry, many will see as precision, and precision is the lifeblood of academia. Indeed, this need for preciseness often leads to what you might think of as "mannered" language in an author of average skill. And academics are selected for their skills in their chosen field, not their abilities as writers.

But there is nots of unnecessarily dense and uninterpretable language in academia that isn't tied to the need for precision. Generally a reviewer is asked to review the intellectual content of a work, not the way it is expressed. In general it is only acceptable to reject a scholarly work as a reviewer if the language is so poor that it literally cannot be understood. A reviewer might point out that there are many mistakes of spelling and grammar in a piece, and request that they be corrected before publication, but thats not quite what you are talking about here.

Ian Sudbery
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    FWIW, I often ask that sections get rewritten for clarity during review. "Can readers understand this work" is absolutely a thing that should be addressed during review. –  Jan 27 '21 at 16:09
  • I think you were to the point. Thanks for taking the time. – Aygwqx Jan 27 '21 at 16:54