The linguistic wall

On April 25, 1953, a short paper appeared in the journal Nature that changed the world.¹ It was barely a page long and contained a single, simple diagram. But what stands out today isn’t just the discovery of the DNA double helix; it is the quiet, unassuming confidence of the opening sentence: “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A).”

There is no jargon, no passive voice, no desperate attempt to sound important. It is simply two people showing us something they have seen.

Compare that to the average paper published today. If a modern researcher were announcing the secret of life, they would likely begin with: “A novel structural configuration for the saline derivative of the deoxyribose nucleic moiety is herein proposed.” The science has advanced, but the writing has retreated behind what researchers call the linguistic wall.²

For years, the scientific community has fought against paywalls—financial barriers that lock knowledge behind expensive subscriptions. But the linguistic wall is just as effective at locking people out. It restricts access based on comprehension, not cost, and risks turning science into an in-group conversation. 

But why is this happening? The impenetrable nature of modern prose is not merely a bad habit; the medium is sending a message. The density, the jargon, and the impenetrability tell us that the scientific paper has fundamentally changed its function. It has transformed from a medium of communication into a token of academic credibility. And by optimizing for this new message, scientists are accidentally undermining the very goals they claim to care about most.

The wall that is getting higher

This isn’t just a nostalgic impression that things were better in the old days. The decline is measurable. Studies analyzing millions of abstracts show that readability has dropped steadily since the 1880s.^2,3 Today, more than a quarter of scientific abstracts are indecipherable even to college graduates.³

The sentences themselves haven’t become longer, in fact, they have shrunk from an average of 29 words in the 1960s to fewer than 15 today.⁴ The problem is density. We have traded length for weight. For example, papers tend to pack sentences with so-called noun chunks—strings of three or more consecutive nouns that act as linguistic stumbling blocks. Instead of saying “we examined how the cells grew,” a modern paper reports on “cell growth observation parameters.” These chunks force the reader to hold multiple concepts in working memory before they reach the verb that explains how those concepts relate.

While the prose has become heavier, it has also become louder. As readability plummeted, the use of sensational language skyrocketed. The frequency of hype words like “novel,” “robust,” and “unprecedented” has increased by 880%.⁵ Here is what we’re left with: papers are harder to read than ever, yet they scream for attention more desperately than ever.

\ Two measures of readability were assessed on around 700,000 papers from 1880 to 2015. Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) quantifies how easy a text is to read. Lower FRE scores indicate less readability. The New Dale-Chall (NDC) estimates text difficulty based on sentence length and difficult words. Higher NDC scores indicate less readability.³

The integrity and exclusion crisis

What harm can a few tangled sentences do?

Science relies on verification and building upon what came before, but you cannot verify what you cannot understand. A study in marine biology found that about a quarter of the citations did not support the claim the authors were making.⁶ This happens because the original texts are often too opaque to check quickly and scientists resort to skimming rather than reading. When the methods section becomes a black box of jargon, independent replication is impossible. Bad writing provides a hiding place for bad science.

The second casualty is collaboration. Science has become so specialized that biologists now struggle to read papers by other biologists. This linguistic wall can hinder interdisciplinary work because experts lack the confidence to engage with fields outside their narrow specialty. It makes it hard to coordinate knowledge across different fields to solve big, complex problems.

Finally, when the public cannot access primary scientific knowledge, they are forced to rely on intermediaries—journalists, influencers, and commentators—who may have their own agendas. If science starts to look like an exclusive, secret club, it should not be surprised when people stop trusting its conclusions.

Rational actors in a broken system

Why do smart people write this way? It can be tempting to say that scientists are simply bad writers—brilliant at the bench, perhaps, but incompetent at the keyboard. But this view misses the mark. The impenetrability of modern prose is not a failure of skill but a rational response to a broken incentive structure.

The scientific article was once a tool for communicating a finding to peers. Today, its primary function has changed to become a unit of academic advancement. A paper is no longer primarily a message, it is proof of productivity. PhD students need papers to graduate, postdocs need them to compete for jobs, and faculty need them to secure tenure and grants.

Once communication becomes a currency, authors optimize for what gatekeepers reward: formality, complexity, and appearing rigorous. 

This system creates a culture of fear and mimicry. Junior researchers look at journals and see pages of dense, jargon-filled text. They perceive this complexity not as a barrier, but as a marker of competence. Supervisors, who themselves learned to write this way, teach the “official style” as the correct way to write. This behavior is partly learned, but it is also strategic. There is a fear that writing simply makes one look simple-minded. To avoid being underestimated, scientists may intentionally complicate their papers to signal sophistication.

The most common defense for this style is that science itself has become more complicated. We should not expect, as Steven Pinker says, a “tete-a-tete among professionals” to be understood by amateurs. But this defense misses the real problem. The issue is not the use of necessary technical jargon. The problem is the structure of the writing itself. It is the compulsive hedging, the convoluted sentences, and the endless strings of noun chunks that act as linguistic stumbling blocks. These elements have nothing to do with technical complexity. They make the text harder for everyone to read, including other professionals.

We can draw a meaningful comparison to that other great crisis haunting modern science: the reproducibility crisis. For a long time, researchers optimized their analysis to capture the statistical significance required for publication. This practice, known as p-hacking, was not usually an act of malice. Often, scientists did not realize they were doing anything wrong. They believed they were simply cleaning their data to let the truth shine through. 

As one scientist wrote:

P-hacking was not something unscrupulous researchers did after dark when their more principled colleagues left the building. No, respectable and eminent scholars p-hacked out in the open, unashamed... And because scientific writing is still an act of persuasion, we were taught to frame all the fruits of our exploration as if they were fruits of confirmation, as if we had predicted these baroque patterns all along.

The scientific community sleepwalked into a crisis of integrity because questionable practices had been normalized as standard methodology. Bad writing has been normalized in the same way. What might be the future, unforeseen consequences of making this choice?

Tear down this wall

We cannot simply tell scientists to write better. We must change the environment that selects for bad writing.

First, we manage what we measure. Currently, one way we judge scientists is by their h-index (a measure of citations on their papers). Perhaps, as some researchers have suggested, we need a counterpart: an r-index that measures readability. If tenure committees and grant agencies began looking at how accessible a scientist’s work is, the clarity of the writing would stop being an afterthought.

Second, the culture of peer review must shift. Editors and reviewers need to suppress the reflex to punish style. When a reviewer encounters a touch of whimsy, a personal pronoun, or a vivid metaphor, they should not view it as unscientific. They should view it as effective communication. We may need to move away from the rigid IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) straightjacket as some journals are already doing and allow for structured abstracts and sections dedicated to speculation and narrative, like eLife’s Ideas and Speculations.

Finally, there is a selfish argment for clarity. You do not have to choose between being serious and being read. In high-impact fields, papers written with greater readability are more likely to land in the top 1% of citations. Clear writing travels further. It creates a window through which more people—peers, the public, and policymakers—can see the world you have discovered.

Writing well is a strong competitive advantage. The linguistic wall serves no one. It is time to tear it down.

References

1. James Watson and Francis Crick,”‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,” Nature 171 (1953): 737–8.

2. Ren Ryba et al., Better Writing in Scientific Publications Builds Reader Confidence and Understanding,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021): 714321.

3. Pontus Plavén-Sigray et al., “The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time,” Elife 6 (2017): e27725. 

4. Mollie Hawkes Hohmann et al., “The evolution of scientific writing: an analysis of 20 million abstracts over 70 years in health and medical science,” Scientometrics 130 (2025), 3349–66.

5. Christiaan H. Vinkers et al., “Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis,” BMJ 351 (2015): h6467.

6. Peter A. Todd et al. “One in four citations in marine biology papers is inappropriate,” Marine Ecology Progress Series 408: 299–303.