The pursuit of knowledge is a beautiful and noble enterprise, and academic research has incredible potential to inform our own, and our government’s, decisions about important topics, from global warming to immigration policy. Unfortunately, research institutions, especially colleges, have a reputation for being isolated from the rest of the population. This image is partially created by the inaccessibility of the results of all that research to most of the population.

Research results can be accessible, but, for a number of different reasons, they most often are not. First, the writing is usually dull and tiring to read. Scientists and social scientists use jargon, unnecessarily long words, and convoluted sentence structure that cloud (or obfuscate, if you’re an academic) a relatively simple concept. George Orwell gave some of the best writing advice in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” Below are his first rules of good writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Number five is particularly relevant to academia. In many instances, researchers choose to use a discipline-specific term when the concept could easily be described with an everyday word. In certain instances, it is of course important to use the most specific term, which could be jargon. However, academic writing, as it is, uses jargon far more often than is necessary. I also strongly believe that academics should not use the passive voice, although scientists will likely disagree just as strongly. Researchers cut themselves out of the story of the research and procedure, but in reality, someone is responsible for the fact that “10 ml of water were added to the beaker.” By cutting themselves out of the report, researchers hide the fact that scientific discovery is a story at all. Frankly, it makes academic writing dry and uninteresting. Even if you are a biologist reading a paper about biology, wouldn’t you rather it were an interesting read instead of dry and boring? Researchers have huge amounts of passion for their subjects, but that is rarely communicated in the results.

Researchers are not fully to blame for their boring papers, though. The pressures facing professors and other academics are not conducive to passionate and engaging writing. Because it is accepted that most people can’t understand academic writing, professors write only for colleagues in their fields. These colleagues are also their competition in publishing and employment, so professors are given good reason to make their writing as complex and impressive-sounding as possible. Unfortunately, this leaves everyone else out of the equation and results in further insulation between fields within academia. Not only are the masses not able to read scientific research, neither are many highly educated political scientists.

The mass media also play a part in distancing the public from research papers by acting as imperfect translators. When the media report on a new discovery or a recent paper, they often misstate the findings and their relevance. It is great to have people learning about recent publications, but the writers summarizing scientific papers aren’t typically trained as scientists and don’t have a deep enough understanding of the original paper or the literature that led up to it to do a good write-up of the report.

Ideally, we wouldn’t need translators to read academic articles. Knowledge is power and the piece of that power in each research paper should be available to everyone. That means academics should write for a general audience and, if necessary, it should be easy to find common-sense definitions of jargon online.

The cost of accessing research papers also stops the public from reading them. Many articles are available only through subscription services to the journals they are published in. Often the only people who can feasibly use these subscriptions are people associated with universities or research labs. For the curious individual, access is limited to articles available for free on the internet.

Maybe there isn’t a long line of people trying to read academic articles. But that is part of the culture of knowledge that has created the current system of exclusive access to research. If academic articles were easier to read and more engaging, perhaps more people would seek them out. If they were easy to find on the internet, more people would read them. If the media reported more accurately on new discoveries, everyone would be more highly educated.

While we wait for the days of open-access to arrive, maybe we need the researchers themselves to write not only their paper but also a media brief describing the project accurately. If those, at least, were available for free online - and were written for a public audience, unlike many abstracts - then maybe our culture around academics could begin to shift.