I Wouldn't Say It Like That

 I saw a presentation by Chelsea Troy the other day on the topic of technical debt in software development teams. One of the points she made is that technical debt is not really about "bad" code, but more about the maintainability of the code. Poorly written code is hard to maintain, which is why it can be problematic. But in trying to identify poorly written code that will cause problems, people sometimes conflate the robustness of the code itself with the particular coding style of the developer (i.e., the "that's not how I would have written it" argument).

 That presentation, and the fact that I've been looking at a lot of drafts of academic papers recently, got me thinking about academic writing. How much of our impression of the writing of others is colored by the difference between what they wrote versus our internal "how I would have phrased it" sense of style? I tend to err on the side of accepting what was written if it isn't "wrong" in a technical/grammatical sense or "unclear" (unless I'm a co-author, in which case I might suggest an alternative phrasing), even though there may be many places where I felt I could have written it "better." But where's the line between our idiosyncratic preference for blue when the writer has given us red, versus legitimate feedback on a passage that virtually any other academic would have also found wanting?

I don't have an answer (though Steven Pinker's wonderful book The Sense of Style might). I know that I overuse parenthetical statements in my own writing and have been accused of being too "informal" by some reviewers. I happen to think that too much writing is overly formal when it doesn't need to be. Writing needs to be clear. Sometimes that means being very short and to the point. Other times it may require an extended description with carefully chosen words that precisely delineate the nuanced argument that you are undertaking. (See what I did there?)

I'm not a fan of trying to "academify" writing just for the sake of it. That said, one expects a certain style when reading an academic paper versus a novel or a news story. Although I would be OK with it, I can imagine that some would consider the following sentence too informal for an academic paper (though perhaps not for an academic presentation):

There are as many teaching styles as there are teachers.

One could rewrite the same sentiment in a slightly more "elevated" style:

There are as many styles of teaching as there are practitioners of the craft.

Whether the second sentence is an improvement over the first likely depends on your tolerance for informality in academic writing, as I can imagine many feeling that the first is too pedestrian to be called "well-written." But is it "bad writing" such that it needs to be "fixed"? I'm not sure.

How about an extreme version:

The variance in the distribution of operationalizations of instructional approaches is isomorphic to the variance in the distribution of instructional practitioners.    

 Unless the author is literally comparing statistical distributions of teaching styles and teachers, I would argue that this version is further from "good writing" than the first. It is needlessly opaque. In other words, I wouldn't say it like that.