Any guidelines as to what's a sufficient level of "being succinct" research papers?

Question

Any guidelines as to what's a sufficient level of "being succinct" research papers?

This confuses me, because it seems to me like "being succinct" is sold as an ideal ("a very desirable thing to have"). But when trying to figure out "well how to produce succinct text", then I find as if there are no general guidelines for it and that it could well be "very subjective" thing.

Based on subjective experience on reading "experienced papers" I would also argue that "being succinct" may come at the cost of not having said information that would have been necessary. I.e. leaving out important information at the cost of appearing "nicer in text".

Answer 1

Here is a guideline: Follow the six rules near the end of this essay by George Orwell https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

especially

• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word [or phrase] out, always cut it out.

In your question, you could cut the start of the 2nd paragraph up to "like" and the last sentence of the 3rd paragraph. I know it is not supposed to be academic writing, but it is just an example of how to be succinct.

But you are right that it is subjective. It depends on the field as well.

Answer 2

While it is notoriously hard to figure out what to cover and what to omit, there is a handful of purely linguistic tricks. toby544 provided a good example of those, and there are plenty more to be found (another set of key words you might find useful: informative writing).

I will focus on something else instead. The mindset. The mind in turmoil struggles to communicate thoughts clearly. I find confidence and clarity absolutely essential for writing. There is no need to omit the thought process entirely while sticking to the subject matter like you suggest in the comments.

Text becomes hard to read because of not-so-necessary fluff: overuse of passive voice, waltzing around conclusions with "probably" and "might indicate", dealing almost exclusively in hypotheticals. These are also the hallmarks of a large part of academic writing: dropping careful formulations is also no good, after all. So how to find that balance, then?

By grouping all the "maybe, maybe not" and "this is not conclusive" bits together. Do not let your - and your reader's - mind wander around too much during a single explanation. You might stop at some key concepts and briefly address possible concerns if it doesn't require going too much in-depth. If it does, find a simpler explanation.

Finally, it is impossible to cover everything required to understand the subject in a single body of text. Spend a lot of time considering the scope: who is your audience? What do and don't they know? This is a lot of work, and the answers can't be given in general. Some examples of questions can.

Answer 3

Being succint is not subjective. Being succint is actually the most objective way to write something because you need to focus on what your audience knows and doesn't know.

A short example: if you are demonstrating a theorem and you perform an addition, you need to specify that the operation is commutative to K12 students, probably not to graduate in mathemathics.

That's why there are great papers, interesting papers, boring papers: some papers flow with you and your knowledge, some rely on your knowledge to miss the gaps, some get you annoyed spending long time in obvious things.

Given the variety of the background and of the knowledge of the readership, professionals in a given field will not unanimously agree on which one is a great paper, but it is quite likely that if 50%-60% of the specialists think a paper is a great paper, then the paper is deemed to be a great paper, even if 20% of the readers maybe think "there are too many missing information in this paper".