Some articles make feel dumb

[WhateverItTakes]

I read articles in my field and sometimes I feel lost. "Wow these people are geniuses because I can't understand even half of this."

I've been tasked to read drafts of my professors work now though. Two them are not native English speakers. A lot of the sentences they write make me feel similarly dumb. I realize now it's not because the concepts are above my head, but because they use run on sentences and words that native English speakers wouldn't normally use.

I'm sure that's not always the case with every article I read. Sometimes people are way more advanced than me. I bet sometimes though, I'm giving authors more credit than they deserve.

[Eigen]

You don't say what field you're in, but shouldn't the difference between "not understanding due to awkward writing" and "not understanding due to conceptual difficulty" be pretty obvious?

I know I find it pretty easy to tell the difference between a paper that gives me a headache because the way it's written isn't clear, and one I have trouble understanding because I'm lacking some conceptual background.

[WhateverItTakes]

I must have trouble identifying "awkward writing." I assume the people who publish are more skilled and knowledgeable than me, which may be a mistake.

With these drafts I'm reading, I know the methodology and results. I know what they want to get across, but can tell they're not doing a great job of writing it concisely. If I read other papers like this, I would conclude I'm the problem.

[Neist]

You know, in the history of science, I find non-native English speakers actually writer better than a lot of native speakers.

Some of my favorite writers aren't native speakers. Even so, I feel your pain for reading badly written articles. I've read a lot of articles that are somewhat painful to slog through. One of my motivations for obtaining a PhD is that I want to write articles that normal, educated people can actually understand. 

[hyperjulie]

Eigen - I don't always find this distinction  particularly clear in my field (cognitive psychology) because it is often the case that awkward writing and jargon obscure concepts that would otherwise be possible to grasp. Sometimes, I'm not sure if I'm missing something because I lack conceptual background or because the author has made that conceptual background really opaque when it could have been conveyed clearly. Now that I have a lot more experience, such that I am familiar with the concepts that these authors try to describe, it is a lot easier for me to pick out what they mean and recognize that it has been conveyed poorly. When I started though, I found I just didn't understand the majority of the papers I read and I had similarly assumed it was because I was not getting it rather than that the articles were poorly written.

I have mixed experience with native versus non-native speakers. I think what it comes down to is that you have good and bad writers, and the good writers writing in their native language are probably better than the good writers writing in a different language. But the good writers writing in another language are generally better than the poor writers in their native language. My mentor is a non-native speaker and a good writer, but although he has been speaking and writing in English longer than I've been alive, I can still write somewhat more clearly than he can. Ultimately I've seen a lot of poorly written articles by native and non-native speakers, and I've seen a lot of well-written articles by both, too.