Via Michael Nielsen I’ve found that Ben Schumacher, inventor of the word “qubit” and quantum information theorist extraordinaire, has a blog. Michael points to the following from quote from Ben:
But you know, so much of academic writing is bad. It is banal, orotund, unmusical, and stuffed with wads of unnecessary jargon. It is the sort of writing that does more to obscure meaning than to convey it. I see this stuff almost every day. I swim in it. OK, maybe I do exaggerate, a little. After all, I teach at a liberal arts college that is moderately well-known for teaching people how to write. Our faculty is full of novelists and poets and whatnot. But let me tell you, it’s here, too. It’s everywhere. It is like a fungus growing over all things, blurring their shapes — the verbal equivalent, maybe, of the ivy on academic buildings. And like the ivy, I guess, its main purpose is to conceal the shabby edifices beneath
Which made me think that it would be fun to create a scientific journal in which good writing was a requirment. No silly page limits either. You either write a killer article, which is comprehensible and well written, or your articled doesn’t get accepted. Even if you result is correct and even if your result is groundbreaking. Sure, not all journals could be this way, but it would if such a journal existed, I would certainly be a regular reader. I certainly know that there are people who are up to the task: every once in a while you stumble upon a piece of scientific writing which is so well written it just makes you cry the next time you look through Physical Review Letters.