Academia is a marketplace of ideas. Just as firms market their products with packaging and advertising, scholars market their ideas with writing. Even the best ideas will make an impact only if others understand and build upon them. Why, then, is academic writing often difficult to understand? By conducting two experiments and analyzing the text of 1640 articles in premier marketing journals, we show that scholars write unclearly in part because they forget that they know more about their research than readers, a phenomenon called “the curse of knowledge.” Knowledge, or familiarity with one’s own research, exacerbates three practices that make academic writing difficult to understand: abstraction, technical language, and passive writing. When marketing scholars know more about a research project, they use more abstract, technical, and passive writing to describe it. Articles with more abstract, technical, and passive writing are harder for readers to understand and are less likely to be cited. We call for scholars to overcome the curse of knowledge and provide two tools -- a website (writingclaritycalculator.com) and a tutorial -- to help them recognize and repair unclear writing so they can write articles that are more likely to make an impact.

学术界是思想的市场。就像公司通过包装和广告来营销产品一样，学者们也通过写作来营销他们的想法。即使是最好的想法，也只有在其他人理解并以此为基础的情况下，才会产生影响。那么，为什么学术著作常常难以理解？通过进行两个实验并分析顶级营销期刊上1640篇文章的文本，我们发现学者之所以写得不清楚，部分原因是他们忘记了自己比读者更了解自己的研究，这种现象称为“知识的诅咒”。知识或对自己研究的熟悉加剧了三种使学术写作难以理解的实践：抽象，技术语言和被动写作。当市场营销学者对研究项目有更多了解时，他们会使用更多的抽象，技术，和被动写作来描述它。具有更抽象，技术和被动写作的文章更难以让读者理解，并且被引用的可能性也较小。我们呼吁学者们克服知识的诅咒，并提供两个工具-一个网站（writingclaritycalculator.com）和一个教程-帮助他们识别和修复不清楚的写作，以便他们可以撰写更有可能产生影响的文章。