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Phrase: Publish or perish
If you are a researcher or post-secondary educator, you already know what ‘publish or perish‘ involves.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, let me explain the situation to you.
It is essential for most researchers and university educators to conduct research and publish their findings.
Their academic career depends on it.
What do you call a researcher with no published papers?
Nothing.
They don’t exist.
If you’re not published, you’re not a researcher.
That’s what publish or perish means.
If a researcher doesn’t publish papers prolifically (say that three times fast, and I don’t mean that, that, that), their careers perish.
If you meet someone who has had a long career as a researcher, you know they must be a sucker for punishment.
Getting a paper published is time-consuming, expensive and demeaning.
Yes, I think it is demeaning due to all the rejection they have to go through.
Then we have the poor educators.
I mean poor, as in not having much money.
Have you ever checked to see how many universities offer positions for unpaid adjunct professors or interns?
They can work for free, use the facilities for research and then pay to have that research published.
If they want to read their research in a journal, they have to pay for a subscription.
Educators are worse suckers for punishment than researchers.
Still, they suffer from the publish or perish phenomenon the same as researchers.
Often, teachers and professors are criticized for spending more time writing papers than teaching.
They do it because they have chosen noble professions.
They know that their work forms the basis for the advancement of the human race.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 66.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.