Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

Re:Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in sci... by zamfi on Sunday August 08, 2021 @10:54PM (#28112305)

Reading this list, it almost seems like these were created by looking up each individual word in a thesaurus, which of course destroys much of the meaning.

E.g.,

  Signal -> flag
  To -> to
  Noise -> clamor

…and…

  Data -> information
  Warehouse -> stockroom

This would be a lot easier than running through multiple translation steps (as proposed elsewhere here).

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Re:Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in sci... by chc on Monday August 09, 2021 @02:35AM (#28113330)

This exact process has been used by spammers for a long time now. It's called spinning, and it is basically the kind of thesaurus replacement you're describing here. When I read the OP, my impression was that these authors were running plagiarized portions of their articles through a similar kind of spinner.

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Re:Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in sci... by native_samples on Monday August 09, 2021 @06:17AM (#28114773)

NB: The paper itself describing this problem talks about the use of spinbot.com at the end.

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Re:Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in sci... by djmips on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @03:39AM (#28139169)

spinbot Tortured Phrases -> "tormented expressions"

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