Comment on The Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid May Have Come From a Rare Class of Meteorites

• sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I’m referring to the overall style that uses vague introductions that effectively pad out what should be a short summary with an unnecessarily wordy general-to-specific funnel:

  found that its composition was relatively rare and could change what we know about the dinosaurs’ last days.

  could offer more insights into the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  Through their analysis, the team was able to narrow down the meteorite’s composition.

  The article style also self interrupts with citations to sources, but doesn’t actually synthesize multiple sources in any given sentence:

  Chondrites are an abundant type of stony meteorite and get their name from chondrules, the nearly spherical particles in the meteorite, according to the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies. Far less abundant, however, are carbonaceous chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites are separated into further categories based on their composition, according to Britannica.

  The other “according to” phrases in the article are similarly awkwardly constructed, like an undergrad student or an LLM being instructed to be careful to include their sources. And when one of the sources is Britannica, that style looks especially unnecessary.

  The overall big picture organizational scheme doesn’t flow logically, either. If I were the editor I would’ve told the author to go in order: punchy intro, background about the meteor, what was believed before, what the study changed in our understanding, what it means to the science.

  As it stands now, the intro drags because it’s intentionally vague instead of actually summarizing. The content I would consider to be background happens at the end, describing the meteorite that likely killed the dinosaurs and the approximate size and the location/size of the crater, all things we already knew before this “summarized” study. Then, when it describes the study itself, it’s a mess. It doesn’t define “Oranans-class” or “Ornans-class” and doesn’t explain whether those are the same thing but spelled differently (either because of a typo or a difference in convention). The description of what a carbonaceous chondrite is, how it relates to chondrites, and how those relate to CO or Oranans/Ornans class carbonaceous chondrites, is not clearly stated or presented in a way that is easy to understand.

  The article also doesn’t explain how it changes the science. It vaguely alludes to an alternative sulfur-based explanation that might be weakened by these findings, but doesn’t actually explain how.

  The article is poorly written. I can’t tell if it’s AI or a bad writer, but the end result is not good.

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