I never said I was humble
September 19, 2007Seeing I’ve already spent four years at university, as well as six years at Latin/Greek school, I’ve certainly had my share of academic articles, in many different fields, ranging from hardcore neuropsychology to conversation analysis. And as the weeks, months, and years of my academic career pass me by, I’ve come to thoroughly hate the writing style employed by many academic writers and scientists. There are two things that annoy me more than anything.
For the time being, it is useful to think of moves as discriminative elements of generic structure and strategies as nondiscriminative options within the allowable contributions available to an author for creative or innovative genre construction.
- Cramming as many difficult words into a sentence as possible does not make you smart. In fact, it only makes it apparent you need to compensate for something.
- If a sentence is so draconian that fairly educated folk such as yours truly (I never said I was humble, did I?), and one with a thing for language at that, needs to read them 244345 times before the actual structure (so not its meaning!) becomes apparent, it probably means you have written down a very bad sentence.
All these articles that I’ve read over the years have shown me one thing: academics are lousy, lousy writers. The fact that these articles are supposed to be read by peers is not an excuse to abuse language in the way so many academics tend to do.
It hurts.
Look at how smart I am ! I put lots of big word into one sentence !
Comment by mikesum32 — September 20, 2007 @ 1:36 am
As always, things are not only black and white. One thing you forget - or do not know, whatever - is that “simplistic” or just “plain” writings are often disregarded as being not scientific enough, I’ve seen it happen. I’ve also seen a paper rejected because - although being thoroughly written and understandable - it didn’t contain “enough” equations. Not quite the same thing, but not too far either. It just happens after a while that people - at least some of them - develop different writing styles for the different targets, one for scientific papers, one for magazines and such, another for writing, like, learning aids for students, and so on. If they don’t forget who they write for, what the target audience is, there shouldn’t be big issues. But then again, some of them just get too much used to formulating non-understandably - for average mortals, that is - that they can’t do else anymore.
Comment by l3v1 — September 20, 2007 @ 6:13 am
I agree with you. Long sentences with poor structure really suck. They show that the author wishes to hide his ignorance more than to reveal his knowledge on the subject. I’ve been involved in physics and engineering, where the problem is not so bad for the seminal papers. Some modern papers on the frontiers of the subject are more unclear though.
In a sense, eloquence has died in the modern world. Maybe this is the result of the democratization of mass communications. Before, people would only read things written by the elite and aristocratic whereas now we see a much more varied quality of literary and journalistic output. See, I can use big words too! :) But I hope they mean something and are easy to understand.
Comment by nksingh (PlatformAgnostic) — September 20, 2007 @ 8:33 am
I like how your headlines rarely correspond with the subject at hand. I would have expected that you would talk about humility, not grammar.
Comment by karhu — September 20, 2007 @ 8:25 pm
Heh, I just arbitrarily pick a few words after having written my entry to serve as a headline.
Comment by Administrator — September 20, 2007 @ 8:58 pm