- Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time low: "Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development." In a similar vein, Bill Watterson has the 6-year-old Calvin titling his homework assignment "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes," and exclaiming to Hobbes, his tiger companion, "Academia, here I come!"
Many choice observations found here. I'm very keen on clarity, a desire sparked in me years ago when @klenbl00@ pointed out the deficit between face-to-face communication and communication over Facebook messages. I've been striving to be a clearer communicator ever since.
Academic writing is all about audience. The primary publication is something akin to a proof, and precise language is important there. I'll be damned in most naming conventions aren't terrible, but if I say "white blood cell", that means one thing to the layman, but to the academic, that means one of several things. More often it's a page-limit that removes explanatory sentences and crunches phrases down into polysyllables. At a certain point, you have to pick what to define and what not to. I would assume a scientific audience knows molecular orbital theory but maybe not Raman scattering. But then again, I'm not going to re-list the rules of quantum mechanics if I'm writing to physicists and I consider that to be common knowledge among them. Still a good read and shared, the "Curse of Knowledge" is definitely one I encounter a lot.People often tell me that academics have no choice but to write badly because the gatekeepers of journals and university presses insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s seriousness,
Nice article. I do my best to keep my writing concise and clear. I probably second guess myself most when it comes to qualifications. I feel strongly about the importance of context, and that it's fashionable these days to map the writer's assertions as far and wide as possible.
I do as well. I'll want to say something, then feel the need to preface it, start to, then stop, then doubt my doubt, and then my whole judgment is swallowed up. I have realized that my fence-jumping, my uncertainty with what I have to say, is really an imposition on whoever is listening to me to be patient. Be patient because I want to think this thought through out loud. It's tedious. What's more, I've learned that the anxiety of being misunderstood is a bit of an insecurity and I should trust the listener. If I was misunderstood, it's not the end of the world, I can add-on later to help the listener suss my meaning out. That's why this paragraph from Pinker, the author here, really struck me:I probably second guess myself most when it comes to qualifications.
For all its directness, classic style remains a pretense, an imposture, a stance. Even scientists, with their commitment to seeing the world as it is, are a bit postmodern. They recognize that it’s hard to know the truth, that the world doesn’t just reveal itself to us, that we understand the world through our theories and constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions, and that our ways of understanding the world must constantly be scrutinized for hidden biases. It’s just that good writers don’t flaunt that anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully conceal it for clarity’s sake.