Dancing with Professors: the trouble with academic prose

I got a PhD but never found my voice writing as an academic. For a while I thought I was a bad writer, but I spent a year or two, a few years later, where the bulk of my income came from writing. I found it was more profitable to write software than to write computer books, but that was when I realized the problem was in academic writing, not in me.

Along the same lines (in case you haven't seen it):

The postmodern essay generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

And Alan Sokal's brilliant hoax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

I really don't see much of this in reading (or writing, hopefully...) papers in astrophysics. The prose is generally dull and impersonal, sure, but it's also simple. Obfuscating your own papers won't buy you anything, because published papers don't count for much unless people cite them. And to do that, they need to know what they are about.

Of course, there's always a certain degree of what's known as a "community of practice" in very specialized writing: Words have special meanings and there are customary ways of expression that makes it hard to penetrate for outsiders. But that's not because the writing itself is necessarily bad, it's because you don't know the code it's written in.

Ha, great article.

Makes me think back to the terribad philosophy classes (at least the softer, less mathy ones - the pure logic ones were fine) I had to sit through in college. My trick back then: whenever I read a paper/essay/book on any topic (particularly metaphysics), I always kept an informal tally of the percentage of argument devoted to arguing that someone else's definition of a term is "wrong." Generally speaking, that percentage is inversely proportional to the overall quality and relevance of the paper - there's no point listening to people argue whether God exists or not if they're merely redefining "God" turn-by-turn until they each prove their point!

This obsession with arguing over definitions and attempting to answer ill-formed questions isn't limited to philosophy, though, it's quite rampant throughout most of the humanities world and even comes up more often than it should in sociology and psychology. Which is a shame - those are both fields where tangible advancements with real world consequences could probably be made, but mired as they are in soft thinking, where everyone can be right (or at least present arguments obscure or pointless enough to dodge criticism), they have a very long way to go. At least psychology is starting to give way to cognitive science, which may pick up some of the slack; I have yet to see any sign of future improvement in sociology.

I think the worst part of this is that "dull writing style is an academic survival skill because they think that is what editors want." I would argue with the author's assertion that "dull, impersonal prose" is not sought.

During my CS graduate school days, I saw several examples of technical article templates (for lack of a better word or phrase) that were specifically geared to follow the existing style of "successful" journal and conference submissions. By template, I mean something that was almost pre-written where you could just drop your data/charts/algorithms/etc into the proper place and submit. The use of such style templates did not leave much room to actually focus on the clear communication of ideas in a paper. But there is so much pressure to publish and build up the CV that I kind of understand why people used that approach. Combine that with the "hack the paper together in a fury of writing in the last hours before FedEx can get the submission into the conference" and I see where writing well is not as valued as simply producing publications.

Of course, I'm also commenting from the viewpoint of someone who received feedback on a tech paper along the lines of " . . . I liked the words and flow . . . but . . " - paraphrasing here - the ideas aren't so good. Not missing grad school so much these days.

I, for one, do claim to understand the quote by Bloom. I think he means that openness understood as "going with the flow" is in fact not openness at all because it obscures alternatives. This is actually a theme recurring throughout the literature, nothing really special.

I do not mean to defend the poor prose of some professors, there is indeed plenty of that, however, in many cases it is simply not an option to use everyday terms because of their ambiguousness.

Finally, the charge of obscurantism and particularly its "explanation" by social factors is just nasty! It's no better than calling your readers too stupid to understand you. In fact, I would argue that while both factors are at work, the latter is much more so. But hey, I'm biased.

I'm hardly a researcher, but I've written my share of dense academic papers as a student.

I remember not trusting my own ideas if they didn't seem written in a 'smart' enough way. I almost thought if something could be written simply, it was too simple.

So I'd re-word my sentences until I came up with something appropriately jargon-filled and wordy. Then I'd feel better about it.

I guess it comes down to trusting yourself.

The good news is the internet will put an end to this type of argument by intimidation in academia. The university system is toast just like the journalist and newspapers. No one knows what will replace it but that is the process underway right now. Do a search for Clay Shirky and his article on newspapers and journalism, its the same principles.

Reminds me of a few sociology papers. Some of the most * awful, self-referential terminology I ever came across. Might have been just those papers, or my mood, but it left a permanent bad taste.