Friday, August 31, 2012
Academia
Academics in the humanities and the social sciences, it’s sometimes
suggested, too often wish to give their fields the legitimacy and public
authority of science, and so write in highly technical, jargon-laced
prose. Academics in the hard sciences, for their part, are too concerned
with factual correctness to worry about making their productions
agreeable, even to co-specialists. Then, of course, there is the really
uncharitable interpretation: Many academics simply haven’t got anything
useful to say, but if they say it in a sufficiently complicated fashion
and use all the vogue terms, they’ll get credit for having said
something without saying anything worth defending. The really
troublesome thing about all this is that many academic writers, even in
the humanities, have legitimate and important insights to convey. Yet
they genuinely believe, whether for one of the aforementioned reasons or
for some other, that it doesn’t serve their interests to write
straightforward English sentences.
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