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This article has too small font, too many words, I lost interest part way through. Is there a presentation somewhere that covers the authors' main points? Thank

by stmw 9y ago

This article has too small font, too many words, I lost interest part way through. Is there a presentation somewhere that covers the authors' main points? Thanks. :) j/k

Turing_Machine 9y ago
The words are pretty much par for the course in academic writing. That font, though, is inexcusable.
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Here it is in modern English: > Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
mbrock 9y ago
PowerPoint is an accessible mode of persuasion. The journal articles is a more elite mode. The massive wall of text with long paragraphs; the numbered footnotes; the long list of references that nobody will read; the availability of a PDF as a kind of indicator that the material is printworthy and serious; the obsessive numbering of pictures as "figures"; the use of academic shibboleths like contextualize, performative, forms of sociality, critique, etc; the refusal to summarize an argument; the namedropping of historical studies to give an impression of endless scholarly depth; the vaguely critical attitude that carefully avoids explicit moral judgments; the long-winded "narrative" form like a New Yorker reportage mixed with excerpts from monographs and textbooks. McLuhan once said that when reading texts for research, he skips the odd pages and only reads the even ones, because he had observed "a huge amount of redundancy in texts" and that having to fill out the remaining pages with his imagination kept him alert and wakeful... This article, which I enjoyed skimming, if you think about in terms of "the medium being the message", seems like a piece of advocacy for literate print culture. The authors mention designing and inventing new and interesting forms of communication and persuasion beyond PowerPoint—but their own choice of form is highly conservative.

by stmw 9y ago

This article has too small font, too many words, I lost interest part way through. Is there a presentation somewhere that covers the authors' main points? Thanks. :) j/k

Turing_Machine 9y ago

The words are pretty much par for the course in academic writing. That font, though, is inexcusable.

PeachPlum 9y ago
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Here it is in modern English: > Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. This is a parody, but not a very gross one.

mbrock 9y ago

PowerPoint is an accessible mode of persuasion. The journal articles is a more elite mode. The massive wall of text with long paragraphs; the numbered footnotes; the long list of references that nobody will read; the availability of a PDF as a kind of indicator that the material is printworthy and serious; the obsessive numbering of pictures as "figures"; the use of academic shibboleths like contextualize, performative, forms of sociality, critique, etc; the refusal to summarize an argument; the namedropping of historical studies to give an impression of endless scholarly depth; the vaguely critical attitude that carefully avoids explicit moral judgments; the long-winded "narrative" form like a New Yorker reportage mixed with excerpts from monographs and textbooks. McLuhan once said that when reading texts for research, he skips the odd pages and only reads the even ones, because he had observed "a huge amount of redundancy in texts" and that having to fill out the remaining pages with his imagination kept him alert and wakeful... This article, which I enjoyed skimming, if you think about in terms of "the medium being the message", seems like a piece of advocacy for literate print culture. The authors mention designing and inventing new and interesting forms of communication and persuasion beyond PowerPoint—but their own choice of form is highly conservative.