4 ms·

I occasionally read Geography articles from the first half of the XXth century, they are a joy to read, until at least the 50s or 60s. It reads like a book: the

by wott 6y ago

I occasionally read Geography articles from the first half of the XXth century, they are a joy to read, until at least the 50s or 60s. It reads like a book: the vocabulary is very accessible (the few words/concepts which do not belong to the common language are introduced and defined) and while the writing flows pleasantly like a fiction or documentary, it conveys much useful information. The recent ones? They're horrible piles of pretentious jargon, jargon which oscillates between hyper-technical and utter-bullshit. They read like those technical marketing fluff pieces. Philosophico-technocratic verbiage all along; when you're done with it (assuming you didn't give up in despair or anger), you haven't learned anything, basically. Anyway, they usually don't bother really describing concrete things any more, they rather talk about fancy social constructs. The synergy of the Promethean dynamic of the actants of transformative innovation of mountainity. Right... (I made up the example, but from real pieces from my last 2 attempts. I unfortunately can't remember or find the previous one, it was 10 times worse, I wouldn't even have needed to make up this example, I could just have copy-pasted its abstract.) The difference is like between reading a page-turner, and trying to read the latest ISO standard about development methodology in safety-related domains (perfect for falling asleep before the second page).

rleigh 6y ago
I've had some limited experience with academic writing, and overall I've not been happy with it. As a PhD student, my supervisor would want to take my writing and reword it to sound "more impressive". That was basically adding in all the pretentious jargon you are referring to. I don't think it aids at all in conveying facts in a clear and simple manner. It's completely unnecessary. More often than not it is deliberately aimed to be non-committal and ambiguous so it ends up saying nothing of any substance. That's completely intentional. There seems to be a school of thought that you should never say you aren't sure or don't understand something, and so you couch that in soft language rather than being direct. I utterly despise it, and regard it as a form of intellectual dishonesty. Later, as a scientific software developer, I tried to write and submit a technical paper for the software I was developing at the time. I spent weeks writing in detail about what it did, along with lots of figures demonstrating its performance and behaviour. But again, after my supervisor was done "revising" it, it become a lot of pretentious waffle that said almost nothing--all of the detail and simple description was reworded ambiguously or removed entirely. If you wanted to use the software, reading the paper would tell you almost nothing of importance. It seems to me that the primary purpose of papers--to be read and to inform others for their work--has not been the case for several decades now. In the end the technical paper mentioned above was rejected, and the reason was utterly ridiculous. The software used a 5D data model inherited as part of its fundamental design from earlier software. Deliberately done for interoperability. The reviewer was from some competitor group who had a thing about the software being unusable unless it supported arbitrary numbers of dimensions. The paper was rejected as being "controversial" as a result, despite the fact that it was an evolution of something that had been in production use for over 15 years in institutions the world over, and worked perfectly as intended. That ultimately led to losing funding and being made redundant. Such is the fickle state of academia where you aren't judged in the quality of your work, but subject to arbitrary and capricious action like this. And peer-reviewed academic publishing being used as an assessment metric for promotion and funding has led to what it is today: a bizarre meta-game played by academics which has little to do with high-quality research or high-quality publications. I'm afraid I became sorely disillusioned with the whole thing.

by wott 6y ago

rleigh 6y ago

I've had some limited experience with academic writing, and overall I've not been happy with it. As a PhD student, my supervisor would want to take my writing and reword it to sound "more impressive". That was basically adding in all the pretentious jargon you are referring to. I don't think it aids at all in conveying facts in a clear and simple manner. It's completely unnecessary. More often than not it is deliberately aimed to be non-committal and ambiguous so it ends up saying nothing of any substance. That's completely intentional. There seems to be a school of thought that you should never say you aren't sure or don't understand something, and so you couch that in soft language rather than being direct. I utterly despise it, and regard it as a form of intellectual dishonesty. Later, as a scientific software developer, I tried to write and submit a technical paper for the software I was developing at the time. I spent weeks writing in detail about what it did, along with lots of figures demonstrating its performance and behaviour. But again, after my supervisor was done "revising" it, it become a lot of pretentious waffle that said almost nothing--all of the detail and simple description was reworded ambiguously or removed entirely. If you wanted to use the software, reading the paper would tell you almost nothing of importance. It seems to me that the primary purpose of papers--to be read and to inform others for their work--has not been the case for several decades now. In the end the technical paper mentioned above was rejected, and the reason was utterly ridiculous. The software used a 5D data model inherited as part of its fundamental design from earlier software. Deliberately done for interoperability. The reviewer was from some competitor group who had a thing about the software being unusable unless it supported arbitrary numbers of dimensions. The paper was rejected as being "controversial" as a result, despite the fact that it was an evolution of something that had been in production use for over 15 years in institutions the world over, and worked perfectly as intended. That ultimately led to losing funding and being made redundant. Such is the fickle state of academia where you aren't judged in the quality of your work, but subject to arbitrary and capricious action like this. And peer-reviewed academic publishing being used as an assessment metric for promotion and funding has led to what it is today: a bizarre meta-game played by academics which has little to do with high-quality research or high-quality publications. I'm afraid I became sorely disillusioned with the whole thing.