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I think I agree. I also think it’s weird to laud academic writing as it is often quite bad, having a tendency to go on and on with some pointless complexity (do
by dan-robertson 6y ago
I think I agree. I also think it’s weird to laud academic writing as it is often quite bad, having a tendency to go on and on with some pointless complexity (do you feel like a real academic when you write “not unreasonable”? I claim that ordinarily the only nuance between this and “reasonable” is that writing one makes you feel clever).
Historically academic writing has been constrained by page limits (compare papers written by Euler to Gauss). But as publishing has moved online and expensive this has become less of an issue. And if you wrote a book there were far fewer constraints on length.
- runald 6y agoI'm far from being an academic, but if I were to make a less snarky interpretation, "not unreasonable" would be written if the reasonableness isn't binary, meaning that "not unreasonable" doesn't necessarily mean "reasonable", and that interchanging the two might lead to a less accurate, stronger statement. Alternatively, one would write "not unreasonable" as a way of contrast relative to something that was previously claimed to be "unreasonable". I can think lots of other reasons, but feeling clever isn't one of them. I mean, if someone would like to feel clever, there's probably a more eloquent synonym for that.
- ajarmst 6y agoDeleted a comment about how "not unreasonable" isn't equivalent to "unreasonable", because I think OP was actually making a different point: like Orwell pointed out in Politics and the English Language (and, yes, this argument has been making the rounds since at least the 1940s)---the problem isn't that the phrase is the same as "reasonable", but that it's so hackneyed as to lose any value.