4 ms·

> We were never told to use fewer, simpler words. Clarity was never a criteria. I agree. I'd even go as far as to say we're taught the exact opposite: You will

> We were never told to use fewer, simpler words. Clarity was never a criteria. I agree. I'd even go as far as to say we're taught the exact opposite: You will get penalized in some courses for using simple words or not meeting arbitrary word-counts. What I always found particularly contradictory is that you are taught in High School you needed to write an advanced way "for college," but when you get to college the standards were lower. Then you get told you need to write verbosely because "for work," but then you get into work, and it is middle-school writing styles and complexity ruling the day. It is exactly the same thing with cursive. Nobody wants cursive in a professional setting, ever.

maegul 4y ago
Curious, haven’t really thought about this before. Seems like your observation is a strong sign that schooling and academia are run by people who’ve only worked in schooling and academia, which isn’t news obviously, but made more salient by an issue such as yours.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  A lot of it is just that clarity is much, much harder to measure than word count or even vocabulary usage. The system almost can't avoid incentivizing what can be measured, and is almost incapable of incentivizing clarity (consider the task of grading 40 papers over the course of a few days and see if you still think it's reasonable to expect otherwise. And honestly, it's true that students need to prove their ability to write long pieces, and it's, again, hard to measure whether the student is covering enough ground to cover the length you want to see. You get what you measure, and what you can't measure is very hard to get (absent relatively intensive personal attention, hard to scale). I don't know a solution.
  - maegul 4y ago
    All absolute true I think. My only addition is that in my educational experience, a number of times someone would came in to teach with an entirely practical and non-academic background, and it was always a clear and tangible breath of fresh air. Their approach, priorities, clarifications, honesty and insights always had a comparative sense of vitality and importance about them, irrespective of how good a teacher they were in the normal sense. Your point still holds about how to assess, which as you point out, is its own thing. But it also doesn't exclude the possibility of recognising and providing the value of education from those outside of the education/academic system, however hard that value may be to measure.
nicbou 4y ago
This is exactly how it went. You can feel the effects of this when people have to write fancy for a cover letter or an important email. People switch to a different voice that isn't theirs, and that they are clearly not comfortable with.

maegul 4y ago

Curious, haven’t really thought about this before. Seems like your observation is a strong sign that schooling and academia are run by people who’ve only worked in schooling and academia, which isn’t news obviously, but made more salient by an issue such as yours.

andrewflnr 4y ago
A lot of it is just that clarity is much, much harder to measure than word count or even vocabulary usage. The system almost can't avoid incentivizing what can be measured, and is almost incapable of incentivizing clarity (consider the task of grading 40 papers over the course of a few days and see if you still think it's reasonable to expect otherwise. And honestly, it's true that students need to prove their ability to write long pieces, and it's, again, hard to measure whether the student is covering enough ground to cover the length you want to see. You get what you measure, and what you can't measure is very hard to get (absent relatively intensive personal attention, hard to scale). I don't know a solution.
- maegul 4y ago
  All absolute true I think. My only addition is that in my educational experience, a number of times someone would came in to teach with an entirely practical and non-academic background, and it was always a clear and tangible breath of fresh air. Their approach, priorities, clarifications, honesty and insights always had a comparative sense of vitality and importance about them, irrespective of how good a teacher they were in the normal sense. Your point still holds about how to assess, which as you point out, is its own thing. But it also doesn't exclude the possibility of recognising and providing the value of education from those outside of the education/academic system, however hard that value may be to measure.

nicbou 4y ago

This is exactly how it went. You can feel the effects of this when people have to write fancy for a cover letter or an important email. People switch to a different voice that isn't theirs, and that they are clearly not comfortable with.