4 ms·

Dancing with Professors: the trouble with academic prose

35 points by frisco 18y ago

paul_houle 18y ago
I got a PhD but never found my voice writing as an academic. For a while I thought I was a bad writer, but I spent a year or two, a few years later, where the bulk of my income came from writing. I found it was more profitable to write software than to write computer books, but that was when I realized the problem was in academic writing, not in me.
pasbesoin 18y ago
Reminds me of a few sociology papers. Some of the most * awful, self-referential terminology I ever came across. Might have been just those papers, or my mood, but it left a permanent bad taste.
- ewjordan 18y ago
  Neither your mood nor those particular papers were at fault - sociology is a rancid cesspool, filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking at its worst, masquerading as a science because the questions it deals with are more concrete. I suppose it's to be expected: the problems that sociology addresses are very complex ones, beyond the reach of science currently (though we're getting closer), and soft "methods" are academic Gods-of-the-Gaps that let people think they're doing useful work while they ramble on and on about topics that we don't actually have the tools to understand yet. Physics was in a similar state at one time, and it took several breakthroughs to get it to the point where we could learn anything useful from it.
  - hack_edu 18y ago
    In keeping with the theme of this article, please define 'Humanities-Style-Thinking' and the intersection of this idea with Sociology.
  - ChristianPerry 18y ago
    I disagree with your assessment of sociology as a discipline "filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking." Sociology uses rigorous, analytical, and quantitative methods to shine insight on the modern condition. It allows one to better understand the condition of the world, and by extension, one's place within it. And it has contributed significantly to my intellectual growth. When I've felt a lack of community in my life, for instance, Robert Putnam showed me that civic and social participation in America have systematically declined for the last six decades. When I've aspired to get into a good school or ahem a prestigious startup incubator, Robert Frank explains how concerns of status and position have a salient effect on my decision making. When I express a preference for a particular kind of music or type of food, Bordieu shows that preferences that I take for granted are in fact strongly correlated with my culture, socioeconomic background, gender, and profession. When I pay money to send a virtual gift to a friend, Baudrillard shows that I'm motivated by "sign value" rather than "use value" -- that what an object represents matters more than what it actually does. And that's just the beginning. Sociology gets a lot of criticism, perhaps because it's such a broad field. However, it has done more to shape my understanding of the world than any single other discipline, and I'm far from speaking alone.
    - ellyagg 18y ago
      Well, you listed several prominent sociologists and stuff they claimed. That doesn't in any way, shape, or form prove that their claims are true or even based on falsifiable hypotheses and experimentation like the sciences we trust, i.e., physics and medicine. This is probably because sociology is one of those disciplines, and I use the term loosely, that really isn't yet close to being able to have its referents captured, chopped up, classified, quantified, analyzed and put into little boxes. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say the observations you point to could have been made by your run-of-the-mill keen observer of humanity, like a Tom Wolfe or Shakespeare.
ewjordan 18y ago
Ha, great article. Makes me think back to the terribad philosophy classes (at least the softer, less mathy ones - the pure logic ones were fine) I had to sit through in college. My trick back then: whenever I read a paper/essay/book on any topic (particularly metaphysics), I always kept an informal tally of the percentage of argument devoted to arguing that someone else's definition of a term is "wrong." Generally speaking, that percentage is inversely proportional to the overall quality and relevance of the paper - there's no point listening to people argue whether God exists or not if they're merely redefining "God" turn-by-turn until they each prove their point! This obsession with arguing over definitions and attempting to answer ill-formed questions isn't limited to philosophy, though, it's quite rampant throughout most of the humanities world and even comes up more often than it should in sociology and psychology. Which is a shame - those are both fields where tangible advancements with real world consequences could probably be made, but mired as they are in soft thinking, where everyone can be right (or at least present arguments obscure or pointless enough to dodge criticism), they have a very long way to go. At least psychology is starting to give way to cognitive science, which may pick up some of the slack; I have yet to see any sign of future improvement in sociology.
- msluyter 18y ago
  The search for definitions goes back to Socrates -- What is Virtue? What is Justice? Etc... I hardly think this denotes bad philosophy.
  - nazgulnarsil 18y ago
    I agree with wittgenstein and the parent. most "philosophy" is arguing over vague definitions. The real meat of philosophy is arguing over axioms. Every system has presuppositions, those can be fruitfully argued about.
    - msluyter 18y ago
      _The real meat of philosophy is arguing over axioms._ Says whom? You're engaging in the very practice the parent is complaining about -- you're attempting to define philosophy in terms suitable to you. In other words, attempting to limit the domain of philosophy to exclude discussion of definitions is an attempt to define philosophy and thus a self-contradiction. This is all besides the point. The original article is a critique of obfuscatory academic writing, and I would assert that one can discuss semantics -- and philosophy generally -- without necessarily being obfuscatory.
sep332 18y ago
"If openness means to 'go with the flow', it is necessarily an accommodation to the present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware of what is doubtful in it." This sentence might not be well-written, but it's not impenetrable. It only took two readings. Translation: "If you want to think critically about the present consensus, you must not be entirely 'open' to it. If you want to just 'go with the flow', you will be required first to forget any doubts or alternatives."
TravisLS 18y ago
Along the same lines (in case you haven't seen it): The postmodern essay generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ And Alan Sokal's brilliant hoax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
tom_b 18y ago
I think the worst part of this is that "dull writing style is an academic survival skill because they think that is what editors want." I would argue with the author's assertion that "dull, impersonal prose" is not sought. During my CS graduate school days, I saw several examples of technical article templates (for lack of a better word or phrase) that were specifically geared to follow the existing style of "successful" journal and conference submissions. By template, I mean something that was almost pre-written where you could just drop your data/charts/algorithms/etc into the proper place and submit. The use of such style templates did not leave much room to actually focus on the clear communication of ideas in a paper. But there is so much pressure to publish and build up the CV that I kind of understand why people used that approach. Combine that with the "hack the paper together in a fury of writing in the last hours before FedEx can get the submission into the conference" and I see where writing well is not as valued as simply producing publications. Of course, I'm also commenting from the viewpoint of someone who received feedback on a tech paper along the lines of " . . . I liked the words and flow . . . but . . " - paraphrasing here - the ideas aren't so good. Not missing grad school so much these days.
gintas 18y ago
I, for one, do claim to understand the quote by Bloom. I think he means that openness understood as "going with the flow" is in fact not openness at all because it obscures alternatives. This is actually a theme recurring throughout the literature, nothing really special. I do not mean to defend the poor prose of some professors, there is indeed plenty of that, however, in many cases it is simply not an option to use everyday terms because of their ambiguousness. Finally, the charge of obscurantism and particularly its "explanation" by social factors is just nasty! It's no better than calling your readers too stupid to understand you. In fact, I would argue that while both factors are at work, the latter is much more so. But hey, I'm biased.
ChrisXYZ 18y ago
I'm hardly a researcher, but I've written my share of dense academic papers as a student. I remember not trusting my own ideas if they didn't seem written in a 'smart' enough way. I almost thought if something could be written simply, it was too simple. So I'd re-word my sentences until I came up with something appropriately jargon-filled and wordy. Then I'd feel better about it. I guess it comes down to trusting yourself.
lutorm 18y ago
I really don't see much of this in reading (or writing, hopefully...) papers in astrophysics. The prose is generally dull and impersonal, sure, but it's also simple. Obfuscating your own papers won't buy you anything, because published papers don't count for much unless people cite them. And to do that, they need to know what they are about. Of course, there's always a certain degree of what's known as a "community of practice" in very specialized writing: Words have special meanings and there are customary ways of expression that makes it hard to penetrate for outsiders. But that's not because the writing itself is necessarily bad, it's because you don't know the code it's written in.
dmfdmf 18y ago
The good news is the internet will put an end to this type of argument by intimidation in academia. The university system is toast just like the journalist and newspapers. No one knows what will replace it but that is the process underway right now. Do a search for Clay Shirky and his article on newspapers and journalism, its the same principles.

35 points by frisco 18y ago

I got a PhD but never found my voice writing as an academic. For a while I thought I was a bad writer, but I spent a year or two, a few years later, where the bulk of my income came from writing. I found it was more profitable to write software than to write computer books, but that was when I realized the problem was in academic writing, not in me.

pasbesoin 18y ago

Reminds me of a few sociology papers. Some of the most * awful, self-referential terminology I ever came across. Might have been just those papers, or my mood, but it left a permanent bad taste.

ewjordan 18y ago
Neither your mood nor those particular papers were at fault - sociology is a rancid cesspool, filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking at its worst, masquerading as a science because the questions it deals with are more concrete. I suppose it's to be expected: the problems that sociology addresses are very complex ones, beyond the reach of science currently (though we're getting closer), and soft "methods" are academic Gods-of-the-Gaps that let people think they're doing useful work while they ramble on and on about topics that we don't actually have the tools to understand yet. Physics was in a similar state at one time, and it took several breakthroughs to get it to the point where we could learn anything useful from it.
- hack_edu 18y ago
  In keeping with the theme of this article, please define 'Humanities-Style-Thinking' and the intersection of this idea with Sociology.
- ChristianPerry 18y ago
  I disagree with your assessment of sociology as a discipline "filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking." Sociology uses rigorous, analytical, and quantitative methods to shine insight on the modern condition. It allows one to better understand the condition of the world, and by extension, one's place within it. And it has contributed significantly to my intellectual growth. When I've felt a lack of community in my life, for instance, Robert Putnam showed me that civic and social participation in America have systematically declined for the last six decades. When I've aspired to get into a good school or ahem a prestigious startup incubator, Robert Frank explains how concerns of status and position have a salient effect on my decision making. When I express a preference for a particular kind of music or type of food, Bordieu shows that preferences that I take for granted are in fact strongly correlated with my culture, socioeconomic background, gender, and profession. When I pay money to send a virtual gift to a friend, Baudrillard shows that I'm motivated by "sign value" rather than "use value" -- that what an object represents matters more than what it actually does. And that's just the beginning. Sociology gets a lot of criticism, perhaps because it's such a broad field. However, it has done more to shape my understanding of the world than any single other discipline, and I'm far from speaking alone.
  - ellyagg 18y ago
    Well, you listed several prominent sociologists and stuff they claimed. That doesn't in any way, shape, or form prove that their claims are true or even based on falsifiable hypotheses and experimentation like the sciences we trust, i.e., physics and medicine. This is probably because sociology is one of those disciplines, and I use the term loosely, that really isn't yet close to being able to have its referents captured, chopped up, classified, quantified, analyzed and put into little boxes. In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say the observations you point to could have been made by your run-of-the-mill keen observer of humanity, like a Tom Wolfe or Shakespeare.

ewjordan 18y ago

Ha, great article. Makes me think back to the terribad philosophy classes (at least the softer, less mathy ones - the pure logic ones were fine) I had to sit through in college. My trick back then: whenever I read a paper/essay/book on any topic (particularly metaphysics), I always kept an informal tally of the percentage of argument devoted to arguing that someone else's definition of a term is "wrong." Generally speaking, that percentage is inversely proportional to the overall quality and relevance of the paper - there's no point listening to people argue whether God exists or not if they're merely redefining "God" turn-by-turn until they each prove their point! This obsession with arguing over definitions and attempting to answer ill-formed questions isn't limited to philosophy, though, it's quite rampant throughout most of the humanities world and even comes up more often than it should in sociology and psychology. Which is a shame - those are both fields where tangible advancements with real world consequences could probably be made, but mired as they are in soft thinking, where everyone can be right (or at least present arguments obscure or pointless enough to dodge criticism), they have a very long way to go. At least psychology is starting to give way to cognitive science, which may pick up some of the slack; I have yet to see any sign of future improvement in sociology.

msluyter 18y ago
The search for definitions goes back to Socrates -- What is Virtue? What is Justice? Etc... I hardly think this denotes bad philosophy.
- nazgulnarsil 18y ago
  I agree with wittgenstein and the parent. most "philosophy" is arguing over vague definitions. The real meat of philosophy is arguing over axioms. Every system has presuppositions, those can be fruitfully argued about.
  - msluyter 18y ago
    _The real meat of philosophy is arguing over axioms._ Says whom? You're engaging in the very practice the parent is complaining about -- you're attempting to define philosophy in terms suitable to you. In other words, attempting to limit the domain of philosophy to exclude discussion of definitions is an attempt to define philosophy and thus a self-contradiction. This is all besides the point. The original article is a critique of obfuscatory academic writing, and I would assert that one can discuss semantics -- and philosophy generally -- without necessarily being obfuscatory.

sep332 18y ago

"If openness means to 'go with the flow', it is necessarily an accommodation to the present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware of what is doubtful in it." This sentence might not be well-written, but it's not impenetrable. It only took two readings. Translation: "If you want to think critically about the present consensus, you must not be entirely 'open' to it. If you want to just 'go with the flow', you will be required first to forget any doubts or alternatives."

TravisLS 18y ago

Along the same lines (in case you haven't seen it): The postmodern essay generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ And Alan Sokal's brilliant hoax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

tom_b 18y ago

I think the worst part of this is that "dull writing style is an academic survival skill because they think that is what editors want." I would argue with the author's assertion that "dull, impersonal prose" is not sought. During my CS graduate school days, I saw several examples of technical article templates (for lack of a better word or phrase) that were specifically geared to follow the existing style of "successful" journal and conference submissions. By template, I mean something that was almost pre-written where you could just drop your data/charts/algorithms/etc into the proper place and submit. The use of such style templates did not leave much room to actually focus on the clear communication of ideas in a paper. But there is so much pressure to publish and build up the CV that I kind of understand why people used that approach. Combine that with the "hack the paper together in a fury of writing in the last hours before FedEx can get the submission into the conference" and I see where writing well is not as valued as simply producing publications. Of course, I'm also commenting from the viewpoint of someone who received feedback on a tech paper along the lines of " . . . I liked the words and flow . . . but . . " - paraphrasing here - the ideas aren't so good. Not missing grad school so much these days.

gintas 18y ago

I, for one, do claim to understand the quote by Bloom. I think he means that openness understood as "going with the flow" is in fact not openness at all because it obscures alternatives. This is actually a theme recurring throughout the literature, nothing really special. I do not mean to defend the poor prose of some professors, there is indeed plenty of that, however, in many cases it is simply not an option to use everyday terms because of their ambiguousness. Finally, the charge of obscurantism and particularly its "explanation" by social factors is just nasty! It's no better than calling your readers too stupid to understand you. In fact, I would argue that while both factors are at work, the latter is much more so. But hey, I'm biased.

ChrisXYZ 18y ago

I'm hardly a researcher, but I've written my share of dense academic papers as a student. I remember not trusting my own ideas if they didn't seem written in a 'smart' enough way. I almost thought if something could be written simply, it was too simple. So I'd re-word my sentences until I came up with something appropriately jargon-filled and wordy. Then I'd feel better about it. I guess it comes down to trusting yourself.

lutorm 18y ago

I really don't see much of this in reading (or writing, hopefully...) papers in astrophysics. The prose is generally dull and impersonal, sure, but it's also simple. Obfuscating your own papers won't buy you anything, because published papers don't count for much unless people cite them. And to do that, they need to know what they are about. Of course, there's always a certain degree of what's known as a "community of practice" in very specialized writing: Words have special meanings and there are customary ways of expression that makes it hard to penetrate for outsiders. But that's not because the writing itself is necessarily bad, it's because you don't know the code it's written in.

dmfdmf 18y ago

The good news is the internet will put an end to this type of argument by intimidation in academia. The university system is toast just like the journalist and newspapers. No one knows what will replace it but that is the process underway right now. Do a search for Clay Shirky and his article on newspapers and journalism, its the same principles.