why academics stink at writing summary thesis

I definitely disagree with his criticism of metadiscourse. And when technical terms are unavoidable, why not choose ones that are easy for readers to understand? Take this sentence from a journal that publishes brief review articles in cognitive science for a wide readership: The slow and integrative nature of conscious perception is confirmed behaviorally by observations such as the “rabbit illusion” and its variants, where the way in which a stimulus is ultimately perceived is influenced by poststimulus events arising several hundreds of milliseconds after the original stimulus. Philosophers are every bit as rigorous when they put away Latin expressions like ceteris paribus, inter alia, and simpliciter, and write in English instead: other things being equal, among other things, and in and of itself. Did the writer really mean to say that there are some areas the student was interested in but didn’t bother to educate herself, or perhaps that she tried to educate herself in those areas but lacked the competence to do so? And the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation. A legal scholar writes, “I have serious doubts that trying to amend the Constitution … would work on an actual level. The reason for poor academic writing inside the academy is because “difficult writing is unavoidable because… That’s because the ideal of classic prose is congenial to the worldview of the scientist. I agree most academics don’t know how to write, and these are big named people. That’s because the ideal of classic prose is congenial to the worldview of the scientist. Powerful, geeky plain text editor. And we’ve got solutions to bad writing, too: The guide comes with advice from four experts about how to fix what ails you. This assertion is based on his observation that writers have written without giving thought about the intended meaning, it is no surprise that scholars engage in what they consider intellectual discourse yet their writings are confusing and at times incoherent. That tedious paragraph was filled with metadiscourse—verbiage about verbiage. Copy and paste this code to your website. Pinker claims that the two major contributors to the poor quality of writing are because they are self-conscious, and feel the need to defend themselves, or because of the “Curse of Knowledge,” and not being able to imagine that someone else might not understand the same things that you do. A considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in “Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,” rather than the bare “Arabidopsis” (which I’ve seen in many science papers). Since there are serious consequences to misinterpreting those statements as absolute laws, a responsible writer should insert a qualifier like on average or all things being equal, together with slightly or somewhat. So when he wrote a Chronicle article on "Why Academics Stink at Writing" I took notice. The truth can be known and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. Change ). The resulting “agonising self-consciousness” leads to many of the irritating tics of academese. Enough already. Is food something about which knowledge is possible? In this article, recent research on this process will be reviewed. Ironically, the field of linguistics is among the worst offenders, with dozens of mystifying technical terms: themes that have nothing to do with themes; PRO and pro, which are pronounced the same way but refer to different things; stage-level and individual-level predicates, which are just unintuitive ways of saying “temporary” and “permanent”; and Principles A, B, and C, which could just as easily have been called the Reflexive Effect, the Pronoun Effect, and the Noun Effect. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. I didn’t think so. The art of classic prose is to use signposts sparingly, as we do in conversation, and with a minimum of metadiscourse. 4). A classic writer, in contrast, counts on the common sense and ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means in general or all else being equal. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader so she can see for herself. Examples of funny papers are few and far between. Nothing like George Eliot, I’m guessing. Why Academics Stink at Writing. An insight from literary analysis and an insight from cognitive science go a long way toward explaining why people who devote their lives to the world of ideas are so inept at conveying them. Nor does their explanation enlighten. “Why Academics Stink at Writing” by Steven Pinker Response. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an “assessment word” is. Check it out. Few academic journals stipulate clarity among their criteria for acceptance, and few reviewers and editors enforce it. If there is a reasonable chance that readers will misinterpret a statistical tendency as an absolute law, a responsible writer will anticipate the oversight and qualify the generalization accordingly. For Pinker, the gold standard of expository prose is the classic style:[1]. About; Books; Publications; Research; Teaching; Lectures; Media “Reducing prejudice” becomes a “prejudice-reduction model”; “calling the police” becomes “approaching this subject from a law-enforcement perspective.”. In writing badly, we are wasting each other’s time, sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a laughingstock. I think the problem here is scientists trying to mimic the complexity of language that's actually necessary for other fields. A commitment to the concrete does more than just ease communication; it can lead to better reasoning. A summary of the flow of the argument allows me to skip to the parts that are relevant to me. When the late Denis Dutton (founder of the Chronicle-owned Arts & Letters Daily) ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles,” he had no shortage of nominations, and he awarded the prizes to some of academe’s leading lights. Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), ‘Why Academics Stink at Writing’ | Steven Pinker, New Silk Roads and a Eurasian Century? There is much uncertainty about the interpretation of experimental data and a great deal of controversy surrounding the theories. ( Log Out /  As we settle into the clique, it becomes our universe. A summary of the flow of the argument allows me to skip to the parts that are ... his analysis of why a academics … By the same token, this guiding image of classic prose could not be farther from the worldview of relativist academic ideologies such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and literary Marxism, which took over many humanities departments in the 1970s. So is “prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance” (when we prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer avoided other mice). Metadiscourse, professional narcissism, apologizing, shudder quotes, hedging, and metaconcepts and nominalizations. When I’m reading things by other writers, the things I value most are being able to understand what they’re trying to say and being entertained and engaged in what they are writing. ( Log Out /  Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. They can turn prose into a night of the living dead. The rest of this article is organized as follows. Academics mindlessly cushion their prose with wads of fluff that imply they are not willing to stand behind what they say. Squeamishness about one’s own choice of words is not among them. And by and large, academe does not. … Classic style similarly puts aside as inappropriate philosophical questions about its enterprise. It simply doesn’t occur to them that their readers don’t know what they know—that those readers haven’t mastered the patois or can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention or have no way to visualize an event that to the writer is as clear as day. …. ( Log Out /  The authors write as if everyone knows what “the rabbit illusion” is, but I’ve been in this business for nearly 40 years and had never heard of it. The reason it’s harder than it sounds is that if you are enough of an expert in a topic to have something to say about it, you have probably come to think about it in abstract chunks and functional labels that are now second nature to you but are still unfamiliar to your readers—and you are the last one to realize it. Still, their writing stinks. Professional narcissism – “academics live in two universes…the world of the thing they study and the world of their profession”. … On the aspirational level, however, a constitutional amendment strategy may be more valuable.” What do the words level and strategy [both metaconcepts] add to a sentence that means, “I doubt that trying to amend the Constitution would actually succeed, but it may be valuable to aspire to it”? That’s a shame, says one scientist. What could be so hard about pretending to open your eyes and hold up your end of a conversation? A third explanation shifts the blame to entrenched authority. Clear and Simple as the Truth is a great book. The curse of knowledge is a major reason that good scholars write bad prose. A failure to realize that my chunks may not be the same as your chunks can explain why we baffle our readers with so much shorthand, jargon, and alphabet soup. English grammar is an enabler of the bad habit of writing in unnecessary abstractions because it includes a dangerous tool for creating abstract terms. Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. I'm not surprised that Pinker finds awful writing in his field, but expanding that to all academic writing is a generalization I can't get on board with. It’s free; download it by following the link above. In reality, metadiscourse is there to help the writer, not the reader, since she has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to, like directions for a shortcut that take longer to figure out than the time the shortcut would save. Here’s Pinker’s version: When Calvin explained to Hobbes, “With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog,” he got it backward. Quotation marks have a number of legitimate uses, such as reproducing someone else’s words (She said, “Fiddlesticks!”), mentioning a word as a word rather than using it to convey its meaning (The New York Times uses “millenniums,” not “millennia”), and signaling that the writer does not accept the meaning of a word as it is being used by others in this context (They executed their sister to preserve the family’s “honor”). Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Within universities, the popular opinion is that the subject matter is so complex that it can’t be expressed in a simple, concise way that people can understand. Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, chair of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and author, most recently, of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, just out from Viking. In a textbook demonstration, a 3-year-old who sees a toy being hidden while a second child is out of the room assumes that the other child will look for it in its actual location rather than where she last saw it. I am a humanities man through and through, so will not buy into any ivory tower onanism-type arguments, nor do I think academics in the hard sciences are the examplars of Orwell's dictums for fine prose, yet nevertheless I think clear, precise writing is, all things being equal, a desirable thing. Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. The curse of knowledge, in combination with chunking and functional fixity, helps make sense of the paradox that classic style is difficult to master. I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. It is difficult to give precise definitions of the concept of language and the concept of acquisition and the concept of children. Since our powers of telepathy are limited, it also requires showing a draft to a sample of real readers and seeing if they can follow it, together with showing it to yourself after enough time has passed that it’s no longer familiar and putting it through another draft (or two or three or four). But after a while those abstractions become containers in which they store and handle all their ideas, and before they know it they can no longer call anything by its name. But it’s not just opaque technical terms that bog down academese. Guess what his prose in his discipline looks like. Why Academics' Writing Stinks by Steven Pinker - The Chronicle Review. The reading draws on the basis of welfare that society has come to enjoy. You don’t have to swallow the rational-actor model of human behavior to see that professionals may not bother with this costly self-improvement if their profession doesn’t reward it. The reason for poor academic writing inside the academy is because “difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter.”. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Welcome to /r/literature, a community for deeper discussions of plays, poetry, short stories, and novels. Why Academics Stink at Writing by Steven Pinker, Academics mainly shared knowledge mostly with fellow scholars and in such case they at times fail to write clear focusing on abstractions and failing to communicate with a wider audience. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. The phrase “assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word,” for example, is infested with zombies. Do you have colleagues, grad students, or friends who could use a little straight talk about their writing? Most academic writing, in contrast, is a blend of two styles. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. The most popular answer inside the academy is the self-serving one: Difficult writing is unavoidable because of the abstractness and complexity of our subject matter. Children mostly outgrow the inability to separate their own knowledge from someone else’s, but not entirely. Those include almost, apparently, comparatively, fairly, in part, nearly, partially, predominantly, presumably, rather, relatively, seemingly, so to speak, somewhat, sort of, to a certain degree, to some extent, and the ubiquitous I would argue. Ready Writing, a contest for students in grades 3,4,5,6. In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the candle to the wall so that the wax won’t drip onto the floor. ( Log Out /  And there is the toolbox of writerly tricks that have to be acquired one by one: a repertoire of handy idioms and tropes, the deft use of coherence connectors such as nonetheless and moreover, an ability to fix convoluted syntax and confusing garden paths, and much else. Shudder quotes. Article: “Why Academics Stink at Writing“. then it's far easier to go back if the paper tells me exactly where it was. Global Perspectives On Ethics: The Wal-mart Effect By Charles Fishman. This has not been my experience, and it turns out to be a myth. | Pepe Escobar, ‘Tony Abbott running from the law’ | The Saturday Paper, Galbraith: Varoufakis and the recent negotiations, ‘The Global Economy Has Entered The Crack-Up Phase’ | Interview with David Stockman, What’s Wrong With Public Intellectuals? But a surprising amount of jargon can simply be banished, and no one will be the worse for it. Classic style ignores the hired help and looks directly at what they are being paid to study: All children acquire the ability to speak a language without explicit lessons. ( Log Out /  We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a multiverse of cliques. It succeeds when it aligns language with truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. “Good scholarship challenges you to learn while teaching and to teach while learning. (To avoid the awkwardness of strings of he or she, I borrow a convention from linguistics and will refer to a male generic writer and a female generic reader.) It’s just that good writers don’t flaunt that anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully conceal it for clarity’s sake. How is clear writing not inherently synonymous with good writing? And the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation. ( Log Out /  I would be very curious as to how Steven Pinker thinks that, for instance, neuroscience could be conveyed in layman's terms. Search . Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Writing is complex and multidisciplinary, but academic writing should still be clear, but does not have to be bad. Many of the hallmarks of academese are symptoms of this agonizing self-consciousness: Metadiscourse. In addition to the fact that common sense is cultural, even people from the same culture will have different interpretations of different words. Pinker names six obnoxious attributes of the “self-conscious style.” What are they? But we readers care, because otherwise we have no idea what really took place. The writers forget that the few seconds they add to their own lives come at the cost of many minutes stolen from their readers. They call it classic style, and they credit its invention to 17th-century French essayists such as Descartes and La Rochefoucauld. Change ), Lynch & Horton’s “Editorial Style” Response, “Twitter Postings: Iterative Design” and “Writing for Social Media” by Jakob Nielsen Response. Sometimes wording is maddeningly opaque without being composed of technical terminology from a private clique. People often tell me that academics have no choice but to write badly because the gatekeepers of journals and university presses insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s seriousness. Many of the most stylish writers who cross over to a general audience are scientists (together with some philosophers who are fans of science), while the perennial winners of the Bad Writing Contest are professors of English. Pronouncements like “Democracies don’t fight wars,” “Men are better than women at geometry problems,” and “Eating broccoli prevents cancer” do not do justice to the reality that those phenomena consist at most of small differences in the means of two overlapping bell curves. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader so she can see for herself. I also use shudder quotes and hedging sometimes when I’m not 100% certain what I’m talking about or I don’t want to come across as definitely being 100% correct. The first section consists of a review of the major shortcomings of academic prose. Instead of the self-referential “This chapter discusses the factors that cause names to rise and fall in popularity,” one can pose a question: “What makes a name rise and fall in popularity?” Or one can co-opt the guiding metaphor behind classic style—vision.

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