Can the Academic Write?
theawl.com
Can the Academic Write?
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#2OK, if nothing else, TIL that there is a legit journal called Speculum which specializes in the history of the Middle Ages. (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/spc/current) Other than that, this article didn't seem to say anything new.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#3Another issue I didn't see in this interview is that academics (at least in the sciences) aren't trained to write, but they are often held to the same standards as those who are trained. Moreover, a scientist's job isn't primarily to write for a general audience, so it's hard to say they've failed in that regard. Whereas a journalist who gets the science wrong when reporting on it (beyond simply dumbing it down or massaging the truth for comprehension) fails at the defining feature of the job: reporting the facts.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#4No, for the most part they cannot. That's why it is so exceptional when there is an academic that has a solid grasp of the subject and can make that intelligible to the general public.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#5Academics seem prone to what Language Log terms "nerdview", the baffling but usually implicit assumption that lay audiences are intimately familiar with the terminology, idioms and house style of your academic niche.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#6Another issue I didn't see in this interview is that academics (at least in the sciences) aren't trained to write, but they are often held to the same standards as those who are trained. Moreover, a scientist's job isn't primarily to write for a general audience, so it's hard to say they've failed in that regard. Whereas a journalist who gets the science wrong when reporting on it (beyond simply dumbing it down or ma…
The real issue here is there may not be any way to report the "facts" such as they are. The jargon, the mathematical models are the sine qua non of the facts. Without them you're just playing sophistic games trying to engage lay enthusiasm with overwrought analogies that never really approximate the truth.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#7People that write articles about computers most certainly cannot. Words are often misspelled and their grammar is atrocious. It's so sad...
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#8A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly relate to this discussion.
Academic writing is all about compressing complex topics and ideas with a long history into as concise a form as possible without losing accuracy. (At least in the natural sciences, where I come from; some people would say otherwise about some humanities, but that is beside the point.) This is why we use technical jargon: it helps us express precisely what we mean in as few words as possible. If you've ever tried explaining something highly scientific to a lay audience, you'll know how tedious it can be if you can't use your technical terms. One of my readers doesn't know a word I used? That's what dictionaries and textbooks are for. I can expect all my readers to already have a sufficient background knowledge to understand what I have written. In academic writing, the greatest sins I can commit are misrepresenting something, omitting something important, or - heaven forbid - not citing somebody correctly (= plagiarizing).
When writing for a nonacademic audience, everything changes. Suddenly I can no longer assume any background knowledge on the part of my readers, every word that sounds vaguely technical needs to be explained. Also, my readers really don't care who said xyz or who disagrees with him, they "just want the facts". Oftentimes, they do not understand that nobody actually knows exactly what these "facts" are yet, and that all we have are various hypotheses and theories vying for the upper hand. So how do I as a writer present them with as understandable an overview as possible, while still doing justice to the different points of view? It is a constant balancing act that all too often doesn't have a satisfactory solution.
Apart from the question of content, the language I use is quite another issue. As j2kun pointed out, scientists aren't trained to write - at least not in the sense journalists are. Scientists are taught to write for scientists: concisely and accurately. Writing in a way that is easy or pleasant to read is not a criterion. So when they do write for the general public, they need to completely overthrow whatever they have learnt about writing and go with a totally different style. That is not easy. All the time I have to keep in mind that the greatest sins here are a) being uninteresting and b) being unintelligible - even when clarity is bought at the expense of accuracy.
So yes, academics can write. It just isn't the type of writing lay audiences appreciate. All in all, a little more patience on both sides of the divide would probably be a good thing.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#9Academics seem prone to what Language Log terms "nerdview", the baffling but usually implicit assumption that lay audiences are intimately familiar with the terminology, idioms and house style of your academic niche. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4509
Absolutely. Surround yourself daily with people using the same language as you, and you begin to forget that the language your group uses is not the language most other people use.
Re: Can the Academic Write?
#10I see this often as a criticism of legal writing as well, and while some of it is legitimate, there's also an element of academic writing having a specific purpose. And that purpose isn't entertainment or pleasantness - it's precision.
Like recently, when I had a sentence using the phase "missing completely at random" and someone deleted "completely" for clarity. That word was there for a very specific purpose - "missing completely at random" and "missing at random" mean different things.