Dancing with Professors: the trouble with academic prose

http://trc.ucdavis.edu/bajaffee/NEM150/Course%20Content/dancing.htm

by frisco • 17 years ago

35 19 17 years ago

trc.ucdavis.edu

paul_houle• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

ewjordan2• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

In keeping with the theme of this article, please define 'Humanities-Style-Thinking' and the intersection of this idea with Sociology.

ChristianPerry• 17 years 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.

ewjordan2• 17 years 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.

msluyter2• 17 years ago

The search for definitions goes back to Socrates -- What is Virtue? What is Justice? Etc...

I hardly think this denotes bad philosophy.

nazgulnarsil2• 17 years 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.

Retric• 17 years ago

Words, trying to suggest they have meaning beyond means of communication makes a huge assumption.

PS: The idea that magic could work is linked to the assumption that words have power beyond what they do inside peoples heads. As computer people I would hope we can understand that power of "software" is all about moving electrons is some useful fashion. Talking about programs absent the compiler and hardware is missing the point.

cduan• 17 years ago

I actually attribute much of my writing skill to a college philosophy class.

The reason was that our class paper assignments were not about arguing philosophical points. Our assignments were to summarize the arguments of philosophers. No personal opinions. Just summaries.

Regardless of the substance of the course, the skill of digesting, analyzing, and summarizing the position of another is surprisingly valuable. It is also surprisingly difficult.

Summarizing is difficult because it is too easy to mix up personal ideas with those of others. This tends to result in a mish-mash of words and ideas that don't fit together, resulting in the incomprehensible academic-speak complained of in the article.

Summarizing is important because it is persuasive. If you can rephrase your opponents' views without bias or argument, and then build on those views to reach your conclusions, your opponents are much more likely to entertain and accept your conclusions, because they feel like their views have been fully heard.

It is unfortunate that so much of writing focuses on making arguments, to the detriment of the equally important skill of understanding the arguments of others.

TravisLS• 17 years ago

Along the same lines (in case you haven't seen it):

The postmodern essay generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

And Alan Sokal's brilliant hoax: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

tom_b• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

Dancing with Professors: the trouble with academic prose

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