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Exploratory Hypotheses on Discursive Non-Transparency in Research and Critical Praxis Situated Within Hegemonic, Institutional, Socio-Ideational Processes, With Implications.
Academic writing is notorious for being turgid, tedious and obscure. Yet, clear, precise, succinct writing is a public good. If academics could be induced to produce readable prose, their day-to-day professional lives would be greatly improved and the general public would be more inclined to respect our centres of higher learning. The quality of academic prose may seem like a trivial or purely cosmetic issue. In fact, it is urgent. If academics cannot bring themselves to write in ways that are engaging and accessible, they will have no means of convincing taxpayers and voters that the work they do is important and therefore deserves support and funding.
For those in the arts and humanities, this is an especially pressing need. The value of the sciences and related fields is more immediately obvious. But scientists also need to make a strong case for the need for basic research, without immediate medical or industrial uses. And we the public also need excellent science communicators to promote the public understanding of science, without which we will not be able to generate the political will to tackle important issues like environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change.
Universities in the UK and US charge most students astronomical fees for degrees in subjects that have no obvious commercial or practical applications. This is beginning to seem like increasingly poor value for money. Meanwhile, in the US especially, an underclass of adjuncts work for hunger wages, without job security and often without prospects. The moral incongruities of university culture are glaring. Academics are among the most fervent advocates of social justice: yet they work in one of the most hierarchical, exploitative and insular of professional environments. We are heading for a major economic depression right now and calls to downsize and defund academic departments are liable to increase. Scholars will no longer be able to rely on an aura of prestige to guarantee support. They will need to show their work and demonstrate its worth. For those in the arts and humanities, whose work largely takes the form of writing, that means that they will have to write well. If a humanities scholar cannot even communicate effectively in writing, she will not be able to persuade others that an education in her field produces any transferable skills.
The fact that most academic prose is so tortuous and excruciating to read is indicative of just how skewed the incentives are in higher education. Someone who knew nothing about the system might assume that scholarly writing would be among the clearest and most elegant. After all, most humanities academics love to read good writing themselves. A profound love of beautiful writing is one of the main things that prompted me to study English Literature—and I am not alone. In my field, academics immerse themselves in the work of some of the most skilful and most powerful users of language—and yet most of the commentary they produce in response is a confused muddle of gobbledygook and jargon. And they do this even though they have to read each other’s work: a cruel and unusual punishment that even the worst of them has surely done nothing to deserve. They could be producing beautifully expressed analyses that would be a pleasure to peruse. Instead, all too often, academic life is centred on the mutual exchange of stultifying, migraine-inducing verbiage.
Humanities academics, like all writers, want to be read. Writing something that you know very few will read and almost no one will read voluntarily is soul-destroying. If humanities and social science academics opted for a more readable style, they would be able to bring their work to larger audiences and could more easily make an impact on the world.
But, unfortunately, the incentives are stacked against good writing in academe.
In much of academe, the primary purpose of writing is not communication but signalling. An article does not exist to be read or to add to the sum total of knowledge in the world so much as to provide a line on an academic’s CV. Once it exists, other academics in the field must read it to demonstrate due diligence and it can be enumerated within the required literature survey section of other articles, thus making their authors look more erudite, by padding out the list of items they have read. This is an academic Ponzi scheme. The old joke that a scholar is a library’s way of making another library seems apt here. Academic gobbledygook is like an infectious parasitic meme, hijacking scholars’ brains to make them blindly produce more copies of itself, a kind of intellectual Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.
Most of this writing is hidden away in scholarly journals, which pay editors and contributors little or nothing—or even, in some especially egregious cases, charge them for publication—but which non-academics cannot access without a hefty fee. They are therefore—understandably—addressed only to colleagues in the field. As a result, the language is not primarily influenced by considerations of readability, style or sense: it’s used to display academic bona fides to other academics. The convoluted sentence structure, the pleonasms, the opaque terminology whose real meaning is often known to no one or which has no paraphrasable meaning at all, all say, I’m a scholar; take me seriously to those who can grant tenure, promotion or funding.
The problem is not the use of specialised technical terminology, like the shorthand that allows scholars in STEM to succinctly refer to complex phenomena or processes that would otherwise require unwieldy paraphrase. Nor is it a problem that academics use long words: lengthy and unusual words can add nuance or enhance the texture and melody of the language. The problem is that these articles are bristling with words, phrases and syntactical structures that add nothing to either style or meaning, that neither clarify nor enrich. These linguistic features are deterrents, serving a similar purpose to a skull and crossbones on a bottle of bleach. They warn: only academics can read this—it’s not for the hoi polloi. You’ll need the right intellectual credentials before you can crack the child seal on this bottle. And this kind of obscurantism differs from specialist, technical writing because no one, not even fellow experts in the field, can usually read it with real understanding.
A lot of such academic obscurantism is probably the result of fear, the kind of fear that drives someone to write while a matrix of diverse factors combine to instantiate this phenomenon, the institutes of K-12 education that provide normative referentiality for the case that this paper wishes to problematise and critique are embedded in what we might consider the ontological realm of the geographically circumscribed local-level rather than we looked at local schools.
No one wants to seem less erudite than others, less au fait with the lingo, less verbally sophisticated. I know of no other profession in which more people suffer from imposter syndrome. No one wants to admit that she doesn’t see the point in all these mystifying convoluted phrases—just in case they actually express something brilliant and profound, which everyone else is clever enough to understand, except her.
To topple this house of cards will take bravery. But, unfortunately, most academics are running scared. In the arts and humanities, especially, jobs are few and money is tight. No one wants to take a risk, so everyone toes the line. This nervous conformity is probably also the reason why academe is so politically homogenous. It has created a class action problem—while writing in the same Double Dutch academese as everyone else may be prudent for any individual academic, the net result impoverishes everyone.
Universities are extremely important as knowledge factories. There are synergies and emergent effects that you can only get by bringing scholars together in one place. The quality of human life is enormously enriched by art, literature, music, history, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines with no immediate monetary or practical value. They deepen our understanding of human nature. Were we to defund the universities, we would suffer an intangible but no less incalculable loss. But, if humanities academics want to survive, they will have to convince other people of this too. A necessary first step will be to write clearly and to make their work publicly accessible.
So, how can we realign the warped incentive system that rewards terrible writing?
Instead of making a department’s funding contingent on the publication of a certain number of journal papers, make it contingent on public outreach. Give humanities and arts academics opportunities to provide regular lectures for the general public. Instead of demanding such academics publish in professional journals, whose contents are sedulously hidden from public view, reward those who are working on books for an educated general readership. Scholars themselves need to stop doing unpaid work for turgid and obscure periodicals and, instead, create open access platforms. They need to praise, reward and signal boost work that is enjoyable to read, and send incomprehensible screeds back to their authors for redrafting. And they need to find the courage to write in a clear, elegant, comprehensible style themselves and discard the crutches of tortuous syntax and meaningless jargon.
The impenetrability of most academic writing has long been regarded as a comic absurdity. I think it’s time we recognised that it is a serious problem. Because, if we want to persuade the taxpaying public that universities are worth funding, academics will need to produce work that is available for public view and enjoyable to read.
32 comments
I’m only reasonably good at sums but I could follow this.
Imagine, an academic hired a hall and talked about, ooohhhh, I don’t know Victorian literature. Charge a couple of quid. I bet anyone who was interesting could make a living, especially if they streamed it online for a pound.
First — Well-done. You’re exactly right.
Second –. They all need to read Orwell’s essay about “Politics and the English Language,” which states and demonstrates exactly what your essay said.
Third –. Okay, the rest is anecdotal and in appreciation of your point. First, true story: I earned degrees in English, journalism, and special ed. I wrote all my papers for all classes in the same, non-jargon-filled, easy-to-read style and most profs appreciated it and wrote positive comments to me.
But I had one class called, ironically, “Theory of Writing.” My first paper for this prof was returned to me with a big red F on it (first ever), along with the note “Don’t you EVER use this casual, journalistic style of writing for an academic paper again!”
I never looked at another paper she handed back, but I wrote every one after that in the most “turgid” (heh), ridiculous, pompous style I could manage, with sentences that ran on for half a page or more, each with several clauses and tons of footnotes. There was no original thought; I merely quoted from the text word-for-word and gave credit.
At the end of the year, I saw that she had given me an A for the course. Guess she understood that I had “gotten” the idea — Theories of Writing. I was probably the only one who did. We used to gather in the hall before her classes and younger students (I was mid-life) would say “This book is too hard for me—I can’t understand it!” and I would tell them no, it’s just very poorly written! (And it was.)
I taught writing for years after that and always agreed with your ideas, as stated. I took care to tell my students about wordiness and taught them to edit (got in trouble for that, too — a superintendent thought I wasn’t “nice” enough and practically shouted at me, “You GRADE YOUR STUDENTS’ WORK IN FRONT OF THEM!” (Guess she never heard of a teacher showing kids how to edit before.)
Anyway, just wanted to share stories. Some of the comments here were great and some silly. The “jargon” everyone uses (education loves to say “pedagogy” and “modalities”) is NOT just “something outsiders don’t understand.” It’s deliberate preening. It works, too. Had a student transferred out of my class and into another teacher’s, with the mom praising how “she knows EVERYTHING about special ed” — meaning she gave all the students tech instead of teaching them handwriting, spelling, and math (this was 15 years ago) and used jargon constantly.
But I got the last laugh when a student we shared came in one afternoon to borrow my overhead. She said “Mrs. — was mad because we were talking, and she banged on the overhead, and glass flew everywhere!” She never had a clue about structure or discipline. Heh, she’s in administration now, of course.
Keep up the good work!
Well, given the writing in this article, you could take your own advice. I found 40 wasted words in the first paragraph alone
The problem is English teachers. They always assign papers by length- which rewards bad writing.
The rules of good writing are simple:
Say it short- wordy writing simply confuses the readers
Put it in a positive form. This sentence you wrote contains two negations- which is really bad. “If academics cannot bring themselves to write in ways that are engaging and accessible, they will have no means of convincing taxpayers and voters that the work they do is important and therefore deserves support and funding.”
A better rendition would be: “If academics wrote engaging and accessible prose, they would more easily convince voters to support academic work”
The pronoun “they” in your sentence refers to “taxpayers and voters” not to “academics” as you intended. Pronouns refer to the noun that immediately precede them
Use words that your audience knows, preferably words of Anglo-Saxon origin. Write “swollen” not “turgid”
No, James Sode. English teachers value conciseness above word counts. In the sentence you refer to, the pronoun ‘they’ refers to ‘academics’ because as you say, pronouns refer to nouns that precede them (except when they don’t) – in this case, ‘academics’, not the phrase ‘taxpayers and voters’ that comes six words after. I know what ‘turgid; means, and that it collocates far more readily with ‘periodical’ than would ‘swollen’.
Most arts and humanities writing is nonsense, so it is disguised. If it were clear then it would be clear to all it is nonsense
You may surmise from my participation in these comments that I am interested in the topic.
Searching for… it doesn’t matter… I came on this related post. (Mitch Kapor’s aphorism on drinking from a fire hydrant comes to mind).
If you are interested in what happened to the Humanities, you may also find it worth reading:
“Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem”
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Dear-Humanities-Profs-We-Are/243100
“For going on 50 years, professors in the humanities have striven to play a political role in the American project.” The article considers how that worked out. I think the writing is a symptom.
Perhaps! Though I certainly don’t think this phenomenon is restricted to the US.
Might it be not obscurantism but some sort of Straussian esotericism that is at play here? For instance, in the writings of, say, Butler, I often get the feeling that what she means is that gender discrimination is not bad or that it is even… a good thing. And this seems to be the case with a lot of postmodernists, that they seem to mean the opposite of or something very different from what they say. In fact, almost everyone save Lyotard, Foucault, and Rorty.
Jonathan Andrews:
“Yes but the purpose of business is to get one over on your rivals and make more money. There’s a reason for it.
Moreover, not being dependent on the public purse they can do as they please”
Well, in ethical business you get one over on your rivals and make more money by providing goods or services your customers value more than the money they give you. As to doing what they please, first they have to please the customer. Then they have to avoid being canceled by a Twitter mob.
So, no.
I have too many points to fit into a short response such as this, but I’d like to mention a few of them. First, is it not possible that the author has confused not being able to make sense of something with the thing itself being ‘senseless’? Take the ‘title’ offered at the beginning of the piece (which I assume is fictional as no source has been attributed to it). It took me a bit of work, but I think sense can be made of it. The paper (if it were to actually exist) is about research and other forms of information-gathering activity that pertains to a social context, itself understood in terms of hegemony (the ways in which we come to consider certain things as knowable and relevant to our lives), institutions (discrete, concrete organisations of people e.g. government, the police), and socio-ideational processes (ways in which ideas and concepts come to be produced in our interactions with one another). Moreover, the title implies that it itself is not attempting to prove anything, but rather wishes to explore the area of study (i.e. it intends to present ‘exploratory hypotheses”). I had to look up ‘socio-ideational’ but it wasn’t hard to find a reasonably clear definition online. The rest of the title was pretty easy to decode. Being charitable (a characteristic we sorely need throughout society as far as our conversations with others are concerned) I would imagine that (again if the paper weren’t fictional) the author would consider this to be the best way to word their title to best get across what they’re trying to do – likely to others who are themselves familiar with similar ideas and theses.
Secondly, I’m a little confused myself about why the author (in the ninth paragraph) appears to accept that technical and specialist language is not the problem. Such language, in any discipline or profession, is likely to be best known to those more familiar with it; to anyone else, it may easily appear to be ‘gobbledegook’ given their lack of familiarity with its contexts of use. From the fact that I don’t understand specialist terms in (e.g.) law it doesn’t follow that said terms are nonsensical; moreover, the very nature of specialist language is such that it is likely to be understood by only a few. So far as I can tell, the author is trying to have their cake and eat it inasmuch as they want to both grant the humanities/social sciences the use of technical terms and also demand that said terms be intelligible to those outside of the humanities and social sciences.
Thirdly, I think that the author utilises a straw man, or else a caricature of academia in order to make their point. It has not been agreed that universities are ‘knowledge factories’ nor are we all equally agreed that academics want (or even need) to be read by people in general. We make no such demands on mathematicians or lawyers, and if a theoretical physicist is unable or unwilling to write for a public audience we don’t consider the quality of their work to be suspect (it might be objected that physicists are able to read and assess each others’ work in order to ascertain its quality, but this only lends credence to my earlier point about technical and specialist language i.e. we would not expect a leading quantum theorist to have their work assessed by those outside of their field, let alone those for whom science is not their profession of choice). While it’s true that an author in the humanities will want to have their work read, they will also not want to be misunderstood and so will likely expect their audience to be in the low triple figures at the very most.
Fourthly, when the author writes about imposter syndrome, where are the figures? A simple Google search for ‘imposter syndrome by profession’ finds that those in the creative arts are the most likely to suffer from this, and there seems to be little to no information about whether or not academics in the humanities experience this. To be clear, this isn’t to say that they don’t, but only that it seems reasonable to expect at least some evidence from an online publication with such a great record for mistrusting so-called lived experience.
Fifthly, I can’t seem to work out what the author means by a ‘clear, elegant style’, but it appears that they might be referring to simple, everyday English. I can only speak for philosophy (my own field of study) but much of what we do demands unfamiliar language, neologisms, and stylistic liberties necessary for more than formal reasons. Much of philosophy is about examining our ideas and concepts, but in doing so we often discover unexpected and unfamiliar things; we find ourselves having to invent new words, or appropriate existing ones, in order to express these things. Moreover, we often have to be careful not to use language in ways that assume or undermine the thing we’re trying to write about. We don’t always get it right, and a lot of what we do is as experimental as the work of any physicist. However, the only alternative is to write about the things people already assume to be true, and to never challenge life as it is spoken about in public conversations.
This reply is getting long, so I’ll make one last point and be done. Imagine requiring the people of a town, with their own local dialect, to speak in ‘proper English’ and chastising them for not doing so. Imagine claiming that the only reason people don’t care about them and their lives is because they refuse to speak in terms familiar to the majority of the population. Imagine assuming their idiosyncrasies to be nonsense simply due to our being unfamiliar with them. It might be hard for us to learn their dialect, and it might even be the case that our not already speaking it means we’ll never fully understand it, but to accuse it of being ‘gobbledegook’ seems like the height of arrogance. Academia is a series of dialects that attempt to make sense of the world, and its existence shouldn’t be dependent on whether we all understand it.
Hi Alistair,
Briefly, I’m talking about writing that is incomprehensible or unparaphrasable for people *in the field in question* or which reads horribly *without* that level of verbiage adding anything whatsoever to the meaning.
Yes, the subtitle is a demonstration of how my actual title could have been phrased, if written in academese.
I elucidate this further in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/IonaItalia/status/1280773443097690112?s=20
There is a difference between STEM and the humanities value to society. Simply, the work of the sciences, when successful, produces tangible results. The humanities can have a huge impact on the way we think about the work but it seems to me that the benefits are difficult to attribute to particular people or groups.
The humanities do need to justify themselves to the taxpayer more than the science because of this and while, I’m sure, difficult language for outsiders is sometimes necessary, it usually is not when addressing ideas that we all have some experience. Iona’s example of jargon used in an educational journal was a good example; not only, like all of us, have I been to school but I am also a teacher of 30 years experience. I didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant. Educational research is generally held in contempt by practitioners who see it of zero value.
You’ll have no choice, the educational model is changing. Taxpayers will no longer put up with something they see as expensive, elitist and that treats those outside the circle with contempt.
Alistair,
The reason that ideas in philosophy or in the sciences are hard to understand is that the ideas themselves are hard to understand, not because they are expressed in a way that obscures meaning. Your claim that academic writing is a dialect comprehensible to specialized professionals would make sense if the writing were clearly comprehensible to those specialized professionals. But I am not an outsider to academia and I don’t come to writing in my field as a non-native speaker. As an insider, I find much of the prose in my own area to be just as Iona describes it.
Some good points, Alastair, and I agree with a few. But your final analogy is not among those.
The townspeople want to be isolated in their own bubble. Why? Likely, because they don’t care about exporting ideas, and they fear their import.
The academic disciplines under discussion here are different. True, they are staunchly resistant to importing ideas, but they passionately want to change the world. Why only communicate that to their fellow true believers when the objective is political action?
These humanities and soft science academics are not the same as hard scientists, mathematicians or engineers.
Terms like ‘quark’, for example, do require effort to understand, but they are representations of thoughts no human had ever had before. You do need to do the work. The very work the humanities folks castigate as colonialist, patriarchal, sexist, transphobic, etc., etc.. Example below.
Terms like “discursive non-transparency” also require effort to understand. It could mean “refusal/inability to resolve complex expressions into simpler language,” or could be a way of saying “serial liars.” You are made to do the work of resolving that. What is gained? Expertise in muddling through social justice word salads?
You say, “Academia is a series of dialects that attempt to make sense of the world…” I think replacing “dialect” with “dialog” would be closer to a traditional understanding of the University.
Understanding of the world is something we all aspire to. When we have insights we want to share we don’t intentionally, and unnecessarily, make them difficult to parse. We only do that when we’re embarrassed. See my comment here on deliberate jargon and obfuscation in scientific papers.
https://areomagazine.com/2020/07/06/writing-wrongs-why-academics-write-so-badly-and-how-that-hurts-them/#comment-41510
You note Italia’s ‘title’ example is sourceless. Indeed. It is a parody. It could easily be real.
To demonstrate let me give you a real example from the Canadian Journal of _Science_:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42330-018-0020-5
“…the curricular inclusion of Indigenous perspectives is differentially problematic if we cannot also attend to the taken-for-granted and naturalized epistemological, ontological, and axiological commitments and enactments of what we are including perspectives into.”
Apparently, they couldn’t figure a good way to get “praxis” in there. But “what we are including perspectives into” is genius.
A passable translation, losing nothing but the emanating penumbra of moral indignation:
“Including Native American mysticism in basic STEM teaching methods will not help if we can’t simultaneously reject the essentially Enlightenment ideas of logic and rationalism. It will be tragic if we don’t do more to make hard science “woke.””
I think the degree of difficulty in such a translation is one good measure of poor writing. I would give this snippet a 6 on a scale of 10. But even without the intellectual preening and virtue narrowcasting it is horrible writing. So, 8 of 10 overall.
Had I written it, I wouldn’t want the public to read the clear text either for fear of loss of funding. In that regard, it isn’t opaque enough as written. But it has a high stultification factor.
Scoring this stuff can be complicated.
Let me provide context for my translation above with an example that gets 9 on the bad writing scale. From the opening paragraph of that same paper:
“It has been argued many times over the course of decades and across diverse paradigms that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education practices-as-usual (re)produce systems of dominance: be it patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, (neo-)colonialism, able-ism, classism, labor inequity, anthropocentrism, and/or others. Thankfully, there are many who are doing the critical and creative work of (re)opening STEM education to the possibility of eco-social justice to-come through a plurality of productive approaches, orientations, and stances: anti-oppressive, anti-racist and critical race-based, decolonizing and de/colonizing, queer, Indigenous, gender-equitable, post-colonial, community-based and participatory, critical place-based, inter-species, and many more. Further, there are many examples taking richly critical and complicit stances to work within and against logics of exclusion. Yet, in doing so, many of these engagements are oft depoliticized and atheoretical practices of inclusion in ways that continue othering those formerly excluded, albeit differently…”
Those are the first four sentences, and less than half the first paragraph. There are one-hundred forty one words. Polysyllabic opportunity is taken at every turn. Especially where a Social Justice meme can be invoked for the target audience.
In, well, quite a few words for four sentences, Marc Higgins, Maria F. G. Wallace and Jesse Bazzul check every identity group/victimhood box, and add “and/or others” and “and many more” for good measure. Tomorrow’s outrage groups can’t be easily predicted. The authors do consider they have world insightfulness, but they seem to want to make sure only people who agree with them read it.
A 9 is solely for the degree of condensation one can achieve in translation:
“Some of our colleagues have been saying STEM education is socially unjust for a long time. It’s a good thing those people are trying to make STEM education conform to the post-modernist assertion that we can’t really know anything. Unless STEM education is remodeled in spirit of the _______ Studies curricula, it excludes all the victim groups you can imagine.”
The pomposity easily bumps it to a 10.
Neil Thin gave some examples of failure to communicate in the “positivistic disciplines.” The issues he cites for the chemists, physicists, mathematicians, etc. are not the same (Thin says so) as those brilliantly parodied in this article’s subhead:
_”Exploratory Hypotheses on Discursive Non-Transparency in Research and Critical Praxis Situated Within Hegemonic, Institutional, Socio-Ideational Processes, With Implications.”_
TJR pointed out that this sort of language is not found in the hard science disciplines.
Thin and TJR did make me wonder about the extent to which the corruption (linguistic and otherwise) of the humanities/soft ‘sciences’ had penetrated the physics lab. I searched for examples for about an hour, and I couldn’t find any. Yes, there are badly written hard science papers, but none of them are carefully calibrated to be discursively non-transparent. A paper on strange quarks may be may be hard to understand, and poorly written, but it still intends to have objective meaning.
What I did find is a study of patterns in how ‘firm’ scientists (bio-medical) lie about their data:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/25/study-demonstrates-a-pattern-in-how-scientists-lie-about-their-data/
_”“Scientists faking data know that they are committing a misconduct and do not want to get caught. Therefore, one strategy to evade this may be to obscure parts of the paper. We suggest that language can be one of many variables to differentiate between fraudulent and genuine science.”
The results showed that fraudulent retracted papers scored significantly higher on the obfuscation index than papers retracted for other reasons. For example, fraudulent papers contained approximately 1.5 percent more jargon than unretracted papers.
“Fradulent papers had about 60 more jargon-like words per paper compared to unretracted papers,” Markowitz said. “This is a non-trivial amount.””_
The study used bio-medical papers as source data, so it’s not quite like they were checking physicists or mathematicians. You might wonder how they could even start to check social science papers.
Social sciences seem to take hedging and deflecting as a core objective, and deploy 90% politicized jargon. You have to question the entire enterprise.
Ask yourself. On what basis could a paper entitled _”Exploratory Hypotheses on Discursive Non-Transparency in Research and Critical Praxis Situated Within Hegemonic, Institutional, Socio-Ideational Processes, With Implications.”_ be retracted?
I particularly like the opening: “Exploratory Hypotheses on Discursive Non-Transparency in Research and Critical Praxis Situated Within Hegemonic, Institutional, Socio-Ideational Processes, With Implications.” 🙂
Mirror is a scary thing 🤣
Its important to note that most of the problems here apply overwhelmingly in the “humanities” subjects of academia, not in scientific subjects. I know this was implied a few times in the text, but it needs emphasising more, especially in the title. None of this applies to any of the mathematicians, scientists or engineers that I know at any rate.
However, 25 years ago I was in an office next door to the sociology department, and talked many times to one of them. I read one of his papers, and it was exactly the sort of pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook you are criticising, even though the work itself was clearly very interesting and useful when he described it verbally. He admitted that the style was nonsense, but said that you just have to write like that to get published.
Yes, spot on.
The use of jargon as a shibboleth to signal that you’re a loyal, dependable, right-thinking, well-trained member of the club is not confined to academia. Other subcultures in our society have their own characteristic private languages to distinguish insiders from outsiders, the saved and virtues from the reprobate heathens. There is the “Christianese” of zealous “evangelicals,” bristling with code-words like “Christian” (for a convinced born-again fundamentalist, never for an ordinary garden-variety non-fundie church-going Protestant or Catholic). “godly” (for “devout,” “orthodox,” or “virtuous”), “convicted” (for “convinced” or “persuaded”), “of God,” “of Satan,” etc. Then there’s the pop-psychology self-help “psychobabble” of “self-esteem,” “liking yourself,” “being your own best friend,” “neediness,” “to own” (for “admit” or “realize”), “together,” “aware,” “I hear you, “etc.
You’re right there are special meanings/terms in the internal communications of any close knit group, but many academics are, in addition, resolutely opaque. Check those links I posted earlier for a couple of examples, and I think you’ll see an order of magnitude difference in opacity, and the writing is horrible even if you allow for that. Academia, particularly what we used to think of as the Humanities, is a special case. Italia does a good job explaining the dysfunction.
The groups you mention are communicating in code. The academiots are attempting to establish a new political paradigm via obscurantism.
Yes, indeed. Actually, I think business is arguably an even worse offender than academe.
Excellent and valuable. Worth following up with further pieces that address more specific shortcomings in particular areas of academia or particular kinds of writing. e.g. in positivistic disciplines, often the problem is blandness or obviousness, but sometimes it’s unhelpful use of jargon and poor explanation of graphics. In qualitative socio-cultural studies, it’s not just the wilful obscurantism, it’s often the appallingly repetitious use of clichéd buzzphrases, or – more fundamentally – the absence of any substantial story line or sense of purpose or inquisitive zeal. In philosophy, it’s often the absurd overuse of prevaricatioins, ludicrous extreme cases, and devil’s-advocate rhetoric.
Yes but the purpose of business is to get one over on your rivals and make more money. There’s a reason for it.
Moreover, not being dependent on the public purse they can do as they please
Enjoyed this article. I’ve complained about this often enough myself.
https://theotherclub.org/2017/12/rigorous-ideologues.html
https://theotherclub.org/2019/01/poisonous-word-smoothy.html
Two thoughts:
“And they do this even though they have to read each other’s work: a cruel and unusual punishment that even the worst of them has surely done nothing to deserve.”
Well, they do produce the gobbledegook. If somebody has to consume it…
“sedulously”
Couldn’t have said diligently? 😉
I love the word sedulously and I cannot lie. :-p
“Sedulously” and “diligently” have almost the same meaning but slightly different connotations. I’d go with “sedulously” here. I also like the word because it evokes Samuel Johnson.
Where have you been all my life, Carl?
Thank you for an excellent article!
Indeed, one may even argue that the fall in the trust of experts and science by the general public is the result of this growing divergence between academics and the rest of society.
Yes, especially combined with the obvious political agenda of CAGW and the selective advice on “social distancing.”
Thanks, Sukhayl!
Thanks, Sukhayl. I agree!