Heheheh :) Probably a good thing you're not academic material. I want to be able to read your works.
There are moves afoot in Australia, and probably elsewhere in the English-speaking world, to teach academics how to write English. :) For real. I kid you not. I listened to a program about it on the radio recently.
My theory is that academics initially wrote that way out of fear that people would understand what they were saying and think they were not smart after all -- if people can't understand a professor, the most common assumption is that the professor is smarter than them. So there is this unhealthy pressure to be obscure and difficult to understand. The big problem is that it has become so pervasive that this is how academics are expected to speak. It becomes habit-forming and even when they want to communicate important stuff they find they are no longer able to. They are stuck with this weird academic-speak which obscures meaning instead of transmitting it. But the primary purpose of communication is to communicate!! What a dumb situation.
Academics have it bad, but bureaucrats have it even worse, and I've noticed that more than a few computer people have hefty doses of it too.
We are racing headlong into a time of vast knowledge where specialists will be almost completely beyond the experience of most others. It is becoming more important than ever that we communicate well with each other.
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You know, I started reading "The Female Masculinity" and it was just like this book report. After 3 hrs I gave up. I'm just not academia material.
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There are moves afoot in Australia, and probably elsewhere in the English-speaking world, to teach academics how to write English. :) For real. I kid you not. I listened to a program about it on the radio recently.
My theory is that academics initially wrote that way out of fear that people would understand what they were saying and think they were not smart after all -- if people can't understand a professor, the most common assumption is that the professor is smarter than them. So there is this unhealthy pressure to be obscure and difficult to understand. The big problem is that it has become so pervasive that this is how academics are expected to speak. It becomes habit-forming and even when they want to communicate important stuff they find they are no longer able to. They are stuck with this weird academic-speak which obscures meaning instead of transmitting it. But the primary purpose of communication is to communicate!! What a dumb situation.
Academics have it bad, but bureaucrats have it even worse, and I've noticed that more than a few computer people have hefty doses of it too.
We are racing headlong into a time of vast knowledge where specialists will be almost completely beyond the experience of most others. It is becoming more important than ever that we communicate well with each other.
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Meanwhile, the opposite holds thru for marketing types. They're so used to writing in fluff that they talk in fluff too! ;-)
who me? biased???