Why is Academic Writing So *Needlessly *Ridiculous?

[minute bull]

I don't think it reflects any insecurity or that these people don't know what they're talking about. Generally, it is a sign that the reader doesn't know the language game well enough. That's their fault (but it's too bad philosophy is so damn exclusive ).

I agree with that, but you bring up insecurity, which is something I had intended to assign to the reader, and without using loaded words like insecurity. My opinion is that yes academic writing has its due place and design and therefore syntax can be complicated, but at the base function of it all it's meant to be a communication.

Meaning, value, and whose fault it is are all moot if communication fails. And it's only when one buys into contrived pretense that one succumbs to value judgements. The ironic thing being that assigning value is only a reflection of one's perception of one's own value, not the object being valued.

Or, I know you are but what am I?

But seriously, everything has its place. Including over-complicated jargon as well as pluralistic ignorance.

 

[Tuf_guy]

So im in my second year of university as a mature student and we have a week break from school, which most people use to catch up on reading. This week i decided to catch up on and also read in advance for one of my courses and it occurred to me that a lot of academic writing is just so needlessly complex in how it's written.

Take this little excerpt taken from the Atlantic expressing this very idea:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/

Like why has polluting your message with language so beyond recognition that no one can understand it become the standard? It's not even for any purpose other than to impress other intellectually snooty von snootersons, It doesn't help anyone to write like that. Worse yet is that it plagues the social sciences WAY more than anything else which is so cringy as they try to sound like real scientists.

It's a dick measuring contest, that's all it is.

I have read countless pages of this type of bullshit and I want to go into my Profs office and fill the room with uppercuts.

Anyone else agree with this assessment?

Ha.
I hate the in-text citations. This shit has gone way too fucking far when there's a string of 6 names in the middle of a sentence, because you can't avoid plageurizing without following a strict set of rules which favors that.

 

[Spoken]

I can no longer help here as I no longer know what exactly the target of your complaints is. It's sounding more now like you just read one bit from one essay and then made a thread about all academic writing

Limiting myself to that specific little bit that you've quoted there: Yeah, that's not good writing. That type of shit is symptomatic of literary theory and is steeped in semiotics crap. But, again, that style is specific to that methodological framework (semiotics) and the language of that field (literary theory, which, unfortunately, has seeped out into the philosophy of art more broadly and, at this point, into the humanities in general).

Learn yourself something here about objectivity, you postmodern heathen



Now we're talking



I've never gotten the hate for Žižek's writing. I get hating Žižek's shtick, his public persona, but the writing itself - particularly Looking Awry, The Parallax View, and Less than Nothing - is top-notch. What's difficult about reading Žižek is that he's read everyone and everything, so he'll string together references and allusions and quotes to 14 things in a single paragraph - or a single sentence! - and that can seem overwhelming. But it's not an indictment of academic writing and it's not even a stylistic problem. He's just dropping Lacan and Hegel and Kierkegaard and Schiller and Wittgenstein and Hitchcock and then he's off to another point to discuss Descartes and Kant and Benjamin and Weininger and film noir and then he's off to another point and on and on like that.

It does feel like intellectual sprints, and if you don't know what he's referencing then of course you're not going to know what he's talking about. But I don't think he's a good example of the general line of critique of this thread regarding the ills of academic writing.



The political Žižek is the only Žižek that I don't read. I mean, the dude loves Marx, Lenin, and Mao. I'd certainly hope that no one takes his political shit seriously

Some shit needs to be called out as shit. Poststructuralism is retarded. Period. It's retards writing retarded shit that only retards think isn't retarded. There's serious danger in writing blank intellectual checks like this to all schools of thought, in thinking that "Since people read it there must be something of merit in there." There might be, but there also might not be, and when there isn't, that needs to be communicated so people can spend their time reading shit that isn't retarded.

Bad philosophy needs to be answered, and while I'm not fan of French poststructuralism, Foucault and Derrida are immensly important figures. It's not stupid or silly or anything of the sort...they're just wrong on a lot of things. They're worthy of engagement. And most of the folks I know who are big deals in the field and quite literally stand on the opposite side from Derrida and the like would tell you the same. Good philosophy is done in charity, imo.

 

[Aegon Spengler]

Father of modern linguistics Noam Chomsky on monosyllabic vs polysyllabic styles of writing.

It's pretty easy to figure out what's going on. Suppose you're a literary scholar at some elite university. Or an anthropologist...whatever. If you do your work seriously, that's fine. But you don't get any big prizes for it. On the other hand if you take a look at the physics department and the math department, they have all sorts of complicated theories that you can't understand but they seem to understand them. They have principles and they deduce complicated things from the principles. They do experiments and they find either they work or they don't work. In the humanities, they think "that's really impressive stuff. I want to be like that too. So I want to have a theory." There's a field called theory in the humanities. They say "we're just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensibly, we talk incomprehensibly. They draw far reaching conclusions, we'll draw far reaching conclusions. We're just as prestigious as they are."

 

[faustian]

I don't actually think that's true. There are good reasons to consider that values might have no objective fundamental grounding, that capitalism is a corrosive ideology destined to fail via its own contradications, and that aesthetic preferences are arbitrary.

They might not be immediately convincing, but they're serious ideas. All the more reason they need to be written about coherently.

By its very nature, postmodernism can be subjectively interpreted to be anything the writer/reader decides it to be. So immediately there's a rejection of objective reason and empirical evidence in favor of subjective rationalization and, ultimately, total rejection of objective knowledge/truth. That's fine when applied to the inherently subjective arenas of art, culture, philosophy, etc but it's not an appropriate mode of analysis for science or mathematics or logic (or any of their derivative disciplines i.e. econometrics, accounting, law, etc)

The serious ideas you refer to regarding critique of objective value and capitalism are indeed serious, but these ideas have already been coherently identified and explored as philosophical concepts by existentialists and nihilists, among others. And whereas existential and nihilist thought eventually produced branching belief systems such as absurdism and dialectical materialsim which address value and capitalism on a philosophical level, postmodernism often devolves into employing obscurantism in the application of subjective abstractions to concrete subjects

I really just don't see the necessity for or usefulness of postmodernism today

 

[Devout Pessimist]

Check out the war room. There are numerous posters who write novels for posts and say next to nothing.
Its because
1. It makes them feel smart
2. If discourages people to respond because nobody has time for that, thus making them feel as if they won

I have spent most of my years on Sherdog posting in the War Room. It has always been interesting to watch an argument between two posters where one poster is getting owned by a few clear and concise points while the poster getting owned writes longer and longer rambling posts.

 

[Spoken]

By its very nature, postmodernism can be subjectively interpreted to be anything the writer/reader decides it to be. So immediately there's a rejection of objective reason and empirical evidence in favor of subjective rationalization and, ultimately, total rejection of objective knowledge/truth. That's fine when applied to the inherently subjective arenas of art, culture, philosophy, etc but it's not an appropriate mode of analysis for science or mathematics or logic (or any of their derivative disciplines i.e. econometrics, accounting, law, etc)

The serious ideas you refer to regarding critique of objective value and capitalism are indeed serious, but these philosophical ideas have already been coherently identified and explored by existentialists and nihilists, among others. And whereas existential and nihilist thought eventually produced branching philosophical belief systems such as absurdism and dialectical materialsim, postmodernism often devolves into employing obscurantism in the application of subjective abstractions to concrete subjects

I really just don't see the necessity for or usefulness of postmodernism today

This is true of some hermeneutical approaches in postmodernism, but not all or most of it. Lit theory in America has radicalized Derrida in ways that accent relativism more than most schools. But most postmodern hermeneutics do not accentuate relativism. Subjectivity, yes, but that's totally different

 

[Kaybee]

Ha.
I hate the in-text citations. This shit has gone way too fucking far when there's a string of 6 names in the middle of a sentence, because you can't avoid plageurizing without following a strict set of rules which favors that.

Yeah, once I started using footnotes because of Chicago Style I realized how much of a difference it makes for the flow of the text. All of the citation styles should use footnotes IMO; it's just so much cleaner.

 

[Kraysla]

I was an incredibly annoying kid when I learned a new word. The day I learned "ludicrous" I must have used it fifty times. At dinner my string beans were ludicrous. I could not be stopped.

In fairness, those string beans were ludicrous.

 

[Bullitt68]

Bad philosophy needs to be answered, and while I'm not fan of French poststructuralism, Foucault and Derrida are immensly important figures. It's not stupid or silly or anything of the sort...they're just wrong on a lot of things. They're worthy of engagement. And most of the folks I know who are big deals in the field and quite literally stand on the opposite side from Derrida and the like would tell you the same. Good philosophy is done in charity, imo.

But why does good philosophy owe so much charity to bad philosophy? Good science doesn't owe charity to flat earthers. Why do I have to extend charity to knuckleheads who can't write two sentences without one contradicting the other? Why do I have to read and know Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault even though I think they're morons while people who love Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault don't have to read and know Austin, Searle, and Cavell? The traffic in academia - certainly in the humanities - only goes one way and we're supposed to pretend that the streets aren't congested and full of idiot drivers.

You mentioned that you teach philosophy courses. I only recently got my PhD and haven't started teaching yet, so you're further along in the game than I am, but I remember when I was doing my MA and the PhD student who led our MA seminars told me something that's stuck with me. In our seminar group, we did a week on Althusser. My PhD group leader told his dissertation supervisor about what he was doing with the MA students and mentioned that this week was Althusser week. The professor was shocked and asked, "Kids are still reading that? That's what I was reading when I was in graduate school."

When the PhD student relayed that to me, I got to thinking: Why are we still reading Althusser on interpellation and Saussure on signifiers and Barthes on the death of the author? Why aren't we at least reading Žižek or Rancière on ideology or Chomsky on linguistics or Carroll on authorship? Why does philosophy get frozen and historicized like literature, like they're Great Pieces written by Great Authors and we have to "study the classics"? Shit's taught as if nothing new has been written in the last century, as if thinkers never reconsidered the things they wrote, as if other thinkers never utterly obliterated the mummified shit that students are reading as if it's "cutting edge" brilliance.

Barthes was a raving lunatic and Derrida was a wacky prestidigitator. They don't deserve the same level of respect and they shouldn't be treated as if they're on the same level as people like Aristotle and Wittgenstein. It's an insult to philosophy and to people who have actually contributed valuable insights to inquiring minds and it pollutes the waters for future generations of inquiring minds.

Now, that's not to say that bad philosophy doesn't need to be answered. It absolutely does. But why aren't the answers ever taught? How many times do you think Althusser has been read alongside a critique of his nonsensical theory of ideology? How many times has Derrida been read alongside Searle or Cavell? Why does every freshman in the humanities have to read Laura Mulvey but not Mary Ann Doane or Linda Williams or Teresa de Lauretis or Elizabeth Cowie or Miriam Hansen? It's lazy at best and irresponsible at worst.

Philosophers aren't deities. They're people some of whom are smarter and some of whom are stupider than others and have written stuff some of which is better and some of which is worse than other stuff. The pedestaling is intolerable and, worst of all, counterproductive and straight-up anathema to actual thinking.

I know this isn't exactly the topic of the thread, but I like to take every opportunity I have on Sherdog of all places to rant and rave about academia

 

[Phlog]

That specific example is just written by a ponce.

More broadly however, complicated language and jargon facilitates a power dynamic whereupon those in the Ivory towers retain their authorial control and power.

Simply put knowledge is power and an academic elite protects it through opacity of the language they use to communicate their ideas.

 

[Devout Pessimist]

father of modern linguistics Noam Chomsky on monosyllabic vs polysyllabic styles of writing.

The man interviewing Chomsky, Michael Albert, had a lot of insightful criticisms of leftist elitism and leftist echo-chambers.

Here is some audio of Michael Albert criticizing radical lefties during one of his talks. He points out that radical leftists will not change the world by hanging out in echo-chambers and mocking the working class. He said there has to be an effort to reach out to people who drink at a sports-bars and watch football.



@3:05 "Our (radical leftist) movements try to aspire to be like Yale Law School more than they aspire to be a place where normal people will be empowered and will be comfortable."

 

[EyeOfNewt]

So im in my second year of university as a mature student and we have a week break from school, which most people use to catch up on reading. This week i decided to catch up on and also read in advance for one of my courses and it occurred to me that a lot of academic writing is just so needlessly complex in how it's written.

Take this little excerpt taken from the Atlantic expressing this very idea:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/

Like why has polluting your message with language so beyond recognition that no one can understand it become the standard? It's not even for any purpose other than to impress other intellectually snooty von snootersons, It doesn't help anyone to write like that. Worse yet is that it plagues the social sciences WAY more than anything else which is so cringy as they try to sound like real scientists.

It's a dick measuring contest, that's all it is.

I have read countless pages of this type of bullshit and I want to go into my Profs office and fill the room with uppercuts.

Anyone else agree with this assessment?

This is a vestige of Victorian times when academic elitists rendered everything needlessly pedantic. Reminds me of BSD/Unix users

 

[IDL]

So im in my second year of university as a mature student and we have a week break from school, which most people use to catch up on reading. This week i decided to catch up on and also read in advance for one of my courses and it occurred to me that a lot of academic writing is just so needlessly complex in how it's written.

Take this little excerpt taken from the Atlantic expressing this very idea:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/

Like why has polluting your message with language so beyond recognition that no one can understand it become the standard? It's not even for any purpose other than to impress other intellectually snooty von snootersons, It doesn't help anyone to write like that. Worse yet is that it plagues the social sciences WAY more than anything else which is so cringy as they try to sound like real scientists.

It's a dick measuring contest, that's all it is.

I have read countless pages of this type of bullshit and I want to go into my Profs office and fill the room with uppercuts.

Anyone else agree with this assessment?

You will see this all the time.

In the real world outside of the halls of Academia this doesn't fly so well because it's impractical and thus inefficient.

Unless you are writing poetry, the message should be conveyed in such a way where it will be easily understood, as much as possible.

I think sometimes people make things convoluted in an attempt to project a sense of intellect.

 

[Badger67]

So im in my second year of university as a mature student and we have a week break from school, which most people use to catch up on reading. This week i decided to catch up on and also read in advance for one of my courses and it occurred to me that a lot of academic writing is just so needlessly complex in how it's written.

Take this little excerpt taken from the Atlantic expressing this very idea:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/

Like why has polluting your message with language so beyond recognition that no one can understand it become the standard? It's not even for any purpose other than to impress other intellectually snooty von snootersons, It doesn't help anyone to write like that. Worse yet is that it plagues the social sciences WAY more than anything else which is so cringy as they try to sound like real scientists.

It's a dick measuring contest, that's all it is.

I have read countless pages of this type of bullshit and I want to go into my Profs office and fill the room with uppercuts.

Anyone else agree with this assessment?

Med science courses ask for Ejap style. Its a get to the point quickly style. Love it.

 

[Aegon Spengler]

The man interviewing Chomsky, Michael Albert, had a lot of insightful criticisms of leftist elitism and leftist echo-chambers.

Here is some audio of Michael Albert criticizing radical lefties during one of his talks. He points out that radical leftists will not change the world by hanging out in echo-chambers and mocking the working class. He said there has to be an effort to reach out to people who drink at a sports-bars and watch football.



@3:05 "Our (radical leftist) movements try to aspire to be like Yale Law School more than they aspire to be a place where normal people will be empowered and will be comfortable."

I come from a working class background myself, and I recall my labour history professor being a complete wanker. First off he wasn’t politically active at all. In Canada we have two left wing parties and he had plenty of opportunity to volunteer or organize for them but obviously never would. Let alone talking to people in a union hall...
This guy romanticized people who he didn’t associate with, who came from a culture he looked down on and considered racist/sexist/whatever because of the curses working class people use.

I’m not saying every professor has to be an activist like Chomsky but it wouldn’t hurt to actually try to respect and understand people as though they were more than fictional characters...

 

[Spoken]

But why does good philosophy owe so much charity to bad philosophy? Good science doesn't owe charity to flat earthers. Why do I have to extend charity to knuckleheads who can't write two sentences without one contradicting the other? Why do I have to read and know Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault even though I think they're morons while people who love Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault don't have to read and know Austin, Searle, and Cavell? The traffic in academia - certainly in the humanities - only goes one way and we're supposed to pretend that the streets aren't congested and full of idiot drivers.

You mentioned that you teach philosophy courses. I only recently got my PhD and haven't started teaching yet, so you're further along in the game than I am, but I remember when I was doing my MA and the PhD student who led our MA seminars told me something that's stuck with me. In our seminar group, we did a week on Althusser. My PhD group leader told his dissertation supervisor about what he was doing with the MA students and mentioned that this week was Althusser week. The professor was shocked and asked, "Kids are still reading that? That's what I was reading when I was in graduate school."

When the PhD student relayed that to me, I got to thinking: Why are we still reading Althusser on interpellation and Saussure on signifiers and Barthes on the death of the author? Why aren't we at least reading Žižek or Rancière on ideology or Chomsky on linguistics or Carroll on authorship? Why does philosophy get frozen and historicized like literature, like they're Great Pieces written by Great Authors and we have to "study the classics"? Shit's taught as if nothing new has been written in the last century, as if thinkers never reconsidered the things they wrote, as if other thinkers never utterly obliterated the mummified shit that students are reading as if it's "cutting edge" brilliance.

Barthes was a raving lunatic and Derrida was a wacky prestidigitator. They don't deserve the same level of respect and they shouldn't be treated as if they're on the same level as people like Aristotle and Wittgenstein. It's an insult to philosophy and to people who have actually contributed valuable insights to inquiring minds and it pollutes the waters for future generations of inquiring minds.

Now, that's not to say that bad philosophy doesn't need to be answered. It absolutely does. But why aren't the answers ever taught? How many times do you think Althusser has been read alongside a critique of his nonsensical theory of ideology? How many times has Derrida been read alongside Searle or Cavell? Why does every freshman in the humanities have to read Laura Mulvey but not Mary Ann Doane or Linda Williams or Teresa de Lauretis or Elizabeth Cowie or Miriam Hansen? It's lazy at best and irresponsible at worst.

Philosophers aren't deities. They're people some of whom are smarter and some of whom are stupider than others and have written stuff some of which is better and some of which is worse than other stuff. The pedestaling is intolerable and, worst of all, counterproductive and straight-up anathema to actual thinking.

I know this isn't exactly the topic of the thread, but I like to take every opportunity I have on Sherdog of all places to rant and rave about academia

Wait. You're doing a philosophy PhD? I'm teaching, but I've still got some bits of a dissertation to write. I'm not done yet. My wife also has a PhD though and I snagged a position at the same place she did.

I guess I have a hard time calling Derrida or Foucault ridiculous because I see credibility in some of their claims, and I see the internal reasoning here or there as to why folks would follow them (and maybe even make them more radical than they already are).

I've about zero interest in Cavell and late or early Wittgenstein, but I see your point about reading people together to better flesh out which ideas are worth following or aren't. Lots of departments leans heavily to a continental or analytic side (even if it's an arbitrary divide). The bibliographies of the faculty make up the conversation and attract the students. So if ordinary language philosophy isn't being tackled alongside Derrida and Searle, that's a department issue.

I will defend the notion of reading a camp more than another though: your coursework takes you into prelims, and your prelims set you up with a copiousness to tackle teaching. Generally, the dominant camp is going to decide the course work and testing, which means your own research will follow suit. Young scholars can't be expected to know it all. So getting PhD students to read deep and wide is sort impossible. The balance is hard to find, but students tend to follow the camps they've been given.

Further, those departments decide what the Canon is. My Canon was a mix of postmodern and analytic, but leaned heavy towards german postmoderns (who I find quite digestible and compelling). But you're right that the Canon needs to be rethought more often than it is. Though undergrads now get a wider range of ideas than I was given 10-12 years ago.

 

[Spoken]

But why does good philosophy owe so much charity to bad philosophy? Good science doesn't owe charity to flat earthers. Why do I have to extend charity to knuckleheads who can't write two sentences without one contradicting the other? Why do I have to read and know Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault even though I think they're morons while people who love Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault don't have to read and know Austin, Searle, and Cavell? The traffic in academia - certainly in the humanities - only goes one way and we're supposed to pretend that the streets aren't congested and full of idiot drivers.

You mentioned that you teach philosophy courses. I only recently got my PhD and haven't started teaching yet, so you're further along in the game than I am, but I remember when I was doing my MA and the PhD student who led our MA seminars told me something that's stuck with me. In our seminar group, we did a week on Althusser. My PhD group leader told his dissertation supervisor about what he was doing with the MA students and mentioned that this week was Althusser week. The professor was shocked and asked, "Kids are still reading that? That's what I was reading when I was in graduate school."

When the PhD student relayed that to me, I got to thinking: Why are we still reading Althusser on interpellation and Saussure on signifiers and Barthes on the death of the author? Why aren't we at least reading Žižek or Rancière on ideology or Chomsky on linguistics or Carroll on authorship? Why does philosophy get frozen and historicized like literature, like they're Great Pieces written by Great Authors and we have to "study the classics"? Shit's taught as if nothing new has been written in the last century, as if thinkers never reconsidered the things they wrote, as if other thinkers never utterly obliterated the mummified shit that students are reading as if it's "cutting edge" brilliance.

Barthes was a raving lunatic and Derrida was a wacky prestidigitator. They don't deserve the same level of respect and they shouldn't be treated as if they're on the same level as people like Aristotle and Wittgenstein. It's an insult to philosophy and to people who have actually contributed valuable insights to inquiring minds and it pollutes the waters for future generations of inquiring minds.

Now, that's not to say that bad philosophy doesn't need to be answered. It absolutely does. But why aren't the answers ever taught? How many times do you think Althusser has been read alongside a critique of his nonsensical theory of ideology? How many times has Derrida been read alongside Searle or Cavell? Why does every freshman in the humanities have to read Laura Mulvey but not Mary Ann Doane or Linda Williams or Teresa de Lauretis or Elizabeth Cowie or Miriam Hansen? It's lazy at best and irresponsible at worst.

Philosophers aren't deities. They're people some of whom are smarter and some of whom are stupider than others and have written stuff some of which is better and some of which is worse than other stuff. The pedestaling is intolerable and, worst of all, counterproductive and straight-up anathema to actual thinking.

I know this isn't exactly the topic of the thread, but I like to take every opportunity I have on Sherdog of all places to rant and rave about academia

I also teach my intro to philosophy course by making people read 50/50 ancient and modern. We do as much platonic, Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas as we do Heidegger, Wittgenstein, etc. And I teach a deviation in genealogies from German idealism and Nietzsche.

 

[Spoken]

Also, a second year student in University isn't going to digest the hardest literature in any field. They're still relying on secondary lit. I couldnt give a fuck what they think about the scope of a field is when 80% of their classes are general eds.

 

[Phr3121]

Like why has polluting your message with language so beyond recognition that no one can understand it become the standard? It's not even for any purpose other than to impress other intellectually snooty von snootersons, It doesn't help anyone to write like that. Worse yet is that it plagues the social sciences WAY more than anything else which is so cringy as they try to sound like real scientists.

Usually done by teachers who have 'tenure' at a university and feel they are 'untouchable'. They are insecure little 'shits' who have miserable lives and low salaries. They have to justify their existence by using complicated language to 'seem' important, but they are not.