Academic Writing

Why Academics Stink at Writing

Steven Pinker | September 26, 2014

Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time low: "Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development." In a similar vein, Bill Watterson has the 6-year-old Calvin titling his homework assignment "The Dynamics of Inter­being and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes," and exclaiming to Hobbes, his tiger companion, "Academia, here I come!"
No honest professor can deny that there’s something to the stereotype. When the late Denis Dutton (founder of the Chronicle-owned Arts & Letters Daily) ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to celebrate "the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles," he had no shortage of nominations, and he awarded the prizes to some of academe’s leading lights.

[Paperback edition, September 22, 2015] "Why is so much writing so bad, and how can we make it better? Is the English language being corrupted by texting and social media? Do the kids today even care about good writing—and why should we care?" Source: http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing-ebook/dp/B00INIYG74/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1446567810&sr=8-1

<more at http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Academics-Writing-Stinks/148989/; related links: http://judgmentalobserver.com/2015/01/08/in-defense-of-academic-writing/ (In Defense of Academic Writing. January 11, 2105) and http://edge.org/conversation/steven_pinker-writing-in-the-21st-century (+Video) (Writing In The 21st Century. A Conversation With Steven Pinker. June 9, 2014)>