Academics And Bad Writing

Why Most Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers

No one should be surprised if much scholarly writing continues to be mediocre and confused

Noah Berlatsky | July 11, 2016

Academic writing is bad, and academics should feel bad for writing it. So said Steven Pinker in The Chronicle a couple of years back, but he’s hardly alone. Academics have been kicking — or, if you prefer, virtually dialectically deconstructing — academic writing for more than a decade.
Many "academics (and especially younger ones) tend to confuse incomprehensibility with profundity," Stephen Walt declared in 2013. "Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to fit in," Rachel Toor argued in 2010. "Obscurity creates an aura of importance," said Martha Nussbaum as part of a lengthy takedown of the feminist theorist Judith Butler in 1999.

(Why academic writing is so bad. February 16, 2013) Source: http://tomnichols.net/blog/2013/02/16/why-academic-writing-is-so-bad/

<more at http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Most-Academics-Will-Always/237077/; related articles and links: http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_stink_at_writing.pdf (Why Academics Stink at Writing. September 26, 2014) and https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_and_literature/sample.html (Bad Writing's Back. Mark Bauerlein. Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 180-191.)>