queerbychoice | The Academic Language Poll

Heh ... reminds me of my ever-present rant on postmodern academic language in general. What grates on me is: (a) the author, can't remember who exactly at the moment, who was defending it with a sort of "trickle down" theory of knowledge in relation to its applicability to "the general public," (b) the way in which the language thereof seems to have been picked up by a large portion of young writers/indie press zine publishers/etc as THE mark of intelligent discourse, along with postmodernism in general as an inbred static reality rather than a concept of reality, (c) the unnecessary in-crowd nature of that kind of language, and (d) the fact that I cave to the in-crowd (see, for example, the post in which I wrote something to the effect that "my gods smile upon hermeneutical readings of their texts" ... bleh).

Um. Maybe I'm a little caustic on the subject. ;) "Hermeneutics," though, I only know from the thousand and one times I've read it in context. It's "epistemology" that I get snagged on, personally.

Epistemology's just a meta-thought kinda thing. It's whether we can know something something exists, and the ways in which we can check that.

You might enjoy my reply (http://www.livejournal.com/users/queerbychoice/431850.html?thread=2837482#t2837482), about ten inches down this page. Let's meet there and then go for a drink.
(Reply to this)(Parent)

I'm a huge grouch when it comes to the issue of academic language. I find it really rather disgusting that professors and researchers who claim to be doing illuminating work couch it in language that makes it completely inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have an advanced degree.

I think the fact that a lot of the writing is deliberately obsure comes from a desire of the writer to make people think for themselves about its meaning, and not just absorb it like they would a children's book, suspension of disbelief and all. They're writing about deliberately controversial topics, so I think it's only responsible to leave people room for interpretation and disagreement.

...Then again, they might just be pointy-headed cloistered bourgeois wankers. ;-p

I took a class with the head of the physics department, and the first thing he told us about the research papers we were going to write was "We're going to try to discourage some of the habits you may have picked up in your English classes. Here, we try to encourage slightly less . . . flowery language."

I might just be biased, but I think when you talk about concepts that are inherently complicated (example: quantum entanglement), and not artificially complicatred (example: definining the 'horrible', the subject of a liberal arts class my friend took) -- you stop feeling like your paper has just been improved when you add a little twist that will take people a lot longer to decode, or add a word people have to look up.

I always feel proud when I write a sentence that I feel like my not-scientifically-trained mother would understand, and when I get a paper to come in under a page and still explain what it's there to explain.

Have you heaed of >the Social Text affair (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#papers)? A physicist frustrated with postmodernism and the lack of any sort of critical analysis in modern intellectual movements decided to write a paper that was nothing but intentional flowery-sounding absurdities, and got it published in a major social science journal. They were . . . a bit miffed, I think. Read the paper where he reveals the scam (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html).

So: Have I read an abstract theory paper/book in which I felt like I was only muddling through the sentences and only getting a vague meaning? Yes. For example, J. Cserti, Application of the lattice Green's function for calculating the resistance of an infinite network of resistors, Am. J. Phys. 68 896-906 (2002). Have I decided that when I feel like the author is intentionally cloaking his point in academic language, I should only make a cursory attempt to understand it before putting the book down and turning on some simple, straightforward cartoons? Yes. Are there many poor souls out there who actually have something important to say but, because of how they've learned to talk, are being missed because it takes careful examination to see what the hell they're talking about? I have no doubt.

So it might just be my biased perspective, but screw y'all. Try explaining why you can't send information through faster-than-light quantum effects. You'll real fast stop making up words for every new concept that jumps into your head and maybe use the simpler old ones.

And of course it's a lot harder to spew absolute BS and get it published when you know that the math you're using has no subjective truth to it and will be checked for errors.

Not that I've always been a bastion of clarity. This is just how it looks to me at this exact moment.

Part of the problem with social theory, though, is that words used to describe social phenomena are inherently less exact than words describing physical ones. While the general public doesn't get confused by the fact that "matter" means something different in a scientific context than a conversational one, and is okay with naming electrons and protons as different phenomena instead of grouping them all under "little things," social theory (and psychology, my main pursuit) by nature deals with issues that are rather often a part of social discourse, which actually makes it a lot harder to use natural language and also makes people more resistant to new terminologies. People are far more entrenched in their own sense of folk psychology than they are in their sense of folk physics. At the same time, the human social behavior and thought is in fact an incredibly complex, and folk psychology often proves to be either insufficient to deal with certain topics, or just plain wrong. So disciplines dealing with social thought have to spend lots of effort fighting against intuition.

With the exception of certain thinkers, like Deleuze and the psychoanalysts (whom I excuse because their project is in part almost artistic), I find social theorists about as clear, once you understand their terms, as psychological scientists. And I find writing psychological science about as clear as any other science I studied in college.

I wouldn't say I can read Butler as easily as any children's book, but I can read her and Foucault just as easily as any other text aimed at the college level, such as textbooks on education and psychology. I find them pretty clear, quick reads. It's Deleuze that snags me.

While I didn't look up hermeneutics this time, the only reason is because I'd looked it up before awhile ago while attempting to read Derrida.

I go back and forth, see, on whether this constitutes "bad" writing. First, this begs the question of what is "bad" writing. For me, "bad" writing is writing that fails to capture the exact meaning that the author is intending to convey (perhaps because it is too ambiguous). But this is me writing as a legal academic. Whereas if I were to change into a less-worn hat (for example, that of a fiction writer), I might be more approving of ambiguity. Postmodern theorists seem to wear yet another hat; one in which their mission is to question the meaning of language itself. So to me, it would seem to make sense that such writing is not automatically "intended" to be clear, giv en its occasional mission to challenge the concept of "clarity" itself. Maybe you don't like that mission (certain many people question it), but that doesn't mean that their chosen language is not somehow appropriate for this mission.

[more later]

Furthermore, there is the possibility that those with sufficient experience with these words *do* find that they can communicate with them. There are certainly a few people on my friends list (including one who I think was reading the same book) who seem fluent in the language of postmodern theory. To be sure, I myself do not find the language easy to understand. But my background in two very different fields---chemistry and law---makes me able to appreciate how sometimes one needs a specialized vocabulary in order to communicate certain theoretical concepts.

This all said, I think there's often value in avoiding specialized language when one can. (In law, there is even a specific "movement" for this---the Plain English movements) But I also recognize that not everyone feels that way, and that that question itself is part of a broader academic debate. And while I do come out one way, I don't think it's an *easy* debate. Take even "hermeneutics": one could use a longer phrase such as "study and theory of interpretation", but then (a) your text becomes pretty bulky, and (b) you may not even convey what you want to convey, given that "hermeneutics" has accumulated many connotations and relationships through its years of use than the longer phrase has. And maybe you *want* to make reference to those connotations and relationships, to situate your analysis in the broader context of academic debate.

Anyway, that's just one example.

While my answers were generally affirmative, I must add one caveat: oftentimes, a rarefied vocabulary is adopted to conceal the fact that one has little to say, or at least, little to say that is not, in the final analysis, trite. In those instances, I find academic writing to be more difficult to penetrate, because I keep trying to puzzle out the involuted sentences in the expectation that surely there is something significant to be found, only to realize ultimately, as Gertrude Stein put it, that there is no there there.

i don't really feel like the individual words are really the problem - they can have as many syllables as they want, but they're still words, and most of them mean something. but it's easy to produce quite incoherent writing using perfectly respectable words.

i'm also not happy being forced to give a single judgment of an entire body of writing, and i wanted another answer to the next-to-last question. something along the lines of ‘it usually has a point, and sometimes it's an insightful point, but, quite often, it's still presented in an incompetent and needlessly obscure manner’.

For me, how well I understand it depends on the material itself. Stuff like what you mention (anything queer, feminist, or Marxist) I have come to be able to understand quite easily. I can read anything from Marx as if it was spoken to me by a working class neighbor from the South.

I have had a hard time with some structural-functionalists though, such as Parsons. When I was in intro sociology I thought SF was easy, but when you really get down deep into it, especially when you start getting into neo-functionalism and stuff like that, it really starts confusing the hell out of you. But I think more than anything, it was just hard to see the world the way they see it.

The one thing that is harder than modern theorists is older theorists. Try reading Comte, and tell me if you understand what the hell he is talking about. Theorists like that not only use big words, but they write in a way that is foreign to us. Especially when it is translated from another language, and then you are about ready to murder the translator.

When I first started reading hard-core theory it was, well, incomprehensible. Now that I've been reading it for 7 years, I can read it at about the same speed I read other texts. The value of the text really varies. Some authors are really brilliant, but very much dependent on jargon. Other authors are very *not* brilliant, and ONLY have the jargon. There is meaning underneath the jargon--after reading this stuff for 7 years I feel like I can distinguish a "good" text from a "bad" one--but it requires basically re-learning one's reading practices over several years. So, I'll defend good theorists who use jargon if I think their ideas are good--it bothers me when people dismiss them out-of-hand, without making an effort to understand what they're talking about. On the other hand, the overuse of jargon is highly problematic:
1) It's _bad writing_, no doubt about it
2) It's classist, and many theorists who do it are Marxists! This is deeply funny, imho!
In any case, there are some really excellent theorists who do cultural critique in more or less "normal" language--I think Jan Radway is a good example. So really, those are my favorites.

But see, I've been reading it for at least seven years too, and I haven't observed the slightest improvement in reading speed. ;-)

It's sad that I can't just be "queer" and be happy rather than needing to read thick textbooks with large words describing me...when they don't even know me. :)

I guess my lack of horror at this problem is entirely correlated with the fact that I don't pick up the most horrible examples.

That's probably one reason I've always like the anthologies like "Bi Any Other Name" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555831745/qid=1121280047/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-1108982-2468038?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) with people's individual stories. Some of the stories I can relate to, some I can't, and they're short enough to read a new one quickly. :)

But of course you knew that already!

I need clicky boxes, and more choices. :)

Politics and the English Language (http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html) by George Orwell.

I just notice that you've defriended me.. I'm sure you have your reasons and I feel badly if I did anything to offend; just out of curiosity, what did I do wrong?

You did nothing whatsoever wrong. I just spent eight hours reading my friends list last night and then discovered it was bedtime and I hadn't ever had time to do anything but read my friends list, and I started removing people like crazy in a desperate effort to get my life back.

The Academic Language Poll

no subject

no subject

oops, broke my HTML. Re-replying.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Sampling bias!

Re: Sampling bias!

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject