Chris Ortega - Week 8

I understand that both non-fiction writing and formal academic writing have different audiences and equally valid reasons to exist. The former wraps up its content in sweet and powerful narrative, and the latter, as described in Goedde’s piece, “gets down to business” and is designed to transmit super-specific information to fellow researchers as efficiently and precisely as possible. That exactitude, however, makes it a bit difficult to work through if you’re not as passionate or well-versed about the subject as the writer themselves. Because of that, I prefer to read non-fiction case studies over more formal academic case studies.

Then again, I’m sure the content in both non-fiction and academic articles is equally interesting. It’s just the presentation, the style of writing, that adds some barriers to that inherent human interestingness.

There’s a growing movement out there advocating for less opaque academic writing. Things like the 2010 Plain Writing Act and Steven Pinker’s 2014 rant in the Chronicle of Higher Education against impenetrable academic writing, “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, both demonstrate that sentiment amply.

I believe that if more academics took that movement’s simplifying messages to heart in their writing, they would actually have more success propagating their ideas, which ultimately is the goal of the scholarly conversation that is research. Of course, traditional scholar-to-scholar writing will always have a place in the creation of knowledge, but maybe if we asked academic writers to write translations or summaries of their academic articles that non-PhDs could pick up and reasonably understand then more people would accept their work as something human and important rather than see it as something esoteric and unnecessary.

Comments

  1. RbtaylorOctober 28, 2020 at 7:19 AM

    Chris,

    I love that you mention the movement to make academic writing less opaque. I didn't know the movement existed, yet I've been thinking recently that academic writers could learn a lot from other genres of writing. To some degree, academic writing feels a little like intellectual/ language posturing: look at all the complex words and concepts I know and can write about. This caricature of academic writing ignores the big picture, obviously, as you mention the importance of scholar-to-scholar writing in creating new learning, but I do think academic writers could learn a thing or two about bending the norms of their genre.

    In my mind, a good place to look for how to do this would be in professional works written for teachers. I may be biased as a teacher, but the books that are written for teachers employ academic standards, and they are written to be more accessible to a wider audience.

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