The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
Academic Language, or why they done got to talk all fancy-like
Posts
I think it's important to figure out what the author was trying to say before you come up with your own opinion. Need to know the rules before you can break them type of thing.
I'm not saying it's the only valid interpretation, I just think it's important to know.
It makes having a wide range of interests a vocabularic nightmare.
And I have invented like four words in this thread already.
--
Inq: It's worse than that, there's also "What was the author REALLY writing about, subconsciously?"
again, the author's conscious intention has no more inherent value than any other reader's. it is perfectly possible that any given interpretation of a work has more support in the text than the supposed authorial intent. in many cases, the author says a lot of things that he or she doesn't intend to say. is that authorial intent, or something else? the only way to validate a reading is to evaluate it on its own merit. to analyze by the author's supposed intent, and to assign value based on that intent, is officially a fallacy.
None of it actually changes anything anyways, but huge swaths of literature are devoted to psychoanalyzing other literature, and other psychoanalytic literature.
Think of it this way: Okay, you learn the True Meaning of Moby-Dick.
What have you gained?
True Meaning of Moby-Dick
???
Profit
I guess what I'm trying to say more is, if the author was say, a known women's right activist, it probably couldn't hurt to look at their work from the perspective of women's right, in addition to any other analysis you might feel is appropriate.
This. A thousand times this.
It doesn't even require a purely academic setting. Do you have any idea how many words there are for dirt? And they all have slightly different meanings that are compounded upon when viewed through the lens of a different profession/education. Does re-grade mean to push the existing dirt around, apply new dirt from the excavation, import in topsoil, or did Billy erase his first answer but the scantron miss it?
Having read many anthropological theory, I know that there is a danger of going too far. The practical side of anthropology suffers if your ideas about shaping culture are explained in terms that the common person wont understand. Influencing the way culture works cant happen by only influencing academics.
Im sure the practical side of other social sciences also suffer.
but they're listening to every word I say
They already have to hide information from you in required school levels to get through their careers in one piece.
I dont think this applys because we are talking about really heavy academic papers. They dont read those in high schools.
but they're listening to every word I say
Imagine when discussion of the arts, which has far less of a practical side to ground it, encounters the same problem. It compounds itself. Clearly the arts are important, but people reject them because they encounter criticism that seems deliberately obtuse, and in some cases might actually be deliberately obtuse.
Another, more worrisome case of a similar phenomenon is legalese. Legal language is a fucking abortion. It is deliberately twisty and hard to understand, and deliberately uses jargon (or at least was founded on deliberate use of jargon) to make it more difficult for the common folk to get a fix on it. And this is something that has a profound, fundemental role in the very function of society.
How many heavy academic concepts do you think most people can grasp?
People don't believe in evolution.
Some people don't even believe that the Earth is round.
--
Legal language is an issue all its own, and requires huge amounts of bloodshed to change.
It's neither smooth nor does it even maintain a steady shape.
Thing is mostly fluid.
We're sitting on a lava bubble.
But they are obfuscating it, not just for idiots, but for people in other disciplines as well. And for not idiots. If you read some anthropology theory you would be like "what the hell are these people talking about?"
Similar to if I read theories about child molestation or whatever it is you do. :winky:
There need to be some people that bring it in a bit and explain it. But these people are almost always shunned by the larger academic community.
but they're listening to every word I say
It's an insular culture.
I already explained this.
They don't want to be involved with the rest of the world.
The exceptions are usually actual writers.
Yeah, well, that makes them dicks then. They are doing research supposedly to improve things and then don't want to explain to anyone whats going on? Seems like a pretty dick move to me.
but they're listening to every word I say
Most academics aren't trying to "improve" anything. They're trying to pad their CVs so that they can land a tenure-track job, achieve tenure, and then take it easy until retirement.
This.
One of the best and most respected profs at my university? Yeah. One of her journal articles I ran across in one of my higher level classes was about Emily Dickinson being a bisexual who was into being dominated.
--
ELM: I've known some truly awesome and useful academics with broad minds and interests. They're just not very high on the totem pole.
Yes, we can use common terminology, but that is less exact than the technical terminology.
As for sentence structure, written English is never like spoken English, which is why stunning pieces of oratory seem stuttered on the page and vivid written descriptions are hard to follow if listened to. Those skilled in the written word are also more able to move around sentence structure to fit their train of thought and don't notice when it becomes challenging to laymen.
Being an intellectual is like being a patriot: if you claim you are one, you probably aren't.
This doesn't really address the problem I am raising.
Technical terminology, in the first place, does not disrupt communication when you have learned it, in the case of most sciences. Erithacus rubecula is a clearly defined, solidly known concept. Once you know what it is, you know what it is. This is not the case in social sciences and arts criticism, where terminology changes in its meaning from school of though to school of thought, even paper to paper, even page to page. Most problematically, the terminology of academia often takes the form of specially invented or modified words, or even otherwise standard words that have been completely redefined to have a new meaning.
Secondly, if your writing is hard to follow not just for laymen but for professional academics in your own field with a similar area of expertise, you are not "skilled in the written word." The most important element in the realm of academic writing should always be effectiveness of communication. The whole point is to disseminate and share ideas. I have read many articles and essays that are not communicating anywhere near as efficiently as possible. Many of these essays are vitally important in their respective areas of study. That is a problem.
I am pretty certain that I have both read and cited that article in my Queer Theory class last semester.
Anyway, I certainly would not characterize myself as an anti-academic. In fact, it is my fondest wish to one day become a professional academic. But I do think that the system, especially in literature, is clogged by hacks--or if you want to be more charitable, by people who got into academia because they wanted to teach, and see research as something they have to do to get a teaching job. I sympathize completely with the latter group.
But academic language in the liberal arts is something I just don't understand the utility of.
Humanities professors feel like they are under constant pressure to demonstrate the worth of their fields to university administration, since by far most funding gets pulled in through the science departments. I think a lot of the jargon of critical theory was subconsciously devised to make the humanities resemble the sciences so that English profs. could point to their unnecessarily dense papers and point out that they are doing important, specialized work. Like most bad writing, academese is based on fear. I for one don't think the study of the humanities requires justification, and do not foresee a time when humanities education is excluded from our universities, so I think that academics could afford to write more transparently. In trying to prove their worth, I think they just alienate people.
Mathematics has a special meaning of the word "half." In math, a half is one of two equal parts. In modern lay usage, a half is one of two parts. In some archival usage, a half is somehow one of between two and six parts.
It's fallen out of usage because grammar nazis think just one of two parts is improper usage and everybody takes math.
Also: Philosophers tend to suck at writing. The lack of standardization of terms, as pointed out earlier in the thread, sucks.
That's not true for me, in fact I'm rather insulted.
The fact is I'm writing for other academics interested in the same area. If students also happen to read it that's all well and good. Then again, I write in an area where it's unlikely many people except academics are going to want to read any papers I write.
Classical literature, specifically Latin epigram.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
So long as you define PS in a certain way. I think Foucault is brilliant. Of course he was called a PS but claimed PS ws nonsense so go figure.
As to the thread. Language is about communication and communication is about more than just some idealized understanding. Three decent explanations for jargon are 1) more clarity--this is the reason doctors need to study anatomy really, really hard and why lawyers get stuck with things like "mutatis mutandis;" 2) more community--people aren't robots, they like to create their little clubs and language is a huge part of that; and 3) language is a moving target that evolves in a community--you hang out with academics long enough you start to talk/write like them.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
As long as you define brilliant in a certain way, I agree with you.
The way you must define it is "not brilliant".
Legal academic papers tend to be quite good, I found - if only because they come from a discipline that is structured around putting forward complicated arguments in a form that's easy to digest.
Not to say that there aren't some stinkers, though...
The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.
Basically, this professor left Dartmouth because of a "hostile" working environment where her students didn't agree with her. Personally, from the way the material is described, I'd have problems with it too. And if she isn't able to take criticisms, maybe she should avoid having discussions in her classes, or just teach upper-div classes.