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14 July 2009 4:00 PM
The Awful Prose of Academia
Will writes:
Among other relics from middle school, my CD case still contains well-worn copies of both Pinkerton and The Blue Album, so I read Jeffrey Rosenberg's undergraduate thesis on Weezer's odd career arc with great interest (via). My interest waned, however, as the piece wore on; not because Rosenberg's ideas were stupid or uninteresting, but because his thesis is written like every other piece of turgid, academic prose.
OK, that's unfair. There are, in fact, accessible academic works floating around out there. And Rosenberg's thesis really isn't that bad. In fact, it's pretty darn interesting - more interesting than anything I wrote as an undergrad (a low bar, to be sure). But it is written in the oddly stilted, formal style of most academic papers (THIS IS MY THESIS STATEMENT), and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I mean, I understand why an undergraduate's writing style would be modeled on other academics'. But a paper on the fall and rise of America's premier geek-rock band needn't be impenetrable to a broader audience.
Comments (2)
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i used to write in boring academic prose before i got into journalism. it's a question of: (1) effort -- it takes more work to make something sound accessible/fun, and, particularly after 3 long months of research, usually isn't priority #1; (2) an emphasis on ideas over anything else; (3) training -- in academia, one simply isn't taught to generate clever turns of phrase; and (4) habit -- even if a boring academic writer were to recognize the dryness of his/her writing, stilted prose is a super difficult habit to break. i'm still not free of it.
The above comment isn't fair - at least in my discipline, art history, wit, punning, and beautifully crafted language was common. There was a very high importance placed on "clever." But papers and books were still recognizably academic, which is to say - very dense, not meant to stand alone, impenetrable by outsiders.
That being said - I was criticized on several occasions for "journalistic" writing. It wasn't just a neglected virtue; it was actively discouraged. The moral of the story here is that you can't put down academic style to neglect or indifference. It's very intentional, and needs to be evaluated as such.