terpsikeraunos:

anyone else read a paragraph of academic prose and then stare at it blankly with no idea what you just read because it’s so clogged with jargon

Ok but seriously, when I was at the community college, I took a bunch of creative writing courses and really learned a lot about editing and how to string a sophisticated but readable sentence together, and when I went to finish my history degree, I had to read and respond to a lot of academic essays, and it was so distracting how poorly they were written.

I mean, yeah, there are certainly times when the academic jargon is unavoidable. A physicist isn’t writing their academic papers to be read by high school freshman. But there is so much flowery purple prose in these works sometimes. These guys were trying so hard to sound like they were geniuses and knew what they were talking about that they looped back around into absurdity because their work was unreadable. I had a professor call me out specifically in class because I kept trash talking the writing in some of the works we were reading and told me IN FRONT OF THE CLASS to knock it off and focus on the material.

Is it my fault these guys can’t write for crap? You don’t sound smart when you do this. You sound like you’re trying to convince me you’re smart. I was so happy when one of my professors, who agreed this kind of crap had gotten out of control, and assigned us a one page research paper. As in, we could not go over a page. It was really challenging, but also satisfying because I wasn’t having to fluff up my language to make a word count.