Academic writing can be used as a smoke screen to mask bullshit, or to express ideas concisely. But this can happen in all communication.
Another important function is that communicating in this style shows you know “how thingsa re done”. It functions as an implicit screening for wierdos, but comes at the expense of keeping people wit hgood ideas but an unadapted writing style out of the field.
- insert Terry Davis quote *
If I might interject.
One word mean many thing to not same people.
Use special word for special job. Special job doers no get dizzy. All know special word mean same thing.
Special words job help make many people with not same word skill talk gooder.
If you need an example of this read republic book 1.
Socrates essentially just dunks on these guys that are trying to define justice.
One of them says that justice is doing good to your friends and evil to your enemies
The way that socrates reubuts this argument is that the fella in question doesn’t define friends, enemies, good, or evil, so how can he expect to come up with an idea of what justice is before first defining these other concepts that are meaningful to us because of their common usage, but can be twisted greatly in logical argumentation.
I like the part where one guy goes, “Justice is paying your debts” and Socrates goes, “oh yeah? so it would be just for me to return the gun my friend loaned me, when he comes back requesting it in a murderous frenzy? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
And the guy just leaves lol
I don’t read much (/any) academic writing, but does it really misuse words the way the link portrays?
Eg
- academic writing isn’t prose, like that’s almost the definition of prose.
- intra-specialized doesn’t mean anything (the intra prefix didn’t work on adjectives)
- “obfuscating … accessibility” means making it difficult to see that it is accessible, where the author probably actually wants to say “reducing the ability of outsiders to access the meaning”
I get that it is satire, but imo it would be better satire if he put in the work to actually make it mean something. Unless the point is that academic writers misuse thesauruses this badly.
All English words that don’t have a specific pluralization (eg mouse, mice) can be pluralized with either an s or an es. It’s also a Latin and Greek root, so it can be pluralized as you did, in the Latin way, or the Greek way (Thesauroi), or alternatively with the s/es ending, all of which are correct!
It’s saying that it uses terminology that is well-understood, specific and explicit within the field, but depends on a common understanding of the language used. So people outside the field are unable to understand it, even though they would be able to understand the actual concepts.
I think the point is that academic writers use large terms, despite using them wrong, when diminutive ones would suffice.
They use big words for the sake of using big words. Whether they make any sense whatsoever, is entirely beside the point.
The text, as I understand it is essentially saying the same thing, using big words to obfuscate that they’re actually saying something rather boring and simple, which also has the point of obfuscating the meaning of the text to anyone who isn’t an academic; aka someone who isn’t used to such nonsensical word play.
There’s a good reason I’ve avoided any work in academic fields. They incorrectly use terms, which just muddies the water on what the hell they’re actually saying. Not only because the terms are big/less known, but because they’re often used wrong.
IMO, academics are morons who like to sound smart.
… Do you concur?
I don’t think that there’s a higher concentration of morons in academia than in larger society. However, their professional experience is pretty different from the so called ‘real world’ so they definitely can have some unfathomable blind spots.
I understood all of that.
That’s what half a year of city college will get you.
