why is academic writing so boring article

Most of us are trying, really we are! But just because something is published doesn’t mean you can rely on its being well written. The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has launched an updated draft guideline for the diagnosis and management of hypertension in adults. If the evidence leads you to conclude only that more evidence needs to be gathered (which cannot be gathered now, in the scope of the current project), then you may need to either redirect the focus of your project to address a problem where you can conclude something more substantive, or – if the reasons for being unable to make a conclusion are sufficiently surprising or interesting in themselves – you may simply present those reasons as the “evidence” for an open-ended thesis statement. Does it matter to global bureaucracies? It doesn’t have to be, and academics increasingly agree that it shouldn’t be. Paul J. Simpson is The BMJ’s International Editor. Neither intro could be described as flashy but both feel like the start of a story describing a relevant change rather than an encyclopedia entry: “In March, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in 2000 cities from 123 countries left school to call for action on climate change.”, “The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has launched an updated draft guideline for the diagnosis and management of hypertension in adults.”. But then go back to how the term is used in the text you’re working on, and think about its specific application in this context. He explains that most stories start with a change that captures a reader’s attention and that curiosity can be piqued by information gaps that people want to fill by reading on. We might just note here that the teaching of “academic writing” is itself a relatively new phenomenon. In reality, academics are usually collegial people who respect each other’s research and conclusions, and whose main aims are to refine and expand our collective knowledge. No, really, that was hilarious, was it not? It may actually just be badly written, whether because the writer didn’t consider style important, or because the writer never had training in good writing, which most scholars didn’t systematically get until very recently. It includes a standard paragraph on the global burden of road traffic crashes, but opens by describing the author’s personal story of loss. If you find that you’ve reflexively written a boilerplate opening, don’t despair. (For those academic writers of any level who could use some help with the nominalization problem and more, I can’t recommend highly enough Joseph Williams’ Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.). In the not-so-distant past, becoming an insider in the academy was an option for only a few, and the fact that one had to learn the rules of how to look like an insider more or less by osmosis ensured that the ranks remained thin. Raj Bhopal: Blaming, petrifying, and punishing the…, Why we need to keep using the patient made term “Long Covid”, Richard Smith: Who is most likely to have side…, Alex Nowbar’s journal reviews—18 July 2019, Richard Lehman's weekly review of medical journals. But original ideas communicated well through effective writing are still the goal. I’ll be the first to admit that many academic books and articles just aren’t a good read. why is academic writing so boring I like the discount system and your anti-plagiarism policy. I bought Will Storr’s book myself and enjoyed it. Academic writing is a static, unchanging entity, and separate from every other kind of writing. In 2007, The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) published an extensive research report, To Read or Not to Read, which highlighted those precise statistics. Academic writing is full of a bunch of meaningless jargon. These are highly intelligent folks, gifted in their specialized areas, but not necessarily well-schooled in the art of writing clearly. The main reason is probably that we all want to be taken seriously by our colleagues and many of us live in fear of not getting tenure or promotion (which rests in part on our publications). But, speaking as someone who has finished revising her first book under ridiculous time constraints and sleep deprivation (“constraint” and “deprivation” are both nominalizations), sometimes there just isn’t enough bloody time to revise as much as we would like. Experts worry academic papers are now so unintelligible that NO ONE can read them Lengthy titles and long-winded sentences can affect influence of article … What’s wrong with the guidelines? , usefully describes what grabs the attention of readers and does an impressive job of relating his advice to how our brains work. The great shame is not the dreary writing that readers must wade through, but the lost opportunity to capture minds and influence thinking. On inspection both follow Will Storr’s advice on how to start a story by describing a noteworthy change. Hopefully, in a reasonably well-written piece of scholarship, jargon terms will be defined somewhere in the text. Tricks from storytelling could make articles more engaging, says Paul Simpson. My suspicion is that most editors would generally discourage this because scholarly articles are meant to be factual not emotional. Clear, effective writing was – and in some circles still is! I asked a colleague who has previously slashed at my own lifeless writing with a red pen, Alison Tonks. Given the drama at the centre of most academic writing on health and medicine, literally life and death, it is astonishing that the introductions to so many academic pieces are so similar and so dull. It still triggers an emotional response in me six years after first reading it. The best pieces make a single topical point. Most arguments suggest tentative conclusions, expand on conclusions made by others or quibble with aspects of others’ evidence or reasoning, or – in many cases – simply lay out some new, surprising thought or theory so as to deliberately provoke controversy, rather than resolve it. How big is this problem? BMJ Opinion provides comment and opinion written by The BMJ's international community of readers, authors, and editors. I am impatient by nature, easily irritated, and afflicted with a short attention span. In many cases the writing (the form) must be simple or plain, because the ideas (the content) are by definition new and complex. But a more direct way of assessing the problem is to note the nominalization — “revision,” a noun made out of the verb, “to revise.” When you turn a verb into a noun, you are often forced to supply some sort of empty verb, often a passive one, to fill the verb-void. December 1, 2015. For more, read "The Future of Creativity," "Bright Ideas from Baltimore’s Citizens," "The Creativity Conceit," "Art + Science= Inspiration," and "Putting the Arts Back into the Arts. But just because something is published doesn’t mean you can rely on its being well written. Though many students are taught in high school to treat argument in writing as a kind of battle-to-the-death, this is more a reflection of teachers’ need to force novice writers to find their independent opinions — so they may effectively assert and defend them in writing — than a reflection of how the academy really works or what’s actually expected of your written arguments in college and beyond. It includes a standard paragraph on the global burden of road traffic crashes, but opens by describing the author’s personal story of loss. Namely, science articles in scientific journals (which is what I read and know more about). If you don’t, delete it. These familiar opening paragraphs assume that readers are already invested in an article and are only looking for dry facts to get them going. The aim of an academic paper is to quell controversy, to prove that a certain answer is the best answer so effectively that no one will ever disagree about this issue again (and if a paper doesn’t do this, it has failed). Sometimes they could be much better written. The great shame is not the dreary writing that readers must wade through, but the lost opportunity to capture minds and influence thinking. In the academic world, having something truly new to say – or maybe even just something that more or less fills a gap (or even just having a famous name) – can be enough to get published, despite bad writing. LOL. My advice is to use these ubiquitous paragraphs as place holders to be rewritten once an article is nearly complete. Alison highlighted two recent editorials, one on climate change and one on new hypertension guidelines as good examples. As in, the sentence that should state “the committee members revised the bylaws” is more often written, “the revision of the bylaws was enacted by the committee members.” If you present the latter version of that sentence to an English teacher, that teacher is likely to point to the passive and “empty” verb “was enacted” as a problem. If you’re not excited by the ideas in an academic piece, it may be that that subject is not for you, but it may also be that you don’t yet know enough about it to see why it’s so fascinating, or it may be that the author simply didn’t write clearly or directly enough to ‘let you in’ to ideas that do have inherent interest. His column appears monthly, Academics love a dull read, says Jonathan Wolff. Again, Wikipedia might be a good starting point if you have no idea where else even to look. Moreover, standards of what academic writing ought to look like have changed over time and continue to evolve, constantly taking on influences from trends inside and outside the academy. But the nature of the endeavor – in which every claim is constantly questioned and judged by one’s peers – is meant to ensure that nonsense doesn’t hold up forever. When a writer knows her subject really, really well, she tends to think in terms of lists of concepts. Most will be looking for a reason to care, many would love to be swept along by an article that will engage and inspire. Sometimes they’re as well-written as they can be, but the subject matter and purposes of the work don’t lend themselves to easy reading. If there were no scholars (from undergraduates to the big-name professors) to ask questions and vet the information we use to build bridges, cure diseases, form public policy and define ourselves as a people, where would we be as a society? But still, a few moments of pleasure from time to time doesn't seem a lot to ask. A term of jargon always has a very specialized definition, often for a word that is also used in different ways in other contexts, which is part of what makes it so confusing to outsiders. Sometimes, yes, it is. An argument that sets out to definitively prove some absolute solution will – in most cases! Alison has edited hundreds of editorials for, get straight to the point, tell us what happened, why we should care, and what we should do, all in the first couple of paragraphs. Given the drama at the centre of most academic writing on health and medicine, literally life and death, it is astonishing that the introductions to so many academic pieces are so similar and so dull. A second reason is that our subject matter often doesn’t it particularly lend itself to humor (you try to make Stalinism or nuclear physics funny, why don’t you, and don’t forget to make an original contribution to the field while you do it!). II, on page 75 (1982 paperback edition) there’s a whole sentence where nearly every word begins with the letter P: The proliferating profusion of possible political permutations among the pullulating peoples and parties of the Polish provinces in this period palpably prevented the propagation of permanent pacts between potential partners. But most of the time the jargon is far from meaningless, though it may not contribute much to the clarity of the writing. It’s a means of efficiently referencing long, drawn-out thought processes that the whole insider group has already been through. Both articles also invite us to read on by offering an information gap. They are well argued with new insights. And still another reason is that, again, our main focus is always clarity, since by definition our subject matter is complex and new. Okay, this isn’t a common accusation leveled at academic writers, but it should be. But the upside is that it gives me plenty of opportunity to reflect on why reading academic writing is so often a chore and so rarely a joy. Well, rich people do it too - actually, people who read are more likely to get hired for jobs as well. Not boring at all. Important background for this discussion is in my earlier post, What Is Academic Writing? This article gives a brief overview of a couple of… Start with encyclopedias instead, the more specialized the better. The text may depend on a lot of jargon (necessarily or not). Learning a few tricks from storytellers might lead to more engaging articles. The piece reflected on an accompanying essay and the WHO’s Decade of Action on Road Safety. It may have been written with a very tiny audience in mind, of which you are not (yet) a member, so there may be assumptions to which you are not (yet) privy (though you can ask your instructor for help). Every time you sit down to research some information on how to write this or that type of paper, your one eye starts to blink very slowly. Academic writing is always boring, dry, formulaic, and unnecessarily complex. It may be crucial for readers to understand this information in order to follow the important messages in your piece, but you might want to include it a little later in the article. dull. It was interesting to read it and to see simple american view on simple things. Ok, so reading makes you smarter, duh. Jargon should be understood not as made-up words people use to sound smarter than they are (though occasionally it is that). The great shame is not the dreary writing that readers must wade through, but the lost opportunity to capture … Clearly, having every article start with a deeply personal story isn’t great advice and I wouldn’t encourage attempts at fictionalised dramatic openings. You can’t guess from looking at the word, and a standard dictionary won’t help you. It still triggers an emotional response in me six years after first reading it. Your email address will not be published. As an undergraduate, you should (like any other scholar) aim to develop arguments that honestly reflect your reasoned judgment of the evidence. That said, academic whimsy does exist and you occasionally find it in the wild. Academics perversely make the simple and obvious seem more complicated than it is, and refuse to recognize what everyone else knows (i.e., common sense). For better or worse, jargon goes with the territory of academic writing, and you can’t completely avoid it. It's intended to be written by experts, for experts. hy is academic writing so boring? But neither article resorts to a blunt question or worse listing all of the items the article is about to cover: “Health professionals and their organisations must support and learn from the schoolchildren’s action…”, “The new draft NICE guidance has at least three serious problems.”. Only the heartless would fail to empathise with the memorable dramatic change in the intro. These authors are using storytelling tricks to engage their readers within the first few paragraphs of their articles. He gives a nice example from the ominous opening to, Although Storr’s book focuses on writing fiction, his advice on how to begin a story can be applied to academic writing and reminded me of, an article on road traffic crashes published by. An eye catching title and standfirst helps.”, Alison highlighted two recent editorials, one on. Some readers don’t like this, as a matter of taste (it seems dry or formulaic), but in the academy it is inescapable. Required fields are marked *, the personal website of an academic historian. The whole purpose of academia is for some people to spend time working out the really difficult questions, facing the complexity, and bringing to public attention the hardest and most hidden truths. Regularly consulting dictionaries and encyclopedias to expand your vocabularies is not only necessary, but part of the point — if you understood everything you read in college, you wouldn’t be challenging yourself, and you wouldn’t be learning, now would you? This article is part of a package on creativity. I don’t have any connection with the author or book’s publisher. But a reader who is NOT familiar with the subject will find it much easier to digest in a totally different form: as stories about who did what to whom and why (that is, grammatically, via substantive nouns with action verbs). I learned about this endemic problem as an undergraduate student of the Little Red Schoolhouse at the University of Chicago. It can’t give you the nuanced and specific background that you really need to understand how a term like orientalism is being used in a given scholarly work—it can only tell you where to begin to look to understand it. The writer deeply embedded in her subject is likely to write in strings of concepts (often in the grammatical form of nominalizations) linked by empty verbs like “to be,” “to have,” “to enact,” etc., and prepositional phrases like “the yadda-yadda of the humdinger of the balderdash of the chupa-chups.” In the ideal case, the writer revises from strings of nominalized concepts into “stories” (even if abstract ones) structured into substantive nouns and action verbs. Your readers are more likely to do that if you tell them a good story rather than force them to read a reference manual. Differences Between Academic and Personal Writing Personal Writing Academic Writing Tells a story Comments, evaluates, analyses Non-technical vocabulary Subject-specific vocabulary ‘I’ at the centre ‘I’ as observer and commentator Information comes from the writers experience Information comes from sources and refers to what others say Aim higher! "The essay is in a bad way. Competing Interests: I bought Will Storr’s book myself and enjoyed it. Image via Wikimedia Commons. The piece reflected on an accompanying essay and the WHO’s Decade of Action on Road Safety. By Gordon Rugg Scientific writing isn’t boring because scientists don’t know anything better. Admit it, you laughed. So, how should authors approach the introductions to more prosaic academic pieces? Only an article’s authors and a small subset of readers will be invested enough to want such a plain starter. How do we define this problem? If you find that you’ve reflexively written a boilerplate opening, don’t despair. Not everything can — or should — be easy. What can we learn from schoolchildren? I tell my students that one reads academic work not for the pleasure of the moment but for what one comes away with. – considered a little risky, for if just anyone could understand what academics were talking about, what would happen to their prestige?! Thank you very much for the professional job you do. That's why nerds do it, right? First reviews of The Essential Guide to Writing History are out. If you need it, keep it. 2) An academic article is not intended to be a literary piece, or even a textbook. Unfortunately, those reasons are seldom explained to unfortunate non-scientists about to encounter the scientific writing style for the first time. Well, okay, I do see where this criticism is coming from. It doesn’t have to be, and academics increasingly agree that it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of reasons why academic prose may not be exactly scintillating. Unfortunately, I can attest that as an academic writer, being aware of the problem makes it only a little bit easier to address. It’s when a verb is made into a noun. Professor Jonathan Wolff is head of philosophy at University College London. If you don’t, delete it. Ideally, jargon is used only when necessary, but there are times when it really is necessary. Academic writing shouldn't have to be so boring and dry Let's face it, most academic articles are so boring that most people won't even read the full piece. Without debating whether academics themselves have more or less humor than the general population, I will admit that academic writing generally contains little in the way of jokes or whimsy, let alone hilarity. However, this term, like some others, is so well established by now that a good specialized encyclopedia will have it listed. Neither intro could be described as flashy but both feel like the start of a story describing a relevant change rather than an encyclopedia entry: In March, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in 2000 cities from 123 countries left school to call for action on climate change.”. Your article should be clear, compelling, and appeal to our international readership of doctors and other health professionals. We welcome submissions for consideration. All are legitimate ways to start an article, but I suspect their ubiquity leads many readers to give up or glaze over. That I ended up in a job where I have to spend half the day blinking my way through artless, contorted prose is a cruel twist of fate. It may, in rare cases, even be badly written on purpose, to “sound smart.” Figuring out, if possible, which of these is the case in a given instance may help you to wade your way through. On inspection both follow Will Storr’s advice on how to start a story by describing a noteworthy change. The writing is meant to not get in the way by making these ideas less clear or harder to assimilate. These authors are using storytelling tricks to engage their readers within the first few paragraphs of their articles. An eye catching title and standfirst helps.”. However, I see lack of knowledge about simple things like food because nowdays food is not prepared healthy, it’s not healthy at all now. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. rob. Fortunately, this is one bit of nonsense that is on its way out. The ideas themselves are meant to be the source of excitement. In any case, none of these reasons can serve as a good excuse for you to write badly, insofar as you can avoid it. Jargon by definition is understood largely by insiders, which is probably why it so often seems downright offensive. as good examples. If you need it, keep it. I am planning to work with your essay writing … Nominalizing a verb also often results in strings of ugly prepositional phrases, like, “the revision OF the bylaws BY the committee members.” So why on earth would anyone change their nice, fat action verbs into awkward nominalizations that force the whole rest of the sentence into unpleasant contortions of logic? An impressive job of relating his advice to how our brains work are marked * the. View on simple things students that one reads academic work not for the professional job you do easily,! A dull read, says Jonathan Wolff is head of philosophy at University London. Dry, formulaic, and appeal to our international readership of doctors and other health professionals t despair historian! Ideas less clear or harder to assimilate instead, the more specialized the better them a good story than! Just a snore-fest that many academic books and articles just aren ’ t mean you can rely on its well... 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