why academic writing is difficult article

As someone who tries hard to make even my academic writing clear and accessible and who tries to instill that value in my students, I’ve followed the thread with interest.

Obviously, clear communication continues to elude some. Freephone 0800 497 483 I write in order to clarify a point; but I only write for an audience after I’ve got the information clear in my mind. On writing well We choose words then delete them. Instead of merely describing the work of other people, students have to think about why it has been carried out and which uses its findings may have for the future. Why then is writing still so difficult?

As their mind races to the end, their pen (or fingers on the keyboard) can’t keep up. Wellington 6011, Write Limited The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable, America Is About to Enter Its Years of Lead. The question is really pretty simple: do you want to communicate with others or not?

We try to come up with amazing sentences only to be lost in using the same word repeatedly.



Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window). Two reasons immediately spring to mind. Academic writing is a complex business.

It also helps to jot down ideas throughout the day that will come in handy when a student is compiling their draft. Stephen M. Walt: He also spoke openly about the importance of writing in his graduate courses, encouraged students to read books such as Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and was scornful of the trendy neologisms that infest academic writing like so many weevils.

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For this reason, academic writing and research always feature a serious tone and present particular theories and facts that touch upon a … Academic writing usually requires students to look at somebody else’s work or ideas and then form an informed opinion on it. An academic’s paper can find a global audience. Most of us tend to overwrite (especially by using too many adverbs), and shorter is almost always better.

Indeed, its length reminded me of my favourite 10-word noun string from last month: Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System. These strategies boil down to one thing: writing.

As the number of U.S. forces on the ground dwindles and Russian and Iranian propaganda efforts increase, Col. Myles Caggins prepared the soldiers who remain for information warfare.

Think of it this way: If I spend 20 extra hours editing, re-writing, and polishing a piece of research, and if that extra effort enables 500 people to spend a half-hour less apiece figuring out what I am saying, then I have saved humankind a net 230 hours of effort. Books and tools to help you meet your communication goals.
I’ve published in over a dozen academic journals, with a prominent university press, and with two different commercial publishers, as well in a number of journals of opinion. Auckland 09 365 2523, Fill out our project planner to get started, Level 7, AMI Plaza

Waltz didn’t do a lot of line-editing of grad student papers or dissertations, but he certainly let me know when he thought my writing was obscure, verbose, disorganized, or just plain confused. Academic papers aren't written for readers, they are written for reviewers.

On writing well... Over at the new, independent Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan has been hosting an interesting thread on why academic writing is frequently abysmal.
But if the goal is to have impact — both within one’s discipline and in the wider world — then there’s no substitute for clear and effective writing.

We argue with our minds in the same way a mathematician would, we need the formula to finalize the words. I particularly liked the comment from experts that professors often struggle to write for non-academic audiences because they just, well, “know too much about their discipline”.

(Of course, sometimes critics do deliberately misrepresent a scholarly argument, but that’s another matter). But his hospitalization brings to light new questions on what happens if a worst-case scenario hits while Americans are casting their votes. If they write long and ponderous sentences and throw in lots of jargon, they assume that readers will be dazzled by their erudition and more likely to accept whatever it is they are saying uncritically. For starters, I don’t think the problem is that no one encourages future academics to write well.

But in today’s connected world, those ivory towers have come down.

A second reason is the failure of many scholars to appreciate the difference between the logic of discovery and the logic of presentation.

And you don’t have to agree with someone to respect their ability to write: Charles Krauthammer’s ideas usually appall me, but there’s no question that he is an effective prose stylist.

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Specifically, the process by which a scholar figures out the answer to a particular question is rarely if ever the best way to explain that answer to a reader. In a lighter vein, Clayton describes the tale of Daniel Oppenheimer, then a professor at Princeton University, who in 2006 published research arguing that authors who use clear, simple words can seem more intelligent. And, as Sir Ken Robinson says, they tend to “live inside their heads” and “look at their body as a sort of transport” — as “a way of getting their head to meetings”. If you don't get your paper past the reviewers, you won't get it published and no one will read it. I’ve found inspiration in writers like Waltz, Thomas Schelling, James Scott, John Mueller, and Deirdre McCloskey. Most academic writing, in contrast, is a blend of two styles. Your email address will not be published. Finally, I encourage students to emulate writers they admire. — then bad writing isn’t a huge handicap and may even confer some advantages. When you sit down to write a thesis, book or paper you start off with: material that comes from a well designed project a defensible analysis and possibly, depending on discipline, a cogent theoretical explanation a good grip on the relevant… But all too often articles and manuscripts read a bit like a research narrative: "First we read the literature, then we derived the following hypotheses, then we collected this data or researched these cases, then we analyzed them and got these results, and the next day we performed our robustness checks, and here’s what we’re going to do next.".

Ah, thinking before writing. In the end, it comes down to what a scholar is trying to achieve. This may mean they fail to explain the complex details of their research or give practical examples that readers (including students) can understand. Wellington 04 384 6447

There’s something about moving pen on paper, crossing things out, and switching them round, that gets all the facts lined up nicely. I’m also a fan of Anthony Weston’s A Rulebook for Arguments, a very smart primer on the different forms of persuasive argument and the ways to make written arguments more convincing. Writing for some comes naturally, but for the rest of us, we struggle. But it isn’t inevitable even there. Because the poor quality of academic writing is both aesthetically offensive and highly inefficient. Image by Image Catalog / CC0. One aspect of unwieldy writing is an author who makes a convincing argument early in a paper and counters it later on.

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