Reading from Academia: Foibles, Frustrations, and the Curse of Excessive Syllables

 

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Reading academic journal articles and books is a hobby that most of the population considers questionable, if not actively insane, but I readily admit that I really do enjoy it. I mean, I'm the kind of nerdy that wrote and published a research paper around a full-time job; for a few months most of my free time was spent doing nothing but reading sources. But there is a line separating enjoyable academic writing from aggravating, a necessary amount of jargon from multisyllabic self-aggrandizement, and many writers seem to rush across it with abandon.

Case in point: I'm currently reading a book on irregular warfare by nonstate actors. The premise is fascinating, the thesis sound, and the case studies both interesting and supportive of the author's premise. Yet in two months I've barely picked it up, and I'm still only in chapter one. Why? Because the author has gone out of their way to make the text as dense, difficult, and inscrutable as possible, even when detrimental in every way to both their argument and their reader. Despite my knowledge of the field I find myself looking up words every other sentence, sometimes spending fifteen minutes just to parse one paragraph, only to arrive at the end of the section and realize that the argument the author was making could have been accomplished by three sentences of plain language that, in fact, would have described the situation far better than the ridiculous glut of obscure thesaurus-diving I just waded through.

So why would an author do this? To be honest, I don't know, though my similarly-frustrated colleagues and I have come up with several theories. The first: This is how we train academic writers, so they're only doing as they were taught. This style is part of the culture of academia now and these writers are only bowing to conventional pressure, perhaps pushed further by their editors, in making their text as complicated as possible no matter how unnecessary. The second theory, giving the writer much less benefit of the doubt, is that communicating their research in a way that is inscrutable to almost anybody outside academia (and even to many within it) makes them feel smarter than everyone else. You had trouble with their paper? Obviously it's your lack of intelligence, not their lack of skill. The third theory, that this is a method of academia gatekeeping, may be more side effect than cause, but that makes it no less true. 

There are certainly many points in research and in academic writing when the jargon invented for your field is necessary to use to accurately describe what is being done. But when it isn't? Go ahead and use the words that describe your points best, even if they have less than three syllables. It won't hurt, and it just might help.