Linda McPhee, academic writing mentor, Linda McPhee Consulting
Quotation marks have a number of legitimate uses, such as reproducing someone elses words (She said, Fiddlesticks!), mentioning a word as a word rather than using it to convey its meaning (The New York Times uses millenniums, not millennia), and signaling that the writer does not accept the meaning of a word as it is being used by others in this context (They executed their sister to preserve the familys honor). Squeamishness about ones own choice of words is not among them. Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time, in my experience it does not ring true. I know many scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to impress. They do groundbreaking work on important subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing stinks. Claims typically fall into one of four categories. Thinking about how you want to approach your topic, or, in other words, what type of claim you want to make, is one way to focus your thesis on one particular aspect of your broader topic. Step Two: Find at least one preferably two or three academics who you can interview about writing. They need to be people that are already writing for the public and preferably people who dont yet know how you might use what theyve got to say. Having more than one interviewee adds to your overall cred because you give the impression that this is a general view.
First, what is included in the category "drugs"? Is the author talking about illegal drug use, recreational drug use (which might include alcohol and cigarettes), or all uses of medication in general? Second, in what ways are drugs detrimental? Is drug use causing deaths (and is the author equating deaths from overdoses and deaths from drug related violence)? Is drug use changing the moral climate or causing the economy to decline? Finally, what does the author mean by "society"? Is the author referring only to America or to the global population? Does the author make any distinction between the effects on children and adults? There are just too many questions that the claim leaves open. The author could not cover all of the topics listed above, yet the generality of the claim leaves all of these possibilities open to debate. There are many different citation styles with different rules. The most common styles are APA, MLA, and Chicago. Make sure to consistently follow whatever style your institution requires. If you dont cite correctly, you may get in trouble for plagiarism. So is it possible for academic writing to be both informative and irreverent? And as blogs and other social media grow in popularity, what are the skills academics need to write well for their diverse audiences? For all its directness, classic style remains a pretense, an imposture, a stance.
Even scientists, with their commitment to seeing the world as it is, are a bit postmodern. They recognize that its hard to know the truth, that the world doesnt just reveal itself to us, that we understand the world through our theories and constructs, which are not pictures but abstract propositions, and that our ways of understanding the world must constantly be scrutinized for hidden biases. Its just that good writers dont flaunt that anxiety in every passage they write; they artfully conceal it for claritys sake. Firstly, its down to laziness. Trying to make incomprehensible waffle read simply would take too much time. In other words in academic circles, writing is unclear because it can be. Who is going to point out that it reads badly if it sounds clever? So bad habits continue, and academic writing continues to be full of placeholder terminology. In other words, academic writers lean on the same old jargon rather than write something difficult and genuinely insightful. A friend of mine who works at a prestigious U. S. college says that some papers look like they were written by robots. No offense, but you shouldnt take an academic assignment for something that should be an inhuman piece of text.
Bad academic writing - Which type of claim is right for your argument? Which type of thesis or claim you use for your argument will depend on your position and knowledge of the topic, your audience, and the context of your paper. You might want to think about where you imagine your audience to be on this topic and pinpoint where you think the biggest difference in viewpoints might be. Even if you start with one type of claim you probably will be using several within the paper. Regardless of the type of claim you choose to utilize it is key to identify the controversy or debate you are addressing and to define your position early on in the paper.
A considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant, rather than the bare Arabidopsis (which Ive seen in many science papers). Its not just an act of magnanimity; a writer who explains technical terms can multiply his readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk. Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all. There are several reasons this statement is too broad to argue.
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader so she can see for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. The writer and the reader are equals: The reader can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. And the process of directing the readers gaze takes the form of a conversation. But the insider-shorthand theory, too, doesnt fit my experience. I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section of an experimental paper explains, Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word. After some detective work, I determined that it meant, Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or false. The original academese was not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English translation. So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up the polysyllables? The theory that academese is the opposite of classic style helps explain a paradox of academic writing. Many of the most stylish writers who cross over to a general audience are scientists (together with some philosophers who are fans of science), while the perennial winners of the Bad Writing Contest are professors of English. Thats because the ideal of classic prose is congenial to the worldview of the scientist. Contrary to the common misunderstanding in which Einstein proved that everything is relative and Heisenberg proved that observers always affect what they observe, most scientists believe that there are objective truths about the world, and that they can be discovered by a disinterested observer. A failure to realize that my chunks may not be the same as your chunks can explain why we baffle our readers with so much shorthand, jargon, and alphabet soup. But its not the only way we baffle them. Sometimes wording is maddeningly opaque without being composed of technical terminology from a private clique. Even among cognitive scientists, for example, poststimulus event is not a standard way to refer to a tap on the arm.