Stephen M. Walt: In particular, writing blog posts and guest articles utilizing your particular knowledge and skill sets. Indeed, I can think of only one case in nearly thirty years where a manuscript of mine was truly butchered by an editor (it was actually done by an intern) and fortunately the magazine let me repair the damage before the article appeared. Books and tools to help you meet your communication goals. It’s an amusing title that makes you think as well. Writing a paper in the last minutes, on the other hand, puts pressure and stress on a student’s writing and affects the end quality. Just when the U.S. public needs clarity about Trump’s health, tradition and the president’s proclivities make that unlikely. You have to be able to step outside your own understanding of the problem at hand and ask how your words are going to affect the thinking of someone who doesn’t already know what you know and may even be inclined to disagree with you at first. 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”. Your email address will not be published. New Zealand. Academic writing is the way it is because it’s part of a system. Inspiring plain writing tips and tricks, straight to your inbox. Because the poor quality of academic writing is both aesthetically offensive and highly inefficient. Often authors are (understandably) enthusiastic about their research and can give great presentations to others about their work. The question is really pretty simple: do you want to communicate with others or not? On writing well Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. If your prose is clear and your arguments are easy to follow, then readers can figure out what you are saying and they can hold you to account. Sometimes it is indecisive writing, unnecessary words, or just plain bad writing. Trump’s physician expressed optimism about the president’s health after he tested positive for the coronavirus. Academics use an opaque style of writing for many reasons. As research topics can be complex, some researchers have found imaginative and fun ways (including using emoji) to describe their research topics. If you are making forecasts (or if the theory you are advancing has implications for the future), then you will look bad if your predictions are clearly stated and then fail. Why does this matter? I’ve found that some academics propel their pen onwards before perfecting the point. 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. Essay writing is not “difficult”; but to answer your question, here are the reasons why it appears difficult for you. Why then is writing still so difficult? If your argument has obvious testable implications, others can run the tests and see how well your claims stand up. (Of course, sometimes critics do deliberately misrepresent a scholarly argument, but that’s another matter). The second problem is the fear of being wrong. To bridge this gap and keep in mind ‘publish or perish’ (often tied to funding), some choose to write papers on the practical rather than theoretical aspects of their research. In her recent article The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing, Victoria Clayton notes that: In academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition. In my own case, for example, I was fortunate to study with Alex George at Stanford as an undergrad and with Kenneth Waltz at Berkeley during graduate school, and both repeatedly stressed the importance of writing well. Sometimes the texts that we read are simply hard to grasp. 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. 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. For starters, I don’t think the problem is that no one encourages future academics to write well. 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. Online brand architects such as Brandlift Digital Marketing will be the first to point out the importance of link building and content creation in the pursuit of a powerful web presence. But his hospitalization brings to light new questions on what happens if a worst-case scenario hits while Americans are casting their votes. But if the theoretical framework, methodology, proof, or arguments that underpin their research is leaky, no amount of patching is going to help. Indeed, persuasive writing doesn’t just convince the already-converted, a really well-crafted and well-supported argument will overcome a skeptic’s initial resistance. #1 You are not familiar with a strange and unfamiliar subject forced upon you. Finally, I encourage students to emulate writers they admire. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. Academic writing is a complex business. If there are scholars whose books you enjoyed, read them several times and try to capture what it is that makes their use of language so effective. Two reasons immediately spring to mind. 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. Trump is a pariah for top security experts, Biden won’t end U.S. trade wars, and Saudi Arabia’s bid to rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council. 342 Lambton Quay For this reason, academic writing and research always feature a serious tone and present particular theories and facts that touch upon a … I also don’t think the problem is due to poor editing at journals or university presses. Why Are Armenia and Azerbaijan Heading to War. Image by Image Catalog / CC0. An ideal piece of social science writing should have a built-in sense of logical or structural inevitability so that the reader moves along the argument and supporting evidence as effortlessly as possible. We argue with our minds in the same way a mathematician would, we need the formula to finalize the words. 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. 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. And it’s that complexity that makes it tricky. Once you know what your argument is, really effective writing involves sitting down and thinking hard about the best way to present that argument to the reader. If the goal is just narrow professional success — getting tenure, earning a decent salary, etc. The first week or … Writing requires practice. They see their audience as their peers — other researchers. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. 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. 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.". Or as Strunk and White put it: "Vigorous writing is concise. 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. These strategies boil down to one thing: writing. There’s something about moving pen on paper, crossing things out, and switching them round, that gets all the facts lined up nicely. Most academic writing, in contrast, is a blend of two styles. In her recent article The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing, Victoria Clayton notes that: In academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition. I enjoyed reading Teresa Housel’s recent blog post about academic writing. If you don't get your paper past the reviewers, you won't get it published and no one will read it. Wellington 6140 The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing. — then bad writing isn’t a huge handicap and may even confer some advantages. We try to come up with amazing sentences only to be lost in using the same word repeatedly. By taking ‘the devil is in the detail’ to extremes, a text becomes unwieldy. That’s because their writers are dealing with difficult ideas, it’s not because the texts are poorly written. But it isn’t inevitable even there. 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. For this reason, academic writing and research always feature a serious tone and present particular theories and facts that touch upon a … Some academics propel their pen onwards before perfecting the point. One aspect of unwieldy writing is an author who makes a convincing argument early in a paper and counters it later on. In many cases your explanation is spot on, but sometimes academic papers are difficult to read for other reasons. You still have to pay attention and think hard to understand what is being said, but not because the author is making it more difficult than it needs to be. Auckland 09 365 2523, Fill out our project planner to get started, Level 7, AMI Plaza Why Academic Writing Is Important Every academic paper is a kind of communication tool that allows students to convey the acquired knowledge in a certain discipline. See: Your Research, Emoji-fied. 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. We choose words then delete them. I have more than a little sympathy for philosophers grappling with deep questions about morality, time, epistemology, and the like, as these subjects are inherently slippery and it is easy to lose the reader in a fog of words. In the endless war against academic obscurantism, I tell my own students to read Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style and to heed their emphasis on concision. But if your prose is muddy and obscure or your arguments are hedged in every conceivable direction, then readers may not be able to figure out what you’re really saying and you can always dodge criticism by claiming to have been misunderstood. 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. An academic’s paper can find a global audience. As their mind races to the end, their pen (or fingers on the keyboard) can’t keep up. I’ve found inspiration in writers like Waltz, Thomas Schelling, James Scott, John Mueller, and Deirdre McCloskey. The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable, America Is About to Enter Its Years of Lead. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! What Happens If a Presidential Candidate Dies Before Election Day? Wellington 6011, Write Limited Which leads me to the real reasons why academic writing is often bad. So why is academic writing so bad? Moreover, jargon is a way for professional academics to remind ordinary people that they are part of a guild with specialized knowledge that outsiders lack, and younger scholars often fear that if they don’t sound like a professional scholar, then readers won’t believe what they are saying no matter how solid their arguments and evidence are. 2. Your email address will not be published. In so doing, they undermine the paper’s merit. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.". Ah, thinking before writing. One reason academic writing is sometimes difficult is because the subjects being addressed are complicated and difficult and hard to explain with ordinary language. But in today’s connected world, those ivory towers have come down. Practice your craft, they all advise. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm sometimes doesn’t transfer to their written words. The most important part of that process is figuring out the overall structure of the argument — what points need to be developed first, and then what follows naturally or logically from them, and so on. 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). It also helps to jot down ideas throughout the day that will come in handy when a student is compiling their draft. Academic writing usually requires students to look at somebody else’s work or ideas and then form an informed opinion on it. Other academics try to patch every hole in every possible argument. PO Box 5938 Required fields are marked *. As Teresa eloquently notes in her blog post: Scholarly research and plain communication are actually ideal companions. In the end, it comes down to what a scholar is trying to achieve. One aspect of unwieldy writing is an author who makes a convincing argument early in a paper and counters it later on. It’s terribly easy to suggest that academic writing that isn’t transparently obvious at first reading is, by definition, badly written. Having edited the manuscripts of academic researchers for many years, I agree. Some philosophers manage to write about very deep and weighty matters in a prose that is crystal clear. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. 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… A student also needs to create a budget of pages when writing a difficult academic … This may mean they fail to explain the complex details of their research or give practical examples that readers (including students) can understand. Most of us tend to overwrite (especially by using too many adverbs), and shorter is almost always better. Writing for some comes naturally, but for the rest of us, we struggle. 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. Almost all of the editors or copy-editors with whom I’ve worked were helpful and attentive, and some were superlative. Writing in plain English helps ensure that the knowledge reaches the public. The first problem is that many academics (and especially younger ones) tend to confuse incomprehensibility with profundity. No academic likes to have their life’s work pulled apart, especially by their peers. But that’s not always the case. And post frequently, here on Medium or a platform of choice. Writing is hard. The pros, the charlatans hawking writing e-courses, they all say you’ve got to write practice, a lot. In this respect, it seems to me that academic writing resembles administration – in both cases, precedent is viewed as dangerous; best to stick to the plan, the format, tried and trusted. A second reason is the failure of many scholars to appreciate the difference between the logic of discovery and the logic of presentation. In so doing, they undermine the paper’s merit. Academics should strive to write clearly for the obvious reason that it will allow many others to learn more quickly. Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly. Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Wellington 04 384 6447 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. The problem is that this narrative form is rarely the best way to make a convincing case. Freephone 0800 497 483 Academic papers aren't written for readers, they are written for reviewers. Why Academic Writing Is Important Every academic paper is a kind of communication tool that allows students to convey the acquired knowledge in a certain discipline. 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”. Insights, tips, and professional development opportunities. Bad writing thus becomes a form of academic camouflage designed to shield the author from criticism. 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. Sometimes when I am reading an article I just get so frustrated with the writer’s inability to really say anything. Obviously, clear communication continues to elude some. It’s the official name of the US Department of Defense balloon that detached from its mooring station at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland and landed just outside Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. The idea that writing should be clear, concise, and low-jargon isn’t a new one—and it isn’t limited to government agencies, of course. 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. Achieving this quality requires empathy. One reason academic writing is sometimes difficult is because the subjects being addressed are complicated and difficult …
Interview Writing Igcse Essay,
How To Write Your Undergraduate Dissertation,
What Should Students Do To Become Effective Academic Writers Coursework,
Dialogue Writing Topics For Grade 5 Essay,
Star Writing Method Examples Research,
How To Write A Report Introduction Coursework,