One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between “concepts.” There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience… Sociology—by its very nature?—seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died.
Peter Elbow
5 thoughts on “Academic Writing”
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Elbow’s extended aphorism equally describes literary theory from the 1950s through 1980s. And, perhaps more to the point, economics since Keynes, and physics since Einstein, and chemistry and biology (especially genetics) since the mid-nineteenth century. Not to mention law since Hammurabi…
What I suspect it reflects is that “sociologists” and “philosophers” are just now getting specialized enough for their within-field pedentary to be ordinary shorthand within the field but impenetrable to nonspecialists. (Really: Just try to explain to a pure-polisci type why the then-in-effect Frye framework for admitting expert evidence on voting characteristics determined the outcome of Gray v. Sanders and not some grand theory, and how the result would have been different — in the sense that it would have been so obvious that it never would have been taken to the Supreme Court — under the modern Daubert framework, and watch said polisci-type’s head explode.) Philosophers will be appalled that their field is so slow to achieve
juvenile delinquencyimpenetrable specialization, but there it is…As in?
“An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.”
― Nicholas Butler
Closer to the distinction between a “scholar” and an “expert”: A scholar knows how much more she/he/they has/have† to learn, and has an insatiable curiosity to do it; an expert… doesn’t and doesn’t.
What this says about lawyers and expert witnesses (and, even worse, lawyers as expert witnesses) is not appropriate for a family-friendly website like this one.
† Sometimes a “scholar” is a group effort; experts, not so much.
In other words, the world as processed by LLMs. No wonder so many people believe that so-called AI software is actually intelligent.
I’ve been paying attention to Peter Elbow for decades, I have many of his books on writing, and each book was him saying the same thing, written in more complex ways each time.
His original book, Writing Without Teachers, a slim volume, says everything that you need to know about what he is trying to say.
See, once I read his prose, I find that I can’t say it more simply. Yikes!