The Cruel World of Academic Writing

During the course of my university career I have had to read countless verbose books and journal articles. Everything that’s written in academic circles appears to be purposefully boring and overly complicated. It needn’t be that way in my opinion. Why can’t researchers just present their argument clearly and concisely, instead of beating around the bush? What I’m basically saying (see what I’m doing here) is that they should just get to the point. They want people to be interested in their work, right? Then they should make their efforts a whole lot more reader-friendly. And for heavens sake, why use an unnecessary word that’s hardly ever in use when there’s understandable synonyms abound? Some may say that students who complain are just being lazy. This is not entirely true as we are told to be clear and concise in our work. So why can’t the texts we read adopt similar principles. They should even more so (they’re published after all).

 Most full-time students don’t have jobs and have to worry about making ends meet while contending with familial pressures. There’s usually also more than one module they have to do which each have tons of readings. The worst part is when it is recommended that you read the entire text and a lot of the time the author digresses from what the chapter was supposed to be about. Students have enough to cope with  (see last section of the linked page) without having to read repetitive information which may not even be relevant. I’ve heard that authors are trying to demonstrate their academic knowledge and literary prowess in their writing. This explains a lot. But do they really have to make the rest of us suffer? The world of academics is a collaborative sphere where ideas are traded and elaborated on. Shouldn’t we then try to be kind to one another and make our work more user-friendly? Maybe using bullet points and elaborations when absolutely necessary is a good idea.