The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by capnrefsmmat on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @07:52AM (#10457416)

Anyone upset about academic writing would also enjoy Fred Rodell's "Goodbye to Law Reviews", in which he pillories the writing in law review articles:

> There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground.

http://www.refsmmat.com/files/goodbye.pdf

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by fnordfnordfnord on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @08:59AM (#10457667)

> it is in the law reviews that a pennyworth of content is most frequently concealed beneath a pound of so-called style. The average law review writer is peculiarly able to say nothing with an air of great importance.

I like this fellow.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by mercurialshark on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @09:25AM (#10457808)

While I would agree, I still find Judge Posner and Justice Scalia's writing full of puckish eloquence and therefore entertaining...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by fnordfnordfnord on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @08:45AM (#10464070)

The GP link was written in the 1930's so, I'll forgive him for failing to notice his successors.

Here's one of my favorites: https://randazza.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/cybernet-tradem...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by marrs on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @08:50AM (#10457628)

Opaque writing is a pet peeve of mine as well. It seems to be a particularly strong vice of British academic authors. I tend to favour American texts as a result.

I hope the emoji example doesn't catch on though. I found the example in that article harder to understand than the opaque version.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by toothbrush on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @09:04AM (#10457689)

> I hope the emoji example doesn't catch on though. I found the example in that article harder to understand than the opaque version.

I hope so too, but for different reasons. Because loading of exotic fonts is of dubious safety [can't find a reasonable citation] and i'm a tinfoil hatter [no citation needed], i've turned off CSS remote fonts, leaving me with the following rendition of the emoji example :p

https://imgur.com/IDgpNKI

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by chrisseaton on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @10:43AM (#10458265)

People who use emoji generally aren't using CSS remote fonts, so that isn't your problem. Emoji is part of the Unicode standard, so most modern system fonts support it by default. If you can't see the emoji then the problem is your system has out of date fonts, not that remote fonts are turned off.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by toothbrush on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @04:20AM (#10463299)

Interesting! Indeed when i tried the URL in a random not-locked-down browser, i had the same issue :). Thanks for the tip, i'll look into that then.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing by dagw on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @09:06AM (#10457701)

It seems to be a particularly strong vice of British academic authors. I tend to favour American texts as a result.

Funny. At least at the university textbook level I tend to find that US books cost twice as much, have 3-4 times the page count and cover half the topics compared to UK books.

[ Parent | on HN ]