Why is Academic Writing so Boring?

[@Tom_Nicholas]

Thanks for watching! Let me know your thoughts below and, if you'd like to support me to make more videos like this, then I'd be really grateful if you'd check out my Patreon at patreon.com/tomnicholas

[@vrixphillips]

citing this video in my online class forum this week haha just so happens you're talking about similar stuff as Scholes in "The Rise and Fall of English" insofar as he thinks English Departments are becoming disconnected from reality/inaccessible and your talking about readability made me think about "access" and late capitalism. I think about late capitalism a lot lol.

[@Tom_Nicholas]

Do you mean my correction on Capitalist Realism? Nooooooo... Nevermind, can't get everything right!

[@mymarginalia8349]

I've always found intellectuals sexy, but at the same time being a refugee (hence having language problems) and also going to school and university where acting too good for school was the norm, it took me years to chill, it took me years to not act too cool blah blah and, at 27, I started reading a lot. I unapologetically sometimes have the ebook and let my mac read it for me. There are many books that I have in my reading list which I'm "scared" to read. For example, instead of reading Marx's Capital I'm reading short intros and on. This is a lifetime project now so I'm in no rush, but is there any tips that you might give? Is there a dictionary or whatever to help us (that have no formal education in this stuff) Thanks tom

[@josesalguero3224]

Economics is a field particularly plagued with over complicated language. Prof. Ha-Joon Chang argues that the style of communication can be a deliberate attempt at making the political debate on economic issues less accessible to the general public. Thus, in that sense, style does hinder critical thinking and questioned been raised from new avenues and people. I agree with the fact that more technical and precise language is often unavoidable when the target audience of an academic piece are members of that same field of study. However, how can a political scientist, an Economist, a Geographer, and a Linguist have a meaningful conversation without some usage of Layman’s terms? And, beyond that, why should knowledge-sharing be limited to either inaccessible essays or light-texts? why can both coexist and support each other in spreading relevant questions about ourselves, nature, society, etc.? Buttler’s ideas, rich and valuable as they are, can be difficult to understand even to other scientists outside her field, and sometimes “handbooks” or “reading companions” to the minutia of other fields of study are key to translating those insights or findings or even expanding upon them on other fields. I would appreciate to have your thoughts on that. Love your content and the awesome discussions it promotes. Cheers!

[@francinegee9997]

Ironically, Tom, you read the "awful" Judith Butler sentence so clearly, it was almost understandable!

[@HannibalHanslaughter]

I remember my professor telling me that they enjoyed reading my essay and that my style made it easy to comprehend and remain invested, but also, I definitely shouldn't do that in the future cause that's not how I come across as academic. Definitely sheds a light on how being boring and complicated is how you *perform* being sciency whether you are or not.

[@erikpoephoofd]

what the hell, thats fucked

[@erikpoephoofd]

This is part of the reason why being a researcher sounds like a shitty job to me: the academic culture. Everything is about being cited as much as possible. It's about fame and money, not about seeking truth :/

[@DylanHughesPhotoVideo]

Bureaucracy, idiocy, stagnation…

[@richardtickler8555]

my prof called my writing complete, short and easy to understand and let me barely pass because of that (he thought its a bad thing)

[@IncognitoSprax]

That's when you do it anyways. Cause fuck it.

[@KilgoreTroutAsf]

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Einstein

[@Tom_Nicholas]

This quote didn't pop up when I was doing my reading around the topic but I wish it had. I think this puts it well very succinctly!

[@HxH2011DRA]

@@Tom_Nicholas indeed

[@alenbacco7613]

Love your books man

[@andrearaimondi882]

@@Tom_Nicholas I mean... that's Einstein for you 😏😏😏😏😏

[@bracco23]

The great thing about this quote is that Einstein was also doing what is was preaching about. If you have a go at the paper where he introduced Special Relativity, is incredibly easy to understand and well written. It is easily found online, "ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES" the title, and shows how you can definitely write a more understandable but still rigorous paper.

[@jdizzle708]

The irony of you saying "a touch more communicative" instead of "easier to understand" is amazing

[@HxH2011DRA]

LOL

[@jdizzle708]

@CrateofStolenDirt lmao

[@MingusTale]

Ikr lol

[@MingusTale]

@@paxtonacer I'm British, darling, it's not about being British. Sure, you could say "a touch more (blank)" is a British coloquialism but nobody uses the word "communicative" on a regular basis.

[@Tom_Nicholas]

Haha, a fair point!

[@seandevine5836]

Imagine writing about liberating the working class in language that can only be understood after a hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education

[@andrewgeary9749]

hello 21st century communists :)

[@lisaw150]

Imagine an education costing hundreds of thousands :((( America wastes the potential of its young people...

[@Jokkkkke]

That only applies to the US if we’re only talking about the Global North. Without taking purchasing power into account, people in the Global South also get opportunities to study in Europe for less money without scholarships than the amount of money Americans have to spend on higher education, though I’m not sure how much money it works out in total considering the Visas these students have to get and other extraneous things of that nature

[@sverrebjrbk6965]

@@andrewgeary9749 21st century american communists*

[@phosphenevision]

@@Jokkkkke in LATAM most of the best universities are completely free, you can also receive a small payment if you are under a certain amount of family income to study, or get a paid internship to assist in research or in labs

[@juliegolick]

When I did graduate studies (in one of those "soft" fields: medieval history), I HATED academic articles. Heck, I *was* their target audience, and even *I* found the overly-complex language to be both unnecessary and infuriating. The comment I got most frequently from my professors was how understandable my papers were, how easy to read, despite the fact that they were handling complex topics. I can't speak to the sciences, but definitely in the humanities a lot of the articles COULD have been written in a far more understandable way without losing any of the nuance or complex arguments. They just... weren't.

[@TheR971]

Everything that can be said can be said clearly

[@phosphenevision]

@@TheR971 ironically your own comment doesnt mean anything at all, what is everything that can be said? so if there are things that are hard to say clearly they cant be said? does this mean that any subject which seeks to expand our understanding on things and create new meanings shouldnt exist because we can only work with ways of expressing ourselves which are clearly understood from the get go? what does that mean for language that isnt written? what does that mean for the gaps of understanding between different languages?

[@JJsims5504]

I have discovered much the same in music. Though newer articles seem to be better so I think music academia, at least, is learning!

[@lehuy7306]

Can I read your proudest published work? I want to improve my writing

[@HkFinn83]

I have studied history, not at a post graduate level but...I was under the impression history had avoided being colonised by the Foucault/Judith Butler types?

[@BrassicaRappa]

I don't mind me vocabulary! The thing that drives me nuts is structural. You really can communicate complex ideas without paragraph long run on sentences, I promise!

[@sharpe3698]

Hard second for this.

[@gabrielaharries8149]

Seriously... I had to read a book on theology and most of the chapters would consist of sentences that were half a page long and every second word was terminology, after reading a chapter there was no chance I would understand anything. I understand wanting to summarize an idea, but dear lord, it was just a bunch of words on paper.

[@anintp-a9401]

The paaawar of long sentences is something highschool won't taught you.

[@dysmissme7343]

I just watched this video and commented and now I see that we all have the same thoughts!!! 😂😂

[@bambsy9665]

Is it truly possible to express complex ideas within the confines of short sentences rather than long verbose ones of approximately one paragraph in length from word count alone that proceed to communicate their ideas via a method that positions their contents in such a way as to appear, under a thin yet powerful guise, well-thought out and incredibly intelligent, whilst also considering that such ideas are in need of great lengthy sentences to ensure the reader can fully grasp their contents in an efficient manner, and whilst also considering that such lengthy sentences are simpler to comprehend despite the fact the author stopped understanding their own train of thought a quarter through the production of such sentences?

[@normal_stacy]

I'm getting a bachelor in philosophy this year, and imo this kind of critique is absolutely reasonable. Even if you write primarily for colleagues, you still can express yourself more clearly. Terminology is fine, but long, weirdly structured sentenses making my brain melt. Students are bored, general public is confused. Honestly, we can do better than this. ps. whached one Pinker's lecture, wasnt wery impressed

[@Tom_Nicholas]

I've just mentioned this in another comment too, but what I'd love to see is more academics writing books specifically for general audiences. Letting them do the more complex thing for their peers but also doing the equivalent of, say, A Brief History of Time for their fields. There are a whole bunch of instances of this happening but it would be cool to see even more.

[@katherinemorelle7115]

Tom Nicholas I hope people support Zero Books, who publish those “academics for everyone” books, including Capitalist Realism. They have a KZbin channel, and it’s pretty good. It also goes into explaining stuff, like logic with Ben Burgess, or other topics.

[@MrPiotrV]

I came here to say the same thing. This whole video, tbh, kinda missed the mark. The problem is not, for the most part, the usage of technical terms, the problem is that sentences are written in such a confusing manner that it makes comprehension hard, even when one knows all the technical terms.

[@irenedumateachesart]

@@MrPiotrV Yes, this is what I was going to say. Missed the mark completely by not touching on the appallingly long sentences and complete disinterest in grammar. Decades ago, French intellectuals admitted to overwriting to appeal to the snooty classes who wanted to pretend that they were smarter, deeper and above others. An ugly game deserving of giant eye-rolls. This incomprehensible language has now seeped into the arts - and I weep. "Searle claims Foucault told him: “In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep-they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.” When Searle later asked Pierre Bourdieu if he thought this was true, Bourdieu insisted it was much worse than ten percent." Quote from. www.critical-theory.com/foucault-obscurantism-they-it/

[@louisvictor3473]

Maybe what we should instead focus in making basic education so good that academic writing sounds accessible to general audiences instead (excluding academic works actively written as an attempt to sound arcane and "ultra enlighted", for obvious reasons).

[@GrimrDirge]

“Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

[@Dorian_sapiens]

Ah, famously understandable writer Friedrich Nietzsche.

[@GrimrDirge]

@@Dorian_sapiens Fair point. I think he was trying to be clear about some very unclear or undeveloped ideas. Occasionally it worked.

[@alanamontero4743]

@@Dorian_sapiens Nietzsche was actually a skilled and engaging writer compared to most. I'm not a big fan of a lot of his ideas but I do like his writing and find it clearer than most philosophical texts.

[@MoonSouvenirs]

@@Dorian_sapiens I actually think Nietzsche is very legible. The difficulty comes from the associations he made and from the fact that his style was often very poetic and figurative, not from his type of writing.

[@ajiththomas2465]

Damn. If that's not a call out of people like Jordan Peterson, then I don't know know what is. ;)

[@holly7889]

I'm currently finishing up writing a chapter for an academic book where I stress the importance for less-complex language and more engaging writing throughout academia. I really believe everyone should be able to access education but often feel that the omniscient scientific discourse used can create a barrier for many. Thank you for such an interesting discussion on this!!

[@Tom_Nicholas]

I'm absolutely for education being accessible to all (as I hope my other videos show). I think it's about being aware of who the audience for something is. Rather than rethinking how journal articles are written (for example), I'd much rather see top scholars writing books specifically aimed at general audiences (in addition to their "more scholarly" work).

[@simonsmith3030]

I couldn't understand a word you wrote...(Just pulling your leg :-) )

[@CallousCarter]

Before we launch yet another campaign of university evangelism I think we need to take a serious look at the utility of what's being taught and the quality of research. Because frankly worldwide more people go to university than ever, more people have advanced degrees than ever, the kinds of conversations and interests that used to be sole purview of intellectuals in ivory towers are more mainstream than ever and the world is falling apart faster than ever. How many people with advanced degrees have been locked into debt servitude by the racketeering costs and have largely failed to develop skills necessary for navigating the world while being supposedly educated? How broad and universal, does the very ineligibility of the writing not perhaps disguise an intellectual narrowness? How much of what is being taught is actually true? How much of this education is actually indoctrination? I think the pervasiveness of the assumption that more formal education is better I think really exposes a lack of rigor, introspection and critique that has becomes prevalent among the world of tertiary education because anyone who looks at the data and the trendlines over the last 20-40 years will notice a quite startling amount of negative correlations in societies as "education" increases.

[@AdamMooreGameDev]

I've been considering getting a PhD and I've been reading publications from academics in my field...and it is some of the most painfully boring bs I've dragged my eyeballs across. It's like trying to read a student's essay when the assignment had a 2000 word requirement and the student only had 300 words to say, so they paraphrased the same ideas repeatedly to push that word count up.

[@RareSeldas]

it's important to keep in mind that higher vocabulary is meant to save time by fitting more concepts into one word, not alienate people, but it just so happens that often it is exploited for that

[@brandonadams3914]

thank you for making this point. I was going to say the same thing after reading the comments. All of the technical terms are often just concepts which house a great deal of information, arguments, and nuance. It is not simply jargon a lot of the times, and isn't simply an inflated word choice that could be replaced by something simpler. Hegemony is a perfect example. To lay out all of the meanings and nuances of the concepts each time one uses them, so to be "clear" would triple the size of the article or book. This is why taking sections out of context and saying look how hard it is to understand is absurd (though common). Each of those concepts could have been discussed earlier in the text if it is structured properly, and now the passage uses them together to make a larger though more complex point; yet that paragraph could be then ripped out of context and complained about.

[@RareSeldas]

@@brandonadams3914 Agreed.

[@donjindra]

Very rarely does a "higher vocabulary" fit more concepts into one word.

[@RareSeldas]

@@donjindra higher vocabulary, which usually means 3rd tier vocabulary, is just a basic way of talking about this in English. And no, the literal entire point of 3rd tier vocabulary is to represent a composite of concepts. Take a surgical term for example, each bit of the Latin in the gigantic word refers to a different surgical procedure and it'd waste precious time if they had to describe the whole operation every time as opposed to l just saying the term.

[@donjindra]

@@RareSeldas You're confusing theory with practice. Besides, this issue is academic writing, not scientific or engineering terms.

[@slyanna3688]

Y'all can write as complex works as you want but the moment your professor requires that you use "more complicated language" in your papers, thus forcing you to use fancy words to say a lot of nothings, then we have a problem.

[@HxH2011DRA]

👏

[@zoeburke7683]

College writing teacher here: Can confirm, that's some bullshit, and your teacher should feel bad.

[@cheydinal5401]

Wait, they actually do that?

[@cheydinal5401]

I'm so glad my main college course is economics, not sociology or political science

[@corycianangel6321]

So true.

[@lexort4204]

I do wish that academic writing was more accessible, I can usually get the jist of it but I feel as though I may be missing out on certain contexts from time to time. I'm not a student or anything just a curious citizen.

[@ryfrz]

Me too

[@SevenRiderAirForce]

My favorite (close enough) quote on the matter: People with profound things to say strive for simplicity. People with simple things to say strive to sound profound.

[@hamfranky]

In my experience (field of physical chemistry), it's a combination of: 1) Nobody is trained to write in an engaging manner, only encouraged to write objectively with no room for interpretation. Even though these are not mutually exclusive, it is still often seen that way. 2) Editors, reviewers, and probably your PI will not approve of a more 'fun and engaging' writing style if you are not a big established name in the field. I've read well written, easy-to-read articles, but only ever from big names. Yes, they have the experience of writing a lot, but most younger researcher wouldn't dare to submit anything like that.

[@DrAnarchy69]

Academic here! I can answer: because most of us are just bad writers. I come from a background of writing so I’m lucky but most academics don’t have experience in writing other than, well, for academia. Also we (myself included) use WAY too much passive voice, which just reads bad. Also I’m blessed because a lot of my more niche terminology is more widely known since I study the History of Anarchism and socialist theory has had a renaissance recently. So when I say Marxian, or historical materialism, or hierarchy, most leftists know what I mean.

[@Tom_Nicholas]

Haha, I almost drew on an article I read which made this very case. That academics are generally trained to be good at the research element and at teaching but that no one ever really gives you any writing training...

[@NoeHernandezPe767]

I don't think this is completely true, French philosophers and French Academy in general is known by its top-notch writing skills and yet their style is sometimes incomprehensible and very dense, Baroque at best. I believe we are trained to use our own niche terms, we are mostly taught to make use of a set of pre-defined vocabulary that validates us as "good" or "professional" academics, that's the point that Tom makes around 8:44. Still, many academics have very few things to say and they cover their arguments with dense technical language. I truly believe some don't even understand the logical core of their own arguments, but trained as we are to use a vocabulary, they draw sets of terms in order to "give strength" to their papers.

[@toisitrappings6483]

I think there is also an element of articles/writing being misused. My partner took a second year undergrad English course that they needed as part of a general ed requirement of their science degree, and the class had them reading some of Butler's work, when this was the first class most of them had ever taken on anything related to feminist theory. Butler is not an appropriate resource to use to introduce students to the entire field! In my experience, other humanities don't seem to have this issue, though. In my language BA, by the end I was reading high level theoretical articles on linguistics in 3 different languages and had no real trouble, because the groundwork had been properly laid in my earlier courses. As a side note, I was also able to translate high-level chemistry texts with minimal difficulty despite only having high school chem education (the main difficulty was finding a chemistry dictionary so I could look up all of the terminology), but reading Butler just makes my head hurt and eyes glaze over, even when I already understand the ideas she's explaining. And I would argue that the way Butler writes is now the prescribed way to write this sort of piece, and so it isn't very radical anymore. Using language that people can get through and mostly understand as long as they have a dictionary or google to look up specific terms (like hegemony) is a lot more radical to me.

[@alanamontero4743]

And I'm skilled at creative writing and have been for a few decades, yet I struggle with academic writing and find it the worst part of uni. (Though possibly trying to read methodology and stats are worse, mostly because my brain just doesn't care, which means my ADHD brain can't focus for more than 30 seconds.) Because people know that I'm a good writer, many people assume that therefore I must be good at academic writing. Nope. I think I don't like being that analytical and objective. Plus, all the details. I think academic writing suits certain skills and ways of thinking more than others. I don't think that being good at other forms of writing necessarily makes you good at academic writing. Though if you're not good at ANY forms of writing that definitely doesn't help.

[@rafaelalmada723]

trekkie69 In regards to passive voice, I remember a professor of mine commenting on the fact. Paraphrasing, "It was frowned upon to show direct involvement in the project, you wanted to be sufficiently removed from the article you're writing as to remove any sort of personal bias, and writing in passive voice was often used as a literary device to display that". It probably doesn't help that reviewers are used to this language and would encourage it. I'm not very familiar with many works in philosophy outside of history or philosophy of science, but I know that in physics and mathematics that has been in decline in recent years. Most recent papers are written in relatively simple terminology. Though the bad writing structure is still present :(

[@countpythagoras]

She made a point that using everyday language would restrict her ability to put across her point. Yet, the "translation" of her sentence managed to do exactly that. Make her point readily understandable by using everyday language. What those people have gotten mixed up, i think, is their inability to expain a complex topic in a simple way with a false idea that by confusing the shit out of everyone translates to deep thought. Notice that i said "simple way" not simple words. That was on purpose. You can use terminology all you want, because terminology can be easily defined. What made her sentences dull and borderline pretentious was the choice of going full pompous mode and forming sentences in a way that no one talks or writes, i would argue, ever. Basically the problem is not the words and specialized terms, but rather her style of writing. If Feynman managed to make quantum theory understandable to people, anyone can talk about anything in a way that doesn;t make you go "what the fuck does this even mean"

[@abdunnoerkaldine8511]

100% there's a conflation of "clear writing" and "simple writing". One can express great ideas and use technical terms while being clear in expression. That sentence was extremely long and unnecessary.

[@TheQuixoticRambler]

Yes. Absolutely.

[@TheQuixoticRambler]

​@@abdunnoerkaldine8511For sure. Agree.

[@welwitschia]

One thing that I learned during my life in academia is that academics, in many cases, just don't know how to write. I used to work in a 'hard science', and it was maddening to read papers that were so unnecessarily obscure. Yes, many of the ideas we dealt with were very complex, but in many cases reading a paper was more about trying to read the author's mind than just thinking about the underlying story. It was taxing and I hated it. People in science are just never taught how to tell a story, and while some are amazing at it, the variability is huge and some are really, really bad.

[@colonelweird]

This video seems to be conflating several different issues - the use of jargon or specialized terminology, the tradition in philosophy (beginning with Kant) of treating obscurity as a sign of profundity, incompetent stylists, the effects on writing quality of a "publish or perish" academic culture, and the limits of ordinary language in expressing difficult ideas. Seems like each of these should be teased out, defined, and discussed in relation to the others.

[@lad9732]

I agree. I think he also forgot to mention that academia has a group of writers and communicators that are in charge of divulging to the gp the new ideas being tackled by experts. Currently, virologists may find it hard to address and speak about the covid-19 strain because they are used to certain terminology being universally understood by their students or peers. Doctors and nurses, on the other hand, may not know as much about the specifics but may be better equipped to communicate the safety protocols and provide basic information that the common citizen, who has not seen the diagram of a cell since 8th grade, will understand. I love this channel but it is true that sometimes when certain ideas have to summarized, a lot of different areas fall under the umbrella of the matter being discussed or criticized. I think biology, physics, chemistry and math are usually given a pass in their terminology and language because often they end up creating a language of their own with variations that provide specificity or a semblance of clarity. It is also easier to draw the line on how "objective" the matters they want to discuss and theorize over are in comparison with gender studies or even macroeconomics, since both of these rely on unpredictable behavior of very diverse communities (their theories are harder to prove or fail with much more ease). I think there is a distinction to be made here, and I would argue humanities do not owe Kant as much as they owe Hegel in their convoluted and obscure language. Schopenhauer himself adored Kant and thought Hegel was nothing but a charlatan (though he may have been mad for not having many students in his class). So yeah, hope these videos manage to reach a tad more of nuance since a lot of issues are mentioned but not as thoroughly addressed.

[@lad9732]

Galadrielen oh trust me i think Tom is great and im very glad there are people like him puttin so much work into making academia much less obscure and confusing.

[@gabrielaharries8149]

As someone who studied cultural studies, information sciences and publishing, those were many of the problems with academic writing I encountered. And yes those are all complex issues that should be brought up when talking about "soft" sciences and generally about the issues in academic writing. Would be a very interesting video.

[@EayuProuxm]

This comment needs to be pinned

[@ontological_clips7486]

Interesting video, Tom! I have a graduate background in both the 'STEM' area (psych / neuro) and also in the 'soft' sciences and humanities (cultural anthropology, philosophy). As far as I can tell, there are two very different ways of accusing a text of being "difficult". If we accuse some piece of computational neuroscience research of being 'difficult', we typically mean that, despite its meaning being very precise, we just can't access that meaning because we don't understand the frame of reference - the math, the anatomy, or whatever. The problem in this case isn't in the text, but in the reader. The text is 'difficult' BECAUSE, rather IN SPITE OF, its being precise. If the argument were vague, then it would probably be easier to understand for the layperson. Because it is trying to say something very specific about something complicated, it has to use language designed for that purpose: if it used regular language, then it would end up losing some of the information it is trying to communicate. The critique levied against the 'studies' disciplines and philosophy, typically continental philosophy (usually by people outside the humanities), is usually pretty different. They tend to assume that, regardless of one's familiarity with the writer's jargon, the vagueness of the text would remain - i.e., that the text effectively doesn't "say" anything in particular- the problem is in the text, not the reader. But as you suggested with Butler's passage, this is often a disingenuous critique of the writers at hand. In my opinion, the vast majority of critiques of humanities' style being 'opaque' are instances of hand-waving that are designed to let the critic off the hook for not taking the time to understand the argument. An extreme example of this can be found in Chomsky's dismissal of Zizek, who he simultaneously accuses of being 'incomprehensible' but also of only making statements which could be 'summarize in 5 minutes to a 12-year old'. The work required to understand what is at stake in Zizek's argument is taken as evidence that nothing, in fact, is at stake. To sum up -- the opacity of a text is only a worthy critique if the opacity goes 'all the way down' - that is, if it becomes no less opaque once its tools have been learned. Writers like Pinker, who find 'common sense' sufficient to disambiguate complex things such as human history, are largely ignored by serious academics for the same reason a literature professor writing about planetary orbits in 'common sense terms' would be equally ignored -- he is unable to go beyond vague gestures.

[@kitthornton2336]

It's all about audience, and motive. They're writing for their fellow professors, in such a way as will establish their bonafides. It is in the interests of academic institutions to be as vague as possible, to avoid controversy and make themselves seem to be masters of some arcane subject. I was a college professor for some years. I think I might have skimmed a thousand articles in my field at that time. About once a year, I'd find something useful to anyone not in the profession. Maybe it's different in the "hard sciences," but in my field, Philosophy, the discipline is choking on its own smoke. Most work being done in Philosophy is so much useless "inside baseball," and the discipline is being defunded and marginalized because it has no utility to students, and to society as a whole. This is troubling, in that nothing is more "practical" than Philosophy. We all have to weigh arguments, make ethical decisions, and decide what the purpose and meaning of our lives should be. But the further Philosophy gets from these questions, or even denounces them entirely (looking at you, "Analytic Philosophers,") the less justifiable it becomes to spend public resources on Philosophy.

[@moch.farisdzulfiqar6123]

What do you think about avoiding plagiarism that as a student, I feel it is become more like 'changing semantics game' after repetitive paraphrasing? And when my lecturer says to use your own language, they think my writing is too populist.

[@HxH2011DRA]

I agree with this take. Yes the hard sciences have to talk to each other in very specific language without simplifying but not everyone is doing the hard sciences whereas ideally everyone should be participating in the humanities.

[@myselfapretend]

@@HxH2011DRA Yes. Sadly, though, STEM has taken over the whole cultural mindset, dictating the values and assumptions and standards of the average population and, more specifically, universities and colleges across all disciplines. So now the Humanities, which should never have to do so, feel a need (and are given to understand by authorities above them that they need) to justify themselves in the terms of STEM. So they mimic and imitate STEM, regardless of the obvious contextual differences.

[@HxH2011DRA]

@@myselfapretend oof

[@Betterdangaming]

@@myselfapretend while that's certainly true, philosophy has been obscurantist since before STEM was a thing

[@billpeel4408]

One of my teachers has also told me that sometimes journals will not publish something if they think it's "too accessible". That's just anecdotal though

[@nytehauq]

I think the humanities are actually much more important for laymen to understand than much of the obscure "hard sciences" and it actually has a higher burden to be comprehensible for that reason. I'm skeptical that even the hard sciences "need" to use their jargon in order to communicate complex ideas - even when they do, it's generally the use of specialized vocabulary to refer to things that are entirely outside of normal experience, like the behavior of light in a thin film on a reflective surface. Even so, in technical papers I've read, complex jargon is often explained with simple pictures showing what the phenomenon in question would look like at a layman's scale. It's a bit odd to talk about society, a thing we are all constantly enmeshed in and which we all have personal experience with, and to use technical jargon almost exclusively. If academics (be they in the humanities or the hard sciences) are primarily writing for their peers, how can we judge their assessment that their use of language is out of necessity? Can we assume they can see their own potential blindspots?

[@ChippyPippy]

The hard sciences don't need the jargon. Richard Feynman said that decades ago.

[@HxH2011DRA]

Exactly

[@Idonotsa49]

@@ChippyPippy Explain quantum mechanics without jargon. It’s impossible. You can communicate the basics, but as it becomes more advanced, more terminology becomes necessary.

[@ChippyPippy]

@@Idonotsa49 I'm not a quantum mechanics specialist. So asking that question is retarded. I was however, in a hard science field in the military and routinely had to give tours of my facility to officers. While doing so I explained everything in layman's terms. And do you not understand how jargon requires laymen's terms in order to exist in the first place? When you were taught jargon it was all done through laymen's terms. Only a midwit would think it impossible.

[@floatingpointz5903]

The difference is that good teachers in hard sciences can and do use easy to digest language, but for concepts that are extremely counterintuitive to the human mind. Watch the first hour of MIT Courseware on quantum theory: ideas broken down into very digestible chunks to express concepts that, once you understand them, defy all your definitions of the universe. Even explaining Relitivity's concept of gravity, in very very simple terms (which is not often done correctly), will become understandable as an idea, but the idea, once understood, will defy your preexisting ideas and perceptions. Now take the humanities or academic papers on society.... These delve into topics that lay people discuss constantly. I have yet to see any such ideas that defy all my concepts of possible reality; just gently nudging my assumptions. But I do see a ton of jargon and pointless verbosity that only seems to obscure meaning. And if Judith Butler's academic paper is being toted around by Freshmen and laypersons everywhere, I gotta wonder if they're just clinging to an impenetrable veil of assumed intelligence by association. Or, to translate, faking for rep...

[@myselfapretend]

But while I despise Pinker's argument, I will say that you're not gonna change much of the world outside the Humanities faculty walls if your language is otherwise inaccessible. Doesn't it create a small group of "us" who only communicate to one another in the proverbial ivory tower? I was for many years, without knowing it, primed for a lot of what you discuss here, but didn't know it because of the off-putting nature of "academic"-speak. It seems to me that real challenges to the status quo would be more...toothed and clawed. I see folks online dissect, critique, and reframe societal narratives in radical and intelligent ways without resorting to recondite linguistics. In fact, isn't such language how power is often (not always, but often enough) maintained or even amassed? --Ecclisiastical authority, medical authority, business authority, political authority, academic authority, gang authority: the institutions and habits of power often come with their carefully curated and maintained languages. It's spectacle to impress, impose, and intimidate. And yes, frequently those loving in that language do come to think it's actually important and actually real beyond their in-house conventionality.

[@brianb.6356]

In addition to agreeing with what you've said, I also think that while Judith Butler's response claims to be motivated by a desire to change the world, I strongly suspect it is actually motivated by a desire to not change the world she's familiar with, namely academia.

[@abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz3010]

I agree 100% with both these comments.

[@otto_jk]

And I think it's weird that Tom frames this critique of academic language as right wing when Noam Chomsky is a critical of academic language and he certainly isn't a right winger.

[@gwendolinkirkegaard1812]

@@otto_jk Pinker is pretty centrist though, with the occasional sway to the cultural left.

[@stevenwarner9156]

One thing I find a bit insulting about the video is the utter misrepresentation of Pinker. Here is the actual full paragraph: "The most popular answer outside the academy is the cynical one: Bad writing is a deliberate choice. Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. 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." No idea why Tom has utterly misrepresented Pinker, whose article is very sensible, and his book "The Sense of Style" is very enlightening.

[@katherinemorelle7115]

It does make me glad that Law already went through the plain language revolution, to be honest. It was much easier to understand. It was still communicating complex ideas (would anyone ever try to say that law is simple?), but the language was more accessible. There were still technical terms, I don’t think you can get away from that, but the language around those terms was understandable. I guess I just don’t see the need for a paragraph-long run on sentence, regardless of what technical terms are used. It also makes it seem very classist- in that “you must have studied this for 8 years to be able to understand us” kind of way. It completely bars the entrance of those who aren’t at least post grads. Who has the time and money to afford that, when all we are after is a way to understand and critique the society we live in? There has been discussion among the left, that if we want to convince others to join our cause, we need to let go of the overly technical language. We need to let go of the “well you simply must have read X, Y and Z obscure leftist academic to understand anything”. Nothing will change if this is the case (see The Left by Contrapoints). Maybe academics don’t want things to change? Maybe they’re happy to critique society, but don’t want that society they critique to disappear? But we need to make these critiques understandable to a general audience if we want to see any change. I try to understand philosophy and legal theory in order to understand what is wrong, and what can be done to fix it. I get the impression that many academics (and the more snobbish of those on the left) would far rather just talk about those issues, than actually change anything. (Wow, that rant kinda came out of nowhere!)

[@Dorian_sapiens]

Good rant, though! :)

[@BDCTheSloth90]

Wow. Right on the money.

[@marcoarana2773]

One of the many possible solutions would be to include an in book vocabulary dictionary that explains complex terminology. That vocabulary dictionary can be annexed or written by another person( preferably someone with a writing background) to take a load of the academic shoulders while still preserving the necessary complex language and thus making it more accessible to the public. Another suggestion would be to write two kinds of books, articles etc, one for peer communication and another for general audience distribution

[@Skumtomten1]

"There has been discussion among the left, that if we want to convince others to join our cause, we need to let go of the overly technical language." Well, that won't happen, since the overly technical language is moslty used to shield themselves from critique and create a safe space for them to operate in with minimal interference. If you actually simplify and break down academic papers, you will realize that the majority of them aren't nearly as complex, insightful or enlightening as they may seem.

[@imakro69]

You can clearly see that shift in early Soviet papers, as they're super easy to understand, written with spoken language, even in such fields as physics, because it didn't bear a connection to classic academia, neither did it try to establish it's academic finesse, as that was seen borgois There was also a case with building barriers to professions, such as after the war in America there were far too many doctors (military), so they had to come up with various certifications to close off that field from newcomers and retain their salaries. Similar idea is prevalent with Chinese language which some people say has such a complex writing structure based on that there was a whole class of bureaucrats who used it as their profession, and studied professionally to pass exams, so it was a way for them to keep the literacy an elitist feature only accessible to those with resources, meaning the entering bar would have been always hjgh, solidifying their position in society

[@jonasrand6818]

butler's point at 15:01 exhibits bourgeois privilege, 'received grammar' is a needed vehicle for communicating liberating ideas because it's the best way to make it understood to the greatest amount of people - while I agree that specific terms can be helpful for precision and expressing unfamiliar or complex ideas, to suggest that as a defense of alienating language reeks of elitism, or at least shows a lack of care about how poor people can be involved in producing radical change

[@AaronAnaya]

Great Video. I really do think academics should do a lot more to reach out to non-academics, but you’re right that the critique of impenetrable writing is too often used as cudgel against the humanities.

[@yusufpolat228]

So there should be two copies of every academic article, eh? One for the academic peers and one for the general public. I have been doing this for myself for a long time. I often reword articles and studies using a more "fun" register, so to speak. That way, it's easier to remember them :)

[@gabrielaharries8149]

As a non-english student who studies in a field that doesn't have academic articles in my native language, I would a lot of times just translate the articles from english to my native language but in a much simplified form, which helped so much to understand them.

[@Jordan-od3wn]

Could you do a video on Freud, Lacan, or just psychoanalytic theory in general sometime in the future? I find your videos really helpful for grasping complex theoretical concepts, and psychoanalysis is definitely the thing I have the most trouble with.

[@HxH2011DRA]

This

[@Theloveinabubble]

Lacan please!!! I start getting dizzy every time I try to read his writings -.-

[@forthrightgambitia1032]

Yes. I still want to know more about the erm... properties of the imaginary number i.

[@thomasexlager1324]

Gate-keeping: "the cognitive powers have extraordinary relevance for the dialectic" is not disputable by average joe, while he can say a lot about "thinking is of great importance" (Stolen from a German book about a talking kanguru)

[@sharpe3698]

I'm guessing since you're pulling from German, stuff is getting lost in translation, but I think this is quite a poor example. The second sentence says something else/less than the first one We usually understand "thinking" as conscious processes. "cognitive powers" seems to focus particularly on the processes by which we learn and understand, conscious or subconscious. And "the dialectic" has a specific meaning (although please don't ask me to give a concise definition). It isn't just "everything"* I do think the gatekeeping argument has a point; it's inaccessible jargon meant to efficiently convey information to peers. But that's necessary and fine. We don't fault medical researchers, physicists, or mathematicians for communicating with each other that way. We somewhat devalue the humanities by expecting them to be more accessible to the unpracticed than other fields of inquiry.

[@TheMaginor]

There is a book "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality", where Zizek, Laclau and Butler discuss their respective theories. It has the structure of three rounds, where each author writes an essay per round that is a response to questions by the others in the previous round. My understanding of that book was that a big part of the first couple of rounds was them just clearing out misunderstandings because they use the same technical terms in completely different ways. So even academics who have read quite a bit of one another find each other difficult to understand. I have also seen several self-professed Hegelians complain about the denseness of Hegel's original texts.

[@lijenamacka]

I tried reading some of Jürgen Habermas' writings when I was in university. I remember single sentences being spread out over entire pages...

[@NotoriousLightning]

Still easier to understand than Lippmann.

[@saltiestsalt6326]

Had to read Habermas for my master's thesis recently. I was on the verge of tears almost daily.

[@emilyglass6625]

First, let me say that I love your channel and I think you operate in the goodest of good faith. I sit at your feet; you have my rapt attention. But I’m kind of surprised at what I take to be the final upshot of this commentary and not fully satisfied with it. I am actually a philosophy professor, as it happens. I’m the sort of person who is generally good with words but I lack that specific, felicitous type of brain that feels maximally at home in contemporary philosophy, as practiced academically. In short, I mean I have to practice and concentrate to count as a “peer,” but I’ve had about 15 years now to work on it - handling specialized words that name complex concepts and putting them to regular use. And while I agree that obscure words can be incredible, specialized academic tools and we shouldn’t frown on their coming into existence or being used, even used a lot, I don’t think saying the word hegemony is the problem. You said the word hegemony all over the place, and it was in an empowering and democratizing way, not an obfuscating and unhelpful way. It’s not the coming into existence of the words, it’s how they get strung together. The abstract thing abstracts the abstraction abstractly by the abstract means of abstract abstractitude. I can bear up with long-suffering under a sentence like the Judith Butler, but oh Father Christmas if you love me at all, at least follow it up with an example or a more plain-spoken clarification. Good faith writing, even for other academics, needs moments of clarity for the reader to check their interpretation against what the writer is and is not saying. Wall to wall abstraction is just headachy and badly ambiguous. You said it would be strange if Academics had to stop and define the big words for other Academics, but actually I think I’d be enormously grateful - and I don’t just mean beginning of grad school me, I mean now-me. I don’t know about atmospheric scientists, but I think they might use the word “stratosphere” more consistently than academics in the humanities use our specialized language. And I don’t mean it’s a bad kind of inconsistency; I mean we know the basic glossary definitions of the terms but that doesn’t always unlock or lay bare the sense or emphasis intended by a particular writer. I think stopping to talk about what the concept means to you, within the scope of your specific project, can be a mercy to the peer and to the lay person alike. Here’s the thing: if the state of academic writing were about us doing our *best* job of talking to each other while doing not so great at talking to outsiders, then I’d second the need for more texts that *do* speak to non-experts (and for creating them to be a respected academic endeavor), and otherwise be totally content. But I don’t believe we are, as a class, doing our best to communicate with each other. I have sat at conferences clenching *every* brain cell at my disposal trying to follow a paper to absolutely no avail. I have 39 years experience with what people sound like when they’re trying to be understood - even those same exact people who write the papers - and people who want to be understood may use the word hegemony but they don’t sound like THAT. Bell hooks writes about leading class sessions where students of color are encouraged to use their language of origin or vernacular. She says white students often complain about feeling out of the loop. She suggests to them that it can be a salutary experience to listen and struggle and fail to understand. The white students are bearing witness to their classmates feeling the power and welcome of customized language - words that name the complexities of experiences that are familiar matters to the poc but for which the white students have maybe never required a word. Vernacular speech and “hegemony” aren’t so different. They come into existence in the effort to name things no other word was naming - yet. But I don’t think me beating my brains out at the conference, listening to opaque sentence after opaque sentence, is the salutary experience of struggling to understand someone who is feeling the power and joy of commanding language that empowers them to be their most authentic and capture their keenest insights. Frankly, it feels hecka inauthentic. I don’t want to make accusations of willful obfuscation, but I think maybe academia is set up in a way that’s... not great and pressures and incentivizes bad habits. If you hang out with academics, you will meet some blowhards who just straight-up feel good about being hard to understand. Maybe if enough of them set the standards and practices, we all end up approximating and imitating them. If most of the papers you read are obscure, then obscure becomes your idea of academic style. But honestly, I think even we non-total-blowhards are often guilty of being complicit in an Emperor-has-no-clothes kind of situation. It’s not that the hard sciences are doing meaningful work and the “softer” disciplines aren’t, so we’re trying to cover up a collective bankruptcy. The humanities are chock full of meaning. I think it’s more a matter of insecurity and individual self-protection. I have watched how my own colleagues treat a VISITING EXPERT *THEY* BROUGHT IN TO GIVE A PROMISING PRESENTATION. The transparent one-upmanship. The Q + A “questions” that aren’t questions and don’t suggest any real interest in hearing an answer, much less learning from it. It’s sheep bashing horns and it’s embarrassing and saddening and not at all what we *say* we’re here for. My take is that the overly-convoluted paper is the discipline-mandated-output, safe-from-public-humiliation paper. When colleagues aren’t properly collegial, I don’t think it provides much of an incentive to sincerely try and be understood at all. But present a headache in written form and you’re just a little bit more likely to put a roomful of “peers” on the back foot. If they are not sure they understand, they will tread a little carefully before they @ you. Of course, I don’t know a single colleague who has ever mentioned *aloud* having comparable experiences of despair from just trying to keep up so maybe it’s just me, lol. Maybe I’m not much of a peer! At any rate, it should definitely be a valid and validated activity to choose to talk to people from all walks of life about complex ideas and to try to do it in words anyone could understand. If philosophy at its best consisted exclusively of ideas only experts could understand and aptly speak about, then honestly I don’t think it would be much worth doing. In other words, keep up the great work. You’re welcoming *and* you’re complex, and the Judith Butlers should be so lucky.

[@charliegoerges7620]

I really appreciate your discussion of this. My own struggles dealing with the language of philosophy contributed to me switching my major in philosophy to a minor. And I wasn’t even that bad at it, but reading it could be real drudgery at times. That said, class sessions and discussions could be a real joy and basically WERE my college experience. Best wishes

[@somerandompersonidk2272]

yes but ur mom

[@OLucasZanella]

It's a shame the best comment is left unanswered. For what it matters, I understood everything you wrote. Since you're a professor, may I ask you what good philosophers and books you think would be a good starting point? I'm not good at philosophy, but I like to think about things, so I've taken some interest.

[@forthrightgambitia1032]

"The abstract thing abstracts the abstraction abstractly by the abstract means of abstract abstractitude." - This. It is a style of writing that kills the poetry of any writing, regardless of vocabulary size.

[@partytime8092]

@@forthrightgambitia1032 reminds me of trying to comprehend Heidegger in English while my philosophy professor said something like, "well, it's right there. He just explained it. Why don't you get it?"

[@ev13191]

Okay, on the whole I really love this analysis. But in the end I'm not totally satisfied. I am satisfied with your argument that specific/obscure terminology is necessary to communicate ideas which are new. But I'm not satisfied that that means the sentence construction has to be intentionally circuitous. That translation of Judith Butler's sentence -- sure, he replaced "hegemony" with "power," even though "hegemony" is more specific. But even if you restore "hegemony" to the translated sentence, it's still infinitely easier to read and makes infinitely more sense than the original, because the syntax is far more logical. As somebody below said, it's the damn run-on sentences that drive me up a wall. A theory writer like the late theater historian Claire Sponsler is one of the rare academic writers, in my opinion, who was able to use the exact right words for her ideas while structuring them in a way that reads coherently. I'd be really curious to know your thoughts specifically on the syntax of, say, that famous Butler sentence. Some of the clauses are so long that by the time you get to the verb you've forgotten what the subject is. I guess I've yet to hear an argument convincing me that that kind of ponderous writing is necessary to communicate its ideas.

[@jjoohhhnn]

You actually don't always need new terms to describe the data of a new event or concept. You do need proper nouns, and sometimes new verbs (though generally less often). You don't need a new term to describe the features of a new member of a clade, you only need a new scientific name (usually only the species, not genus, tribe, or family). You don't need a new term for the structure you measured. (example 2) You don't need to use terms like iridium, osmium and circumboreal, or even megafauna to explain the 'new concept' of the Younger Dryas event. It's easier to say continental forest fires and rare earth elements more common in meteor impacts were found in high levels together, which suggests an impact was responsible for the extinction of large animals at the end of the ice age. You really don't need complex language and poor verbiage to communicate.

[@Cecilia-ky3uw]

Hegemony is about as obscure as monarchy or maybe thats just me because ive known the term for some time now

[@imakro69]

Facts The problem most of the time with writing is not the words being used BUT the manner in which they're being used Instead of saying a>>b They end up with saying: in a response to subsequent events provided by the development of A, it was observed to instigate a breeding ground of B taking place

[@thatboringone7851]

Learning new terms: good and necessary. Constructing long paragraphs full of run-on sentences and obscure meaning: bad for everyone, academia included. The issue isn't so much about unfamiliar language (or even entire subjects) as it is about how easily it reads. If you write well, even people that don't entirely know what you know can still get the gist of it. Honestly, I think a good deal of these issues could be sorted out by working with a decent editor - you don't have to tell your audience what they already know to make your writing readable to both your peers _and_ people who are still learning more, you just need to be clear and concise.

[@VisualdelightPro]

So a Clique lacking in accountability. Thus zero transparency for the Public order.

[@AlexGoldhill]

This reminds me of the various pissing contests between Analytic and Continental philosophers. A typical criticism of Continental Philosophy by Analytic Philosophers is that it is verbose, obscurantist and often unintelligible as opposed to the Analytic philosophers who supposedly prioritised clarity and concise definitions and writing. Yet as a philosophy undergrad studying Analytic philosophy I often found it very difficult to follow the arguments that were being made by the supposedly concise Analytic philosophers and that their terminology was often pretty dense and unwelcoming to newcomers.

[@pharmakon7920]

yep, i quit analytic philosophy when it turned into basically word math. both have their problems but honestly analytic philosophy writing is often even more of a chore to get through.

[@billpeel4408]

I think a part of this is also that most people simply don't have the time to dedicate long stretches into reading complicated texts. When you're encouraged to work and work and not "waste time", no one wants to spend that time reading Derrida or Butler because of the added time investment of translating their style into something that's easier to understand

[@phosphenevision]

agreed, butler has parts that are quite complicated but also not the entirety of her books are hard to understand. But it can be daunting going in and running into a complicated sentence when you don't know much about the subject and the book seems like 400 pages of that. i think a good thing to do is look for material before reading the book, if you know it's gonna be quite dense, read a few summaries, read about the author, what is the gist of the book beforehand, then read it, take notes and don't expect to read it like a fiction book

[@Nai-qk4vp]

@@phosphenevision Not a "fiction book", a good book. Garbage fiction which uses a lot of words to say nothing at all also exists. See "Atlas Shrugged". Good non-fiction exists that says a lot with fewer words and clearer , concise writing. See "The Triple Helix" by Richard Lewontin.

[@phlaryx7145]

A lot of these articles I’m forced to read just seem like people trying to sound smarter than they really are. They beat around the bush and are hardly straightforward. It takes them three paragraphs to describe something that could be condensed into like 6 sentences wtf.

[@excitedbox5705]

There is a difference in using new/complicated words and sentence stuffing. Usually if 1 or 2 words in a sentence or paragraph are unknown to you the rest of the context clues can be used to understand the meaning. This is actually how you are supposed to write. It allows the use of unknown or complex words to express ideas but the rest of the sentence gives context to those words. Anything else is word spam and gate keeping for no purpose other than trying to seem smarter than the reader. Any idea that can be expressed in word, can also be expressed by a phrase. Picking and choosing when to use which is what makes a good writer. Stuffing a bunch of unknown words can actually confuse meaning and intent due to the missing contextual cues needed to convey meaning. A word itself is not a complete idea. That is why we have incomplete sentences, punctuation, paragraphs, etc. The rest of the sentence gives meaning and clarity to any one word in that sentence.

[@palmo9823]

I've noticed a trend on social media where some people will accuse others of writing that's too dense, convoluted etc (basically everything you describe here) largely when they don't like what the other person has to say - it's turned into an easy criticism. That's not to say this isn't a real issue in academia obviously - there were statements in Frames of War I asked my professor for clarification about and he couldn't tell me, we were both left to kind of guess (Frames of War is written by Judith Butler, just like that long sentence was, for anyone reading who isn't familiar. She's kind of low hanging fruit at this point!). This is a really great video (I'm commenting as I'm watching lol), very relevant to current debates I see all the time and the explanation of academic language is very illuminating. P.S Mark Fisher is fantastic!

[@Tom_Nicholas]

I think you're right about it being a bit of an easy insult to throw as it largely enables one to avoid having to engage in any kind of substantive way with whoever's work it is being criticised. I think, elsewhere (in an article I didn't quote in this video), Judith Butler also points to the regularity with which such accusations are thrown at women and writers of colour; there's almost the notion that male scholars have the right to write in a more complex manner than women or people of colour do. I do wonder whether the kind of nuance that you're talking about is often also necessary too. I often find people are surprised when they read someone like Foucault, for instance, to find his arguments to be far less definitive and more subtle than any summary can ever be (also, when creating summaries, it's really easy to present every single thinker ever as "groundbreaking" rather than to acknowledge that they might have made a smaller and perhaps less-earth-shattering contribution to knowledge).

[@Jokkkkke]

@@Tom_Nicholas I think Butler probably made a fair point there about people being less likely to criticise white men for writing overly dense, though I must say that this may be changing since every fellow student I ever talked to about this subject was criticising said white men for their complex language use (it could also be that my sample size might consist of too many broadly left wing young people but a lot of them were white people). That all being said as well, Butler never changed her writing style as far as I know and that’s a problem. Just because the criticism was levied lopsidedly it doesn’t mean that the criticism wasn’t correct (or incorrect for that matter)

[@divdesmitpieci6767]

I think there's a difference between using technical terms without explaining them and writing paragraph-long sentences with no coherence. Even academics struggle to read some of their fellow colleagues.

[@AydanM]

I really really really like your videos. They take questions I’ve asked myself and respond to them concisely and accurately, showing multiple viewpoints and allowing us to think with you instead of listening to you thinking. You’re doing a great job, keep up the great work.

[@maipineapple8049]

Thank you so much for addressing this! When facing an academic text I often feel insecure for I'm certain I won't understand it in its entirety right away (hi imposter syndrome. It's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one who struggles) although it's also something of a challenge and it's rewarding when I get to finally grasp the scholar's idea, get to make sense of what they wrote. But it's so much difficult and even more so when nobody is there to guide me through it. Quarantine was interesting in that way. For I had to do it alone or with few opportunities to discuss with my lecturers/tutors. Anyway, similarly to what you said, I find that to further our understanding of things it is necessary to upgrade our linguistic abilities, and although it's at a different scale in academic works, it is not at all different from our linguistic journey through childhood, teen years, and adulthood. Only, In a scientific paper, the vocabulary is much more specific than in common discussions. But still, we don't use the same vocabulary at 8 yo and 20 yo and in an academic paper and a random discussion with you friends and family. So although we'd love to have easy academic text to learn from, that won't help us much. But only having academic texts won't do it either. It has to be a conjoined thing so we may take the better of both parts! Thank you again for this, it motivates me to go through my academic TBR during the holidays!

[@NotmyRealname847]

The old argument from the humanities that "well the hard sciences use the same obscure language, so there!" is actually completely untrue. I've read through hundreds of medical papers and textbooks as a student and professional and never had any issues with the language. Often I'd have to look up a term or do some background reading on a certain concept to fully understand it, but the language itself is never the problem. In pure science fields like physics or maths, things can obviously get very complicated with all the terms and abstract concepts being discussed. However, again, they're not made more difficult than they need to be with run on sentences and multiple (often redundant) clauses. As much as I enjoy the channel, I really feel like this video lets the likes of Butler off too lightly and misses the point by focusing too much on individual terms like hegemony (not a particularly good example either since it's not an obscure word), rather than the overly complicated grammar and turgid prose. As for Pinker, even if he's wrong about his political views, which I personally believe him to be, that doesn't nullify his argument with regards poor academic writing. To claim that he's defending the status quo and thus only requires stale, establishment grammar and terminology, while Butler is a trailblazing rebel and thus needs this edgy yet unintelligible prose seems very specious reasoning. Anti establishment leftists make the very same criticisms as Pinker.

[@cruzerk100]

Couldn’t agree more. In fact, there’s writings on physics that manage to leave out the more complex aspects of concepts, but still manages to provide a clear understanding of the fundamental elements of those concepts. Philosophy, and other academic fields, really need to start working on accessibility.

[@zzzzoot]

@@cruzerk100 That's an silly statement because in any field of philosophy you can find accessible texts regarding any concept, just as you can find needlessly busy convoluted text regarding any hard science subject.

[@cruzerk100]

Visage Yeah, you can find accessible and convoluted texts in any field. There are philosophy books that are accessible, especially secondary texts, but I find myself coming across far more philosophy books that are unnecessarily complex. I’m talking books that you have to decode, but once you figure it out, you realize the way it was written was more complex than the actual concept. I find that silly. I’m sure there’s convoluted science books, but most that I’ve read are usually complex by the nature of the concept and not because it’s written in an deliberately opaque way. But I get what where you’re coming from

[@XxEvilTiggerxX]

I was always told to write as if I'm communicating my ideas to my second year university self. Someone who has been immersed in the broader topic for a little while, knows what's going on and has a grasp of some of the technical language but who is also not an expert in this specific field I'm chatting about. It seems to create a decent balance.

[@GAPIntoTheGame]

Seems reasonable

[@unvexis]

I come at this from the angle of so-called hard science and mathematics, where the ideas referred to in papers are complex, and no simpler "plain language" equivalent exists. I do not believe that soft sciences are essentially different. These translations of so-called soft science to "plain language" do not seem to keep the nuance of the original text. An academic paper properly rewritten for a general audience would be much longer because more words would need to be spent explaining unfamiliar concepts.

[@aaronstansk-popdreamcatche4279]

I knew a guy whose senior thesis was on sociology writings. He went through journal after journal after journal and summarized every article he could read in one sentence, which would include all their points. He succeeded, and often with very short sentences. I wanted to read it, but he said that being I was still in college I likely would hate my professors if I saw what blowhards they were. I ended up hating them anyways.

[@jjoohhhnn]

lol

[@9gagHasMySoul]

It's not just about the vocabulary used though. I've been an english lit and langue student for 5 years and a lot of the articles I have to read analysing a text are deliberately dense, to the point that I end up having to reread a sentence multiple times just to understand the meaning. That sort of writing, which is inaccessible to the people who study a discipline much less the general public, is just a sign that the author is a bad writer or that the discipline in question needs to take a look at its standards (if its a widespread thing). In other subjects, specifically french scientific subjects, the importance of short and clear sentences is emphasized precisely because the vocabulary and data are heavy enough on their own and equating that to bad writing on english lit (for example) does a disservice to the former.

[@jjknight5627]

Sorry Tom Im gonna have to call absolute rubbish on this. I actually completely agree that we shouldn't ever water down what is being said in order to make it easier to understand, IF that means sacrificing some meaning. But the "translation" of what butler said is a perfect example of how what she actually said was just plain obtuse. Which made her response just ring hollow because she's essentially defending her choice to talk in damn riddles. Like that translation is so clearly the better choice for how to get across her ideas, and if her carrier relies on impressing people by making her work in-accessable then what's even the point? Who is she helping? For example even just a glossary for all those big words, that yes sometimes are needed to communicate new ideas, would have gone a long way. It's not just as simple as saying they need these words because everyday language hasn't "caught up" yet misses the larger point that what they are saying is still structured obtusely on top of that. Besides saying " well, the current zeitgeist defines what words are considered everyday so therefor we must use these more fringe words because it's the only way to communicate these futuristic ideas" just isn't true, you might have a higher word count but it's certainly possible, we should be trying to get these word into the mainstream by helping those who seek to better thier understanding to understand. Otherwise aren't all these books just really expensive and clout chasing ways for academics to run their own blogs. Or I suppose a better way of putting it is if you want to be a part of Thier club you ether have to be a mod and have posting privileges, or pay THEM and their peers to teach you all those fancy words otherwise you can't understand the posts. Or like you can just try and learn it all on your own from the internet I guess but I just think thats wack honestly. Your right there is no shame in needing additional material to help you understand complex ideas, but there is shame in overcomplicating your ideas if you didn't have to and I am unconvinced by your argument that that isn't what butler was doing (and by extension alot of other academics) I want to make it clear however that I think Pinkerton is a hack and I hate to be seen even slightly agreeing with him, and I do actually I think butler is simply abit to fond of the smell of her own farts but actually seems to make good arguments. Again tho, what's the point of only a handful of other, similarly gassy, scholars to whiff then what's the damn point of it all?

[@montagnarde1794]

As an historian, I try to make my work understandable and you're right, that does differ somewhat by audience: if I tell you I wrote my doctoral thesis on a Montagnard representative on mission I will likely need to explain those terms, but if I'm publishing a journal article I'm not going to want to waste the precious few characters I've been given explaining these terms to people who already understand them. However, even there, the identity of my "peers" isn't a constant: the terms I just cited are known to French Revolution specialists, but not to all historians, so depending on how general the journal is, I may still need to explain them. As for more general terms like "hegemony," I'm afraid many academics may simply be guilty of having forgotten what reads as "technical" to a general audience: hegemony isn't a term I have to think hard about to interpret, so I might use it without thinking about how it might make my work less accessible. That said, most colloquia I attend are not well-attended by the public, but I did speak at one a couple of years ago that was and I'm pretty proud of the fact that a lot of non-specialists came up to me afterwards and told me they appreciated how clear my presentation was. I'm no doubt not a "captivating" writer, but I like to think I can at least be a clear one. On the one hand, history may be easier to make accessible than other disciplines (even without sensationalizing or replacing analysis with pure narrative, which academic historians generally try to avoid, myself included), but on the other I could definitely cite some colleagues who seem to write obscurely simply to look smarter than they are, or even potentially to avoid criticism (no one wants to look like they can't understand your work, so they will simply pretend they do while being unable to actually engage meaningfully with your arguments). So, tl;dr: this is a topic that's more complex than it first appears, but I don't think it would do any harm if academics - or anyone who publishes their writing - always tried to keep in mind whether the choice to use complex jargon and syntax is necessary and appropriate or whether they could be simplified or clarified without losing anything. Final note: This especially applies to syntax. As you can see, I have a tendency, like many academics, to use overly complex syntax, especially in a first draft (and I'm not doing multiple drafts on a youtube comment). But I find that my writing is invariably stronger when I break most of my long sentences up. It may just be that some academics don't want to take the time to this kind of editing and then come to believe complex syntax is always necessary to getting their point across (and maybe even that anyone who says otherwise is anti-intellectual)...

[@williamchamberlain2263]

There are at least a few well-known well-written papers in almost every field, so I think that boringness creeps in slowly from insecurity leading to conformity and formalism in parts of papers where it's not needed.

[@zombieruler0123]

Judith Butler's point at 15:01 echoes George Orwell's concept of newspeak in '1984', a language designed to be so limited as to make critical thought impossible. I think it is interesting that the style that authors are constrained to when making radical arguments in academia somewhat serves to gatekeep knowledge and understanding of these arguments by the general public who might stand more chance of making collective societal change if these were more accessible.

[@hailyxia2477]

Historical articles are riddled with unnecessarily complicated verbiage. I agree that you need a wider vocabulary to communicate new ideas, however I have encountered numerous authors who are simply pissing into the wind to impress their peers. There is no thought given to anyone else who will encounter these articles. And yet professors will still assign these works to new grad level students and sneer when they don't understand the complex ideas. I have been fortunate to have some great professors who are willing to explain these ideas, but the "better than you" mentality is still very, very real.

[@HxH2011DRA]

Sad facts

[@emrazum]

I really agree with you. my main complaint about academic writing relies on the fact that liberal arts scholars often don't do a meta analysis of the potential implications behind the terminology they invent. For example, some sociologists just re-name concepts for no particular reason where the same meaning could be achieved by simply modifying an old sociological term or borrowing a concept from another field altogether. I like and understand the need for complexity, I just don't want redundancy, where sociologists, art historians, gender theorists, and philosophers are all talking about the same thing with unique specialized terms that really should just be combined into one metaphysical concept.

[@THEWeonesss]

Their audiences are themselves and their circle, but if they want to critique and change the world, their audience should be expanded. Butler writes about vulnerable subjects who would never understand her words and, to me, thats is very unfair, the academics use the subjects like objects. (sorry if my english is bad, i am chilean and ussualy dont write in other laguage)

[@Nai-qk4vp]

You sure as shit were better in making a point and making me think than whatever that dreck by Butler was. "Using subjects as objects". Love it.

[@W4stel4nd]

One point I think is also worth bearing in mind is that academic writing - especially in philosophy and related fields - highly values conceptual precision. This is similar to Tom's point about using the term "hegemony" to communicate a very particular idea. Good academic writing aims to communicate exactly what it intends and nothing else, which means that the selection of particular terminology and syntax is (ideally) very careful and intentional. For example, the award-winning Butler quote feels clunky and repetitive in places most likely because she is trying to explicitly define the scope and particularity of her claim. One uncharitable explanation for this is that an optimal route to increase publications and pursue a career in academia is writing papers responding to others' works in ways often amounting to conceptual nitpicking. More charitably, since these disciplines are (ideally) founded on critical thinking, this pursuit of precision not only allows more productive dialogue, but also prevents us from smuggling in unintended implications and assumptions. This is also illustrated by looking at internal criticism around intelligibility in academia. "Analytic" philosophers have often criticised "continental" philosophy for being intentionally obscuritanist, using jargon and almost poetic styles. Yet analytic philosophy is generally no more accessible than continental (even plenty of ordinary language philosophy is written in convoluted and puzzling ways). Rather, it aims at conceptual precision in a different way, such as greater recourse to formal logic, which can similarly be a barrier to access. Obviously some academic writing is *also* just bad writing. But the vast majority of difficult academic writing is that way for a good reason.

[@W4stel4nd]

I'm also reminded of Kant's comment in the Critique of Pure Reason that: "it can be said of many a book, that it would have been much shorter if it were not so short" and that "many a book would have been much clearer if it had not made such an effort to be clear". Some academic work requires accepting that making it "clearer" would make it less accurate, requiring more time devoted to properly understanding it and thus actually making it less clear. Similarly, trying to make works concise and easy to parse might actually lead to them taking more time to understand properly, where if the work had just taken the required space to communicate properly, they would have been "shorter" to understand.

[@joeoliver4266]

Original sentence: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian Theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. " Edited sentence: "The move from an understanding of social relations as structured by capital to one of power relations as subject to repetition brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift to a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the rearticulation of power." Same thing, less words. Cut in half. Embarrassing how easy that was.

[@papasitoman]

*fewer

[@LowestofheDead]

Even just adding some punctuation and breaking it up into sentences helps: "There was a move from a Structuralist account (in which Capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways) to a view of Hegemony (in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation). This move: 1. Brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, 2. Marked a shift from a form of Althusserian Theory (that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects) to a renewed conception that was inaugurated by insights into the contingent possibility of structure. The renewed conception of Hegemony was one bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

[@Zalmoksis44]

In Butler's sentence, I see a lot bigger problems than this "hegemony" -- a word that is quite common and easy to understand. I studied engineering, I've got a relatively solid base in natural sciences (although I hate chemistry - - too much to memorize), I'm interested in linguistics and I occasionally read quite specialist books or articles on the subject. And still whenever I try to read a book on one of those "soft" fields, say cultural anthropology, I'm hardly able to say afterwards what it was about and what it tried to communicate. Oh, and by the way, Tom, your own communication style is not particulartly straightforward either.

[@georgkretzschmar]

Coming from Biology I usually tell my students that academic writing should strive to make the already complicated matter as easy to understand as possible. While specialized terminology is necessary to talk about the subject at all and often helps to bring the point across concisely, the structure of a sentence, a paragraph and also the whole article should be as straight forward as possible. Short sentences should be prefered, which is difficult for Germans sometimes. ;-) And for every phrase one should think about whether it actually adds something. Otherwise it might be better to leave it out.

[@jjoohhhnn]

I'm 100% with you. I also think it's a good idea to have a glossary at the end, it should be a copy-paste thing, because the definition of the word hasn't changed.

[@Doc-Mi]

My PhD thesis was celebrated as "very comprehensive and engaging writing". It was not on purpose though. I wrote it in my third language and I couldn't write it the usual way :D It turned out juuuust fine!!! It was even selected to be published as book by very established editorial (which didn't happen only due to lack of funding).

[@lostartofcaring]

This is so true. However, when I was in college, I studied politics, philosophy, and literature, we were taught not to write this way. I shit you not, we would have excercises reading this kind of academic, semantic vomit and would have to gleam any meaning we could out of it. It was taught to us to never write this way.

[@darenallisonyoung8568]

I'm reminded of my grad school days. After presenting at a national conference, I bemoaned to a trusted colleague in my field of study that I never got any of the after-panel questions from the audience. She said my paper had been so dense and complex she couldn't follow it, and suspected that was the case for the rest of the audience. On the one hand, I felt defensive because "of course!" a twenty-five page paper condensed down into a 15-minute talk was going to be dense and complex. However, I was also deeply embarrassed because my field of study was the teaching of rhetoric in academic writing, and I had failed utterly to communicate meaningfully.

[@bradmc4395]

Looking forward to this. Got the notification just as I stepped away from the computer after a gruelling morning of thesis writing

[@Tom_Nicholas]

Haha, I hope it was productive even if a bit gruelling!

[@MIOLAZARUS]

Such a good video. I think academic texts are so difficult to exclude as many people as possible to make it exclusive.

[@kartaiss]

I think there's another problem with "hegemony" here: Butler is using a word that was made popular by Gramsci, who was a revolutionary, a Communist Party leader, and a political prisoner. Someone who devoted his life to inspiring the people to rise up and fight for a better world. His writings ain't easy reads, either, but they have a distinct popular purpose. Now this word is in a sentence that none of the "people" could ever understand, and so it's lost its power to move things in the world and become a husk of itself. Just like many other words in that sentence. The problem with a lot of academic writing nowadays is not even that it's boring, it's that it uses revolutionary lingo to write for a handful of peers and attain tenures. There's a good video by The Onion on this, on how a car factory worker who voted for Trump finally understands his mistake after reading through 500 pages of Butler.

[@monkeymox2544]

Some of my favourite texts are ones with which I have profound disagreements - Nozick's 'Anarchy, State and Utopia' is a prime example. I partly enjoy reading it because you can tell that Nozick enjoyed writing it. The style is clear and direct, and it contains moments of real humour, and other moments of sincere passion. He's also quite an honest writer, and often signposts gaps in his own argument. I'd actually hold it up as an example of how to write well. Because its so well written, its also incredibly easy to debunk! You don't have to spend hours deciphering what Nozick might mean, picking apart opaque sentences, because he writes precisely what he means in plain (but still technical and thoughtful) English. Its definitely one of the major benefits of the analytic tradition that this is generally the style of writing employed. I remember having an interesting discussion with my lecturer, who'd written his PhD on the subject of philosophy as literature. My basic complaint was that Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) spends pages saying what could be said just as well in a single sentence, and dresses it up in the most obscure terminology and pointlessly convoluted language, and seems to want his reader to have as hard a time as possible in getting to grips with what he's trying to say. My lecturer replied that this was, in fact, the point: by forcing the reader to grapple with the text, the reader comes to a deeper understanding of it, whereas if the language is too straightforward, the reader might not actually take in what has been said. Now personally, I think that Sartre writes that book the way he does in order to hide the fact that its mainly bollocks (okay that's a kind of joke, but some of this other work is written in a much more straightforward style, so it makes me wonder...), but its definitely an interesting thought.

[@dachhu]

Tom:"...mesophere, stratosphere and troposhere while most of us would describe it as..." Basic me nodding:"sky" Tom:"...Atmosphere" Basic me:"bollocks" New sub, love your stuff.

[@JoniWan77]

I believe one thing, that should be looked at in this regard, is the relation between math and language and their respective importance in academics. Math could be called complex in simplicity. Every mathematical value and operation is clearly defined and simple to understand. But when you work with it, those clearly defined and simple to understand values and operators form extremely complex and hard to comprehend structures, which ultimately lead to precise results. Language on the other hand could be called simple in complexity. Words and grammatical operations themselves are simple to use and utter, but hold extremely complex, ambiguous and vague meanings. In contrast to math language forms rather simple structures from complex words. It is therefore ill-suited for precise results. Henceforth academics, who have to rely on language to come to and explain results, need to improve the precision of language. They usually do this by creating words with very clearly defined and therefore "simple" meanings. By doing that, however, language loses part of its simplicity in complexity and the structure tends to become more complex instead. Translating academic writing into easier to understand writing can therefore be seen as the following: It's loosely similar to for example replacing any of the infinite values between 3.5 and 4.5 with just 4 in any given mathematical formula. While this makes things simpler, it may also alter the result of your formula in such a way, that the result is not precise enough anymore to be used. So why do we accept the importance of precision in a mathematical/scientific context, but do not accept the importance of precision in the humanities? This also partly explains, why science is less guilty of this issue. Science does not need language to be precise, although it isn't. Math does this job, since it was created for it. Of course a lot can be done to counteract this general trend. In some situations precision is not important, when explaining results. And most of the time there are strategies to keep complexity as low as possible as you can rewrite mathematical formulas to look less complex. You can also ease people into your "alteration of language" by doing it one step after another and slowly ramping up the complexity similar to how great video game tutorials work. Maybe the humanities should look at their papers more often like we look at mathematical formulas: Where can we restructure and simplify?

[@jacobmeredith-andrews2694]

My friend and I were discussing this topic a few days ago. I wonder whether you might help us answer a question we could not resolve: When did the contemporary style of academic writing emerge? With Marx or Freud? With the development of modern sociology and cultural studies programs? When new departments (African American Studies, Asian Studies, Native American Studies, etc) required new language to articulate their ideas? Also, I really love your channel!

[@brianb.6356]

Neither Marx nor Freud wrote in a terribly dense style, or at least not most of the time. I think it's a process of cruft accumulating over time. An example: in pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics, there's a term "implicate". This word means the same thing an ordinary person would mean by the word "imply"; i.e. if I say "some men smoke" I am implicating/implying that not all men smoke (but this doesn't necessarily follow; "some men smoke" is also true if all men smoke). The reason the academics couldn't just use the word "imply" is that linguists were already using the word "imply" to mean "entail": i.e. "all men smoke" implies/entails "some men smoke". And linguists use the word "imply" this way because logicians were already using it this way, because to a logician there is no subtler form of implication that one might want to keep a word for. Or in short: there's this system of words, which could easily be substituted for a different system of words that is easier for the general public to understand, except it won't be because everyone currently in the field knows the current system and would be confused by switching over to plainer language.

[@nataschavisser573]

Very late to the party, but here goes: I had the displeasure of attending an interdisciplinary conference on oceanography. Each presenter's presentation was pretty much unintelligible to those not in their discipline. The ecologists and zoologists did not understand the physics and climate people and neither group saw any value in the contributions of the sociologists who were discussing how real people were responding to climate change, fish poaching and the like. Jargon and really complex 3-D diagrammes and obscure statistical models abounded.

[@philipgeyer926]

Speaking as a linguist, the theory which Butler espouses, namely that language defines thought, has been discredited for the most part.

[@mossydog6968]

There's an easy solution: write your publication for your peers, but you may also choose to hand it to a "translator" to unknot the work for students or the general public.

[@Sorenzo]

"Enunciatory modality, indeed!" LOL... My hot take: Academic language is necessary but significantly overused. You just can't explain everything succinctly in plain language without taking too much time, so some concepts need names that most people won't know off-hand. That being said, a lot of academics seem to take pride in being indecipherable and this is definitely a bad thing if they aren't otherwise very good writers. If they do write more accessible works or their hard-to-decipher texts are really engaging and structured so people benefit from the density, I'd consider them good writers. I studied education back in the day, and some sociologists would spend a chapter full of jargon to describe concepts like "kids have to build one piece of knowledge on top of another."

[@ChRoPi21]

It doesn't have to be boring. I like finding interesting things in texts that others hadn't spotted.

[@MZCD]

thanks, very useful and encouraging, brings out guidance, courage and motivation to read, I'm sure i'll get better at reading them

[@WeebJail]

"I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one" -mark twain this is just academics being lazy, nothing more. its cool to use some complex terms but for 99% of it there's absolutely no excuse.

[@nancywysemen7196]

yes,i'm planning on a great week....so invigorating,your videos. my favorite grandchild. the toys you play with. those abc blocks....

[@brandonrobinson5943]

This seems like an easily fixed problem: create two editions. One academic edition and one layman edition.

[@paxtonacer]

I have no idea how this channel is not more popular. Good luck to you in the future and I'm excited to see what else you create in the future.

[@Tom_Nicholas]

Thank you, appreciate you saying so!

[@thorharter8658]

I'm on the fence. I understand the need to create new vocabulary for changing conditions but, specifically in the case of Marxist theory and critiquing capital, to who's benefit is the new thought if it's not accessible to the broader working class? Actually I would further that any work that seeks to explain the oppressive natures of power structures is doing a disservice to the underclass by not being accessible to them. Like finding someone's glasses and saying they have to pass a vision test to get them back.

[@Jokkkkke]

Hey Tom thanks for engaging so much with your audience in the comment section. Its so nice to see!

[@arandorapress7561]

Because it's designed to look more complex than it is. And it is badly written. Legal texts are similar. A well written judgement is easy to read and understand. Contrast with the incomprehensible drivel that emanates from many legal academics and professionals.

[@mjacton]

Unnecessarily opaque academic writing isn't always about technical or advanced vocabulary. Sometimes it's about long and winding, sometimes incoherent, sentences combined with the vocabulary.

[@drmodestoesq]

“If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.” ― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

[@p.gaumond7640]

Thank you for that video! As a young academic (working on my PhD), I'd agree that the specificity of academic language is important in order to develop comprehensive and coherent thought: each word kind of needs a single meaning in order to reduce what I'd call the "problem of interpretation", which is the distance between the ideas written about and the ideas that have been interpreted by the reader. An argument could be made that metaphors (created in an attempt to "dumb it down" as one could say) increase that distance. There is that vague idea of betrayal in any popularization attempt. The use of the passive voice gives an aura of scientificity, as if reality was writing itself; as if objects described themselves. (A lot could be said about that in another video of yours. I just watched the one about Foucault and, as someone who encountered him in French as I'm a French-speaking Canadian, I asked myself if the theory "moves" because of the translation. This comes to me as a bilingual academic who refers to theory both in French and in English. Food for thought.)

[@theswoletariat3479]

Fisher is bad example to use here. Im a student of politics and philosophy and even I found some bits dense and needlessly wordy and abstract. He borrows a lot from post modernism. Any normie reading that book would be utterly lost in several points

[@PapaSMURFFS]

I wasn't going to leave a comment, but then your outro. I know this is an older video, and probably without much ongoing consideration or discussion. One thing I did note, and love, is that when you quote Butler at 15:10, she is using "grammar" in a way which is common throughout the social sciences but not the normal way for a layperson on the street. In effect, while it doesn't confuse the meaning of what she is trying to say, it is actually an example of the argument of specialized language which is being discussed at the time. I think it also leads towards one other reason for incomprehensible writing in academic (albeit probably not as significant a factor as the ones you discussed): an assumption of background knowledge greater than actually held by the public. I notice that factor a lot in my line of work, wherein I am trying to preemptively simplify a concept because I think my audience won't understand it -- only to discover that they don't understand a far more fundamental portion of the discussion which is required for them to understand the simplified text!

[@jonathancompo828]

THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS VIDEO, LOL! I feel so seen! When I saw the thumbnail, I was worried you were going to come down on Pinker's side. If you haven't already read it, Butler's NYT op-ed 'A Bad Writer Bites Back' is worth checking out. That it might be good for some writing to resist our desire to 'master' it and that easy consumption isn't the only possible virtue a piece of writing can have is a position I rarely see defended; you're doing the good work, haha. Also, for any conservatives who are convinced that hard-to-read writing comes only from the left, I invite you all to check out Maps of Meaning by our dear Dr. Peterson.

[@jakobmatthies6553]

The main issue I have with academic writing is the bafflingly complex grammar. I get using technical/very specific words, but nesting dependent clauses multiple times in a single sentence is very rarely justified. I've done it myself in my academic career, but I was just showing off; I personally enjoy writing, so it was also kinda fun to try and wrangle some monster of a thought into one sentence. IDK how it is in other fields, but engineering students are generally encouraged to be as efficient with their writing as possible. Shorter, less grammatically complex sentences tend to convey more information per word. Leave it to a bunch of engineers to optimize their language in their eternal battle against the second law of thermodynamics.

[@andremachadolinguistica]

Your channel is a treat, Tom, but I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on this one. You can argue that the intended audience is the key for chosing how to write, but even if one's writing for their academic peers, I see absolutely no advantage to adhering to such convoluted style. Other than "coming across as academic" , long sentences teeming with subordinated clauses make the audience no favour, regardless of who this audience is. It seems to me that, if academics feel this complex writing is the proper way to do science, they're suffering from a weird sort of Stockholm syndromme. They write like this because they're stuck to stifling, superannuated traditions, not because this style of writing brings any benefits to academic discussion.

[@charamusicfan]

Great video! Wel-structured and argumented. And definitely relatable. As a gradutate student in art history, I sometimes feel like we're slightly spoiled in the academic writing of our field compared to others. A lot of it is semi-aimed at a general audience, because it is tied to museums and exhibitions. There's also loads of pictures. The part about needing new words to express new ideas, and the inability to express radical ideas within the confines of traditional grammar rules, also struck me as a way to defend the need for artistic expression. We need this to confey ideas and emotions that regular language would either be unable to or would take a lot of time to do.

[@Tom_Nicholas]

"There's also loads of pictures" - yep, that sounds like one way to win me over to any book!

[@wolffennec474]

Being able to present yourself as interesting and entertaining can be very useful when you have something important to share, and it applies to all walks of life. I work with magicians and I always find it very interesting that some can be technically brilliant, but their performances are boring and audiences can't tell that what the magician is doing is of a superior standard. Other magicians may be impressed, but the lay person is not, and these magicians often maintain that it's the fault of their audience. There are others who focus a lot more energy into the performance aspect and are always more successful. If you want to create something that only the elite of your field can understand or be bothered to look at then you limit your contribution to society and your potential gain from it. Mainstream appeal can be noble

[@senh4944]

I've recently changed my Minor to Sociology and oh hell those authors are HARD to get into. As reference, my Major has been English Studies for 2 years before that and I don't find those half as difficult

[@danguillou713]

I think your interpretation is so charitable that it becomes almost completely wrong. First, writing is hard. Communicating your thoughts in clear and enjoyable text is a skill. It takes time and effort to get even halfway good at it. My experience of academic writing is that much of it sucks ass for the same reason that so much teaching in academia does: the scientists doing it have neither training nor inclination. People who become scientists are generally in it for the research. But in order to get to do research they are forced to teach basics to grad students. Same goes for a lot of academic texts; scientists who are focused on the pleasure of finding things out are forced, in order to get their next research grant or assignment, to document what they have already found. For many it’s a tedious and uninteresting chore similar to how programmers are forced to write documentation describing what their programming does. And despite extorting all their scientists into teaching and writing, most institutions offer little or no training in it. Third observation. A lot of students write in a pompous convoluted way because they are insecure. They are afraid that put in the plainest possible language their analysis will be revealed as shallow and unoriginal. They fear that any touch of humor or humanity in their language would give the impression that they don’t take the subject matter seriously enough. Too often their teachers don’t reprimand, some may even reward this, because they do it themselves. Thus foundations are laid for lifelong bad writing habits. Four: some corners of the softer sciences are burdened by centuries of minority complex toward the hard sciences. Advanced physics, chemistry and biology study things and processes that have no everyday equivalents. Thus they are forced to develop a complicated language that is impenetratable even to their own beginning students. So in order to seem more ”scientific”, some disciplines within sociology and philosophy the have taken pains to generate a complicated apparatus of insider jargon. Five. Institutional culture matters. Some fields are just unlucky in having really important, even foundational, star contributors who happened to write like assholes. Postcolonial sociology for instance happen to have Pierre Bourdieu. Now he’s actually super important, his findings on how opressed and opressors think about themselves, or on how social capital works in the ”old wealth” classes are groundbreaking and essential. But man, he writes like a jerk. His convoluted sentence structure and walls of verbiage can make you throw a text against the nearest wall in despair. Or maybe just start laughing, because you realize that at some point he’s just trolling you. (He could actually write really well when he wanted to, and I think he’s on record saying that the reason his academic texts were so different from his private ones, was that if he had used an accessible and enjoyable language for his academic work, he wouldn’t get published.) There is no doubt that some unfortunate disciplines have an inherited tradition of shitty writing that they enforce upon themselves, because ”that is just how you write in our field”. Six. Some fields of academia are so bogged down in their habits of shitty writing that they can’t defend themselves against charlatans. Writing really badly is a skill too. Some people have made successful careers intentionally writing unintelligable gobbledygook, protected by the fact that in order to call them out, a critic would first have to admit that he didn’t understand one bit of it. There’s a famous hoax where pranksters submitted word salad to a prestigious postmodern journal, and got published, because the editors couldn’t admit that they couldn’t understand anything of it. (Google the Sokal affair. It is hilarious!) Actually, this prank has been successfully repeated several times. Seven. In fields that produce ideology, or at least prescriptive philosophy, it is particularly advantageous to be hard to read. People in the business of telling you how you should live and what the world ought to be like are extra keen to make their prescriptions appear as objective and scientifically fact-like as possible. And to achieve that it is important for them that their end product findings come as results of a scientific process that is really really *really* hard to access. I know that postmodernism and/or gender studies are prone to this, but in my mind the entire field of neoliberal economics are equal offenders. The strategy is the same: they give you a conclusion, paired with some very unambigous admonitions on what to do, and if you just take the prescription it looks like a political or ideological statement. But they claim, very confidently, that it is nothing but pure rational science. And in order to challenge their statement, they demand that you engage seriously with their scientific process. Which is by design incredibly filled with jargon and complications, and sometimes esoteric math. So the idea that Judith Butlers language is the way it is, simply because it needed to be that way in order to express her scientific findings, is pure bunk. After listening to your excellent vids about shitposting and neoliberalism, I don’t understand how you failed to make these connections in this video. Ah, well. I’m just getting started on this channel. Maybe you’ve adressed this elsewhere.

[@Xlomid]

Thank you! This was very insightful and clearly argued. I appreciate that the video didn't stop at repeating Pinker's argument but discussed a counterpoint to it. There is certainly a degree of deliberate obfuscation in some academic writing. It seems to be even more pronounced in certain linguistic traditions: e.g., I find it much harder to understand most Russian scholarship in the humanities than I do when I read Anglophone authors, despite Russian being my first language. However, when I see style guides or courses on academic writing that aim to distill the process down to a set of clear, simple rules (don't use passive voice; avoid lengthy sentences; etc.), that also seems to reductive and counterproductive. So I guess it's a more of a balancing act between depth and accessibility?

[@steelfloor10]

There is also the aspect that in many disciplines we are writing about subjects or topics that are extremely disturbing at which point it’s difficult to write about.

[@prophoem9492]

That bad writing award is pretty wrongheaded, any author that's written much has written two bad sentences in their career, academic or otherwise. Thanks for the video Tom!

[@tglwickske]

This was such a well done video! You took me on a trip. I started off thinking one way and then you took me somewhere totally different. Now I feel like I understand both so much better. Thank you! :)

[@Ruskefaen]

What is the name of the stock music playing in the background?