Academi-itis

In middle school and high school, I read constantly. I always read significantly higher than my grade level and I intentionally chose books that would challenge me. But when the SATs rolled around, I found that my grades for the reading comprehension section were surprisingly low- even lower than math; and I still can’t do long division. My parents were fortunate enough to be able to afford SAT classes and when I took the test the second time, my grades for each section improved at least 200 points. That is, except reading comprehension, which only went up 30. It was a discouraging experience, but once I got into college, I completely forgot about it.

And then I became an English Major.

I started reading Dickens and Chaucer and Plath with little to no confusion and started to wonder why I had such trouble with an exam that’s supposed to test your readiness for college. And then it hit me: It was just shit writing. 

We all know that the SATs are bogus and don’t actually represent your ability to perform in college, but I never really understood how deep it went. In the reading comprehension section, the readings are intentionally confusing and the questions are intentionally vague in order to confuse as many poor high school juniors as possible. No author worth reading in college wrote a book thinking, “gee, I really hope no one understands what I’m trying to say.”

And the really messed up part is, it doesn’t end there. In order to survive in college, you have to write essays (particularly in my major, but also in any major to some extent); and in order to write essays, you usually have to use academic articles, meaning peer-reviewed, published essays written by experts in the field. While peer-reviewed articles are reliable and intelligent, they’re also written like the author changed every noun and adjective to the last suggested synonym in Microsoft Word and then filtered it through google translate 17 times. Sometimes it honestly feels like reading in another language, or as some call it, “academese.”

But why are the people who write these- the people who are supposedly experts in their field- so incapable of writing clearly? Well, Steven Pinker’s article, “Why Academics Stink at Writing and How to Fix It,” answers just that question. He suggests a few possible answers. Maybe the subject matter of the writing is just too complex and it would take too much time to define basic terms in each article. Or maybe it’s because the people who decide what goes into journals and university presses require that type of language if the author wants to be taken seriously.

While there may be something to these theories, I personally think academics write like this because it makes them feel superior. But that’s just me.

Pinker then goes into several tips on how to write “less badly” (or as I like to call it, less pretentiously). There are too many to mention in this post, but I’ll link the article here. This post isn’t meant to suggest ways to write clearer; that’s what Pinker’s article is for. This post is a PSA:

The next time you’re taking any standardized test, remember: they just want your money and they’re making the questions extra confusing so that you feel dumb and spend more money trying to ace the test. And the next time you’re reading something for your English or Psychology or even Chemistry paper and you find yourself reading the same sentence over and over, remember: it’s not above your comprehension, the author is probably just some snooty academic who wouldn’t know a clear sentence if Hemingway slapped him in the face with it.

-Marie Pruitt