Academese
- Thread starter baboon2004
- Start date
four_five_one
Infinition
Classes are pretty good. But as a first year undergrad at the age of 23, other first year students have come as a bit of a shock. Everyone seems so very, well... young. I didn't think the age difference was that much, but it really is. I imagine I'll get over it. Probably need to find more graduates to hang out with.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
I'd definitely agree with this. i feel as though I am missing some basic grounding in certain areas, as though I'd missed a few lectrues (which actually didn't exist, but anyway). BUT I have been know to groan frequently when authors give a concrete example of what they have been arduously explaining in complex theoretical prose over the past few pages, my reaction being....well, if that's what you meant, why didn't you say it?
While I obviously agree that opacity and profundity can go together, i think there's such a terror (and I have anecdotal evidence of this from friends who are academics, in relation to the atmosphere in many departments) of being 'found out' as being ultimately vapid/lacking in original thought/'simplistic', that it is a defensive impulse to couch much academic writing in an 'experts-only' language to circumvent this possibility.
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vimothy
yurp
You could be right about that. I can only speak to what I know; the people I work with (social scientists) all have something to say, they're just generally not too good at saying it, and it all tends to come out in this generic academese. I think that this is a fairly common problem in the social sciences. A social scientist who can actually write is a rare thing indeed.
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Good God, I'd imagine so. When I went into college recently to use the library on a weekday, I was stunned by how young everyone seemed. Of course I knew that would be the case, but to actually experience it was like stepping through the set of a (overcast) teen movie.
I think taking a few years 'out' before university should be mandatory.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
I'd have to agree - but it seems so much simpler to write well/clearly than to write in general academese, in principle. I suppose when you've read a thousand papers written in that academic style, your own writing becomes altered.
We need more academics who can talk in the vernacular of the common man, more.....sidewalk social scientists, if you will.
3 Body No Problem
Well-known member
The opposite is true, as you will find out in a few years, when you'll begin to be at the top of your field. Writing about a specialised subject in a non-technical language (without loosing precision) is difficult and for many advanced sciences essentially impossible. The reason to use specialised vocabulary is that it makes communication with other experts in a given field more easy. You can take all the mathematical texts in the world and express them in everyday language. The price of this translation is that texts would increase in length by a factor of 5000.
Just stop whining and start learning the terms of your chosen trade.
scottdisco
rip this joint please
correct.
3 Body No Problem
Well-known member
I also think that sometimes (I went to university when I was 23), but it pushes the problem just somewhere else (i.e. what else should these immature brats do). If you study late it aggravates the problem of realising only one or two years in your course that you've picked the wrong field.
I wish I had gone to study earlier, because in the years between high-school and university I did essentially nothing of interest (because I had not idea what to do with my life). I only went to study because my parents put severe pressure on me to do so. At uni I met so many new and interesting people that I could have met years before.
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
To your first paragraph: For advanced sciences/maths, I'm sure this is true, absolutely. For social sciences, I think less so, and i think that kow-towing to 'experts' just because they use a particular way fo framing their thoughts is part of the problem in bridging the awkward gap between much of social science academia and reality. I know this wouldn't apply to maths, physics etc in the same way, however.
Again, I'm not so much referring to specialised vocabulary, as much as a specific kind of sentence structure. I can't emphasise this enough (well, I can...)!
To your second paragraph: Don't be such a patronising twat, please! Thank you. You wouldn't say that to me in person (although, sigh, you'll probably claim that you would), so don't be insulting over a message board. We're not on youtube, y'know. Quite what constitutes 'whining' about a genuine problem I'm having, I don't know anyways...
3 Body No Problem
Well-known member
Sorry, then I misunderstood what you meant.
BTW, there's a second dimension to specialist language: it allows the expert to see quickly if an interlocutor has put in the work to master the field. This is a proxy indicator for the likely quality of a discussion. It's like the mandatory "Related Work" section in a scientific paper. If you don't do it right, experts may simply decide it's not worth their time to engage with a paper/discussion.
Hehe, I say this all the time to my students (when necessary), because it shuts them up every time. It's a really effective rhetorical device. Highly recommended.
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padraig (u.s.)
a monkey that will go ape
1st yr undergrad at 25, tell me about it. but it's actually not all that uncommon these days - here at least, can't speak to the UK - and esp. b/c I'm doing my first 2 yrs worth of credits at a community college to save $ (b/c of the crazy system we have here, I pay ~$2,000 a semester right now, as opposed to ~6-7K/semester at a 4 yr state school or 14K/semester & up at a private school. yes, it's a very crazy system). there are loads of older students, both those going for the first time & those going back to get more training or retrain for a new career. most of the time, there are at least half a dozen people in the class my age or older.
I find that it really depends on the class tho - like English 101-102 are full of kids right out of high school. plus no one wants to be there, they're just fulfilling prerequisites, so those classes are pretty dreary (tho I still enjoy writing papers). OTOH, all my science course have had a much bigger age range and people studying things that they're interested in or which are at least relevant to their majors so they're compelled to put the effort in. not a lot of academese, either, tho I'm not doing any social sciences beyond the prereqs (which I'd gladly skip if possible).
I dunno, I can't say I'm glad I didn't go to school earlier, but I certainly don't regret anything either.
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slightly crooked
Active member
I did similar to the OP this time last year, returning to academia after 7 years away & also felt a bit of a sense of culture shock in getting to grips with the particular style of writing and argumentation. While, as others have suggested, I don't think there's any way around getting to grips with the particular terminology in the long term, a few things that worked for me were:
-Find somewhere to get a foothold. Find a topic/idea/theory that really appeals or interests you and spend some time really getting to grips with that set of literature. Then when you have to approach new material you can try to assess how it relates/differs to the material you are more familiar with, which can (sometimes) help to provide a way into the new stuff.
-Even within academic writing there can be massive differences in argumentative style between authors. Some people just seem to be closer to your wavelength than others in the way they think and present a case. When you find someone who constructs an argument in a way that resonates with you, I find the terminological difficulties don't feel so problematic.
-Review articles can be really useful when trying to get your head around a body of literature. You don't necessarily have to take the author's opinion of the material on board, but a good review article can help you get your bearings as to different approaches and the particular points of controversy between them.
-Try to figure out which texts are absolutely crucial. Sometimes you don't have to puzzle over a paragraph for half an hour trying to figure out what they meant, but in some key cases you just have to bite the bullet and keep reading the thing until it does make sense.
Oh, and it does get better once you get into it...
-Find somewhere to get a foothold. Find a topic/idea/theory that really appeals or interests you and spend some time really getting to grips with that set of literature. Then when you have to approach new material you can try to assess how it relates/differs to the material you are more familiar with, which can (sometimes) help to provide a way into the new stuff.
-Even within academic writing there can be massive differences in argumentative style between authors. Some people just seem to be closer to your wavelength than others in the way they think and present a case. When you find someone who constructs an argument in a way that resonates with you, I find the terminological difficulties don't feel so problematic.
-Review articles can be really useful when trying to get your head around a body of literature. You don't necessarily have to take the author's opinion of the material on board, but a good review article can help you get your bearings as to different approaches and the particular points of controversy between them.
-Try to figure out which texts are absolutely crucial. Sometimes you don't have to puzzle over a paragraph for half an hour trying to figure out what they meant, but in some key cases you just have to bite the bullet and keep reading the thing until it does make sense.
Oh, and it does get better once you get into it...
This was what really got me (I did philosophy). So often I just found myself thinking 'get to the point'. Sometime this is just because they want to be rigorous, discounting every possible alternative before moving on, but others it is because they are just following tenuously related lines of thought that could easily be cut from the paper/book with no real loss. Then there is Plato whose dialogue format means you have to read through what seems like pages and pages of "of course, it couldn't be any other way Socrates".
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mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Unclear expression benefits poor arguments yet does good ones a disservice - and the writer knows this.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Reminds me of: http://xkcd.com/169/ (I'm sure there's an XKCD for every occasion)
On the subject of necessary vs. unnecessary jargon, I think it's worth pointing out that in the humanities/social sciences, the concepts under discussion are often concepts that are used in everyday conversation - they may be discussed in terms much more complex or subtle than the way most people think about them, but it's fundamentally different from talking about quarks or telomeres or uncountable sets or whatever.
I mean, suppose you're a social studies professor and you're doing some research on factors that affect the percentage of state school pupils from different neighbourhoods that go to Russell Group universities. Now obviously anyone with a reasonable grasp of English knows what a state school is, what a neighbourhood is and what a university is. If they didn't know what the Russell Group is, they could type it into google and find out in about two seconds. Of course the prof is bound to use more abstract concepts in his paper, such as aspiration, privilege, prejudice, self-image and so on, but again, these are non-specialised words that most people understand. So I would assume there's a kind of spectrum of possible styles he could use in writing this paper, ranging from erring so far on the side of caution (towards transparency and understandability, I mean) that he effectively dumbs down a lot of the more subtle and probably more important points, to a hyper-abstruse style where each idea is expressed as abstractly as possible with a deliberately obscure vocabulary and gratuitously tortuous sentences.
I'll admit I'm speculating like mad here, but does this chime with anyone's experience of this kind of discourse? I just mean that when you're discussing ideas most people could get some kind of basic handle on, even if they'd have to study for years to understand all the complex interrelations between them, there must be some kind of choice as to whether you use more-or-less everyday language or go for super-abstruse jargon. Whereas in the natural sciences, medicine and mathematics, you have no choice but to use jargon because you're talking about concepts that don't occur at all in lay usage.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
Dude, no way. That would be the European Graduate School.
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
I just got second highest in my class of 140 on a bio exam
(Neither of us in top two got perfect scores, either.) I'm pretty psyched because this class is difficult. Much more difficult than anything I ever took in a philosophy department. Or any other humanities department, for that matter.
If you (by this I mean the royal "you") don't like learning new terms, keep to to the humanities, because there are far fewer of them than in science, and the ones that exist are far more intuitive and easier to guess at.
My brother was a history major and from what I gather the challenge there is the sheer volume of information available, so everything is about research, research, research, and then making persuasive arguments based on either challenging or supporting prevailing views on x, y, or z history topic.