Blog Post #8 - Complicated writing

This week, I decided to write about Professor Fleming's article about "Coming Down From the Clouds". For those interested, the article can be found here:
http://chronicle.com/article/Coming-Down-From-the-Clouds-/235581/ 

I could not agree more with this article. As someone with a unique writing style (I often opt with descriptive writing), I usually get two reactions from professors: "What is this? You can't write like this in a paper!" or "I love your writing style."

I do not know if my writing style stems from my "creative" phase (I wrote A LOT of poetry and stories) during my high school, but I know it carried over to my academic writing when I arrived in university.

That said, every time I read an academic paper or article, I get bored after the first two pages. The language is overly complicated and always theoretical. Trust me, I have no problem with abstract thinking, but using terms like an "edgeless cube" to say "sphere" is unnecessary. Frankly, the subject matter could be astronomy or technology, but if it requires a PhD. in Linguistics and astrophysics to understand, I will get bored.

This semester, I have a class with Professor Patricia Palulis. Some of the assigned articles are "different" (by academia standards). Some authors wrote papers in the form of memoirs or flat out stories. I loved them. I read them from title page to the very last period. Were they less intelligent because they weren't written in "academic style"? Absolutely not. The message was well conveyed, and their research were well presented.

So why do we have to make things overly complicated? If researchers want their knowledge to be known (and applied) by the general public, make your text simpler. By no means am I saying the general public cannot understand the language, but I think it would be easier to bring attention to your research and keep readers interested.