An article on writing-Highly Recommended

For authors of various stripes, writing should be hard work, but that doesn't mean that is should be impossible to read says Gail Hornstein in an article on the often obtuse nature of academic writing. Complex subject matter does not mean the material should be incomprehensible to "ordinary" folk, if it is then the fault lies with the writer not the reader and encourages isolation:

When I was in graduate school at Clark University, I learned a key lesson about teaching from my adviser, Seymour Wapner. He called it the "Beethoven assumption." Si said that if you want to teach someone music, you don't just play scales to them. You play Beethoven, so they can grasp the complex essence of music; then you teach them to understand what they've heard. That has been my guiding assumption throughout 30 years of teaching, and I can tell you, it works.
Just as there's no need to sacrifice complexity in teaching core material, there's no need to do so in one's writing. As Graff rightly cautions: "Blanket suspicion of anything that might be called reductive—which often translates into a fear of making an assertion lest one be criticized—is probably far more to blame than opaque jargon for obfuscatory academic writing and teaching." I'd put that more sharply: Academics write so densely because they are afraid of being held accountable for their work.

You can read the rest here.

HT:Mental Multivitamin