And That’s How Some Professors Write

Published by

Clarissa

December 2, 2011

“Students noted that those native speakers that were assigned were of variable quality and a degree of assigned-expectation was greatly needed.”

“Students expressed that professors’ individualized instruction when needed.”

And these are not random gaffes, either. I have in my hands a six-page document that is written in its entirety in this kind of language. And then I complain that students can’t write worth a shit. Well, what can I expect when tenured faculty members produce and disseminate this kind of writing?

I can’t tell you how often I receive professional communications that regale me with statements like “The student’s are expected to be effected by this changes.”

Work on your writing skills, people. Especially if you are in academia. Or if you really can’t improve, then at least delegate writing to those who are capable of creating a semi-literate phrase.

I’m not even an English-speaker and it hurts me to see the language mangled in this way by people for whom English is the only language they speak.

Rate this:

10 responses to “And That’s How Some Professors Write”

Helena Suess

December 2, 2011

Damn.

LikeLike

Reply
Ol.

December 2, 2011

Guau. And it was not even written by me!

LikeLike

Reply
Jennifer Frances Armstrong

December 2, 2011

Those kinds of difficulties can be the result of rewriting. You start a sentence one way and then revise it and your language is no longer mechanically correct. The best solution is to consider how to get it right the first time. Slow down. Stop multi-tasking. Trying to formulate your ideas at the same time as expressing them is very difficult and we often underestimate the effort needed.

LikeLike

Reply
Lindsay

December 2, 2011

I think Jennifer’s on to something — a lot of times, trying to rework a tricky sentence will result in something completely unintelligible if you change one clause and forget to make sure it still fits with the rest of the sentence.

(Your second example might be an instance of this, in that there might be another clause that was accidentally left off — “Students expressed that professors’ individualized instruction, when needed, (blah blah blah)” — but then it might also just be a single-word mixup of “when” for “WAS.” Individualized instruction WAS needed.)

Which leads me to some of the worst writing advice I ever got, in my science classes. There, they encouraged us to write our Methods sections in the passive voice, which you hate and which I think is a lot less clear than the active voice. We weren’t allowed just to write, “We did this, then we did that, then we did the other thing” — oh, no; this, that, and the other thing were done. By … someone.

I have no idea why my TAs and professors were so concerned that we not write ourselves into our lab reports; actual journal articles don’t shy away from using personal pronouns, especially when the alternative is some ludicrously contorted passive-voice construction.

LikeLike

Reply
1. SnarkyWriter
  
  December 3, 2011
  
  That seems to be a science thing. My hubby has to write all of his stuff in passive voice for APA guidelines. Blech.
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply
  1. bloggerclarissa
    
    December 3, 2011
    
    And I’ve been wondering why some of my students struggle so much as they try to make every sentence passive.
    
    Instead of “after I read this novel, I realized. . .”, a student wrote, “after the novel was read, a realization was achieved. . .”
    
    I found that very scary. But now I’m finally getting where this must have come from.
    
    LikeLike
    
    Reply
2. NancyP
  
  December 3, 2011
  
  Most college science teachers consider the passive voice to be required in “methods” sections. Editors of scientific journals are less dogmatic. The (plural) active voice is acceptable in grant proposals and in discussion sections of journal articles.
  
  LikeLike
  
  Reply
Steve

December 3, 2011

Sounds familiar.

For 13 years I worked as an editor of academic texts in the biggest university of the Southern Hemisphere, which is a distance education university, so the study material is written. It was very clear that most academics could not write. You might enjoy a book by Stanislav Andreski, called Social sciences as sorcery. Like his fellow countryman Joseph Conrad, he writes better English than most native speakers.

He explained the phenomenon thus:

“The attraction of jargon and obfuscating convolutions can
be fully explained by the normal striving of humans for
emoluments and prestige at the least cost to themselves, the
cost in question consisting of the mental effort and danger of
‘sticking one’s neck out’ or ‘putting one’s foot in it’. In
addition to eliminating such risks, as well as the need to
learn much, nebulous verbosity opens a road to the most
prestigious academic posts to people of small intelligence
whose limitations would stand naked if they had to state what
they have to say clearly and succinctly.”

LikeLike

Reply
Miriam

December 3, 2011

HAHAHA. I’m laughing despite the fact that much pain has been caused to me by the illiteracy of the researchers who have produced the papers that I have been asked to read in order to conduct a literature review that I recently conducted. How’s that?

But no, seriously, writing skills are depressingly deficient in much of the American population, and people with doctorates are somehow no exception to that.

Yet I feel like standards are higher now–grad school admissions are so competitive that I cannot imagine someone being accepted who writes like that

LikeLike

Reply
NancyP

December 3, 2011

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

Read it.

Assign it in your classes.

Mail it to all of the administrators.

LikeLike

Reply