“Nobody Will Ever Read Your Research”

~ Clarissa

I have finally figured out why some people keep saying that “nobody will ever read your scholarship, it is doomed to remain ignored and unread.”

These people don’t read any scholarship in their own field. They just glance perfunctorily at an article here and there to cull a few quotes. To them, it is impossible to imagine that there are people who follow the work of their favorite scholars and read everything they publish and much of what they quote.

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Published by Clarissa

4 thoughts on ““Nobody Will Ever Read Your Research””

  2. I think a lot rests here on how you define “nobody.” If we’re talking about a book whose print run is likely to be equal to the number of academic libraries in the U.S. and that is likely to be read with care by 1 – 25 people and in the stupid “glance perfunctorily and pull a few quotes” way by maybe 75 more…well, that’s not nobody.

    But I realized at some point that it really wasn’t enough for me.

    It also seems to me that an awful lot of books get written, not out of a deep commitment to the subject (like you have) or out of an assessment of the particular kind of contribution one wants to do in the world (like what led me not to finish my book) but out of certain professional imperatives that require the writing of book-length chunks of stuff-that-can-be-called-research. I’d be happy to see fewer books get written if it meant that the ones that appeared really mattered, and if people could make the decision to spend less time generating less researchy-looking-stuff and more time reading, thinking about, and teaching from the books that get published.

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    1. “I’d be happy to see fewer books get written if it meant that the ones that appeared really mattered, and if people could make the decision to spend less time generating less researchy-looking-stuff and more time reading, thinking about, and teaching from the books that get published.”

      – Yes, I agree completely. Sadly, I often see scholarship that is very superficial. One article on a novel I was analyzing kept mentioning a character whose name was Sagrario. I scored the novel in search for Sagrario but she simply wasn’t there. Then I realized that the scholar in question didn’t even take the trouble to ensure he was getting the characters’ names right. This is simply embarrassing.

      The really sad part is that I was initially taught to do research in this perfunctory way, culling out a few quotes but never reading the sources in full. It took a while to unlearn that strategy. 😦

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