Lee Wrote:
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> A number of years ago I was asked to edit some
> papers written by PhD candidates in psychology.
> One of these wrote of an an experiment that "the
> pigeon had previously received placement in the
> box." This was supposed to mean that the pigeon
> was put in the box before the experiment began.
> Take about unecessary jargon. Writing like this
> obfuscates rather than illuminates, and I
> sometimes thank that's deliberate: take something
> quite simple and pump it up with useless phrases
> that make it sound more difficult, hence more
> "scientific." Some of what passes for English
> these days is truly ludicrous, and these people
> are going to "teach" others? Egad.
>
> Lee
>
>
Having waded through a myriad of academic papers over the years, I have concluded that the opacity of writing is directly correlated to the emptiness of the content. It is a way to hide the fact that "the emperor is naked" in terms of real intellectual content. French postmodernists are the worst offenders, but papers in education, anthropology, and sociology are contenders. As useful exercises, I often asked my student to render the verbiage into simple declarative sentences to realize how trite the matrial really was. As far as I am concerned, if you really know something, you should be able to able to state it simply and clearly.
Bernard
>
> Edited 1 times. Last edit at 08/23/05 08:40AM by
> Lee.