What does this mean?

You have to ask a feminist. They would know better. Just print it out, and ask. Simple as that. None of us are feminist. You may have some meninist on board, but I don’t know for sure.

To show how old I’m getting, and how my mind wanders these days, I searched for one of those bad writing prize winners:

https://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/corner/writing.html

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

It also helps or hurts that I just finished reading a short collection of essays by Dwight Macdonald. A seriously persnickety leftist, the essays are mostly from the 1950s and 60s.

Some of his critique struck me as overdone, with far too many examples of bad writing and bad thinking, especially when it came to changes in dictionaries back then, or “Great Books” projects, or revisions to the King James Bible. I got the idea early on and just didn’t need all of those examples, etc. Most of the essays were really good, though.

There’s a perfect parody of Hemingway, for example, and his theory of Masscult and Midcult is fascinating. It’s sometimes good for us to know that we aren’t the first people to “get” certain aspects of our culture, or to be turned off by them. A lot of that predates us.

nittany ram wrote:

Agreed. Way too much jargon. It looks like the author got a shiny new vocabulary and wants to show it off.

I’m surprised the site would allow it to be published it that form. Even the reviewers of scholarly journals often force rewrites of submissions with too much jargon.

It’s standard issue graduate school discourse in the field.

And journals in the field don’t care. SJ’s are for people in the discipline, not general readership.

People not in the field find it unreadable. But then that’s true of every field, including for example sociology or anthropology or psychology.

It’s not jargon, it’s field-bound concepts. Those always lose something in translation. I translated it in a prior post…I know I left things out. Not all concepts like that have easy synonymns.

It’s a double-edged sword. Should field-bound scholarship encourage prose that fits a general readership? Well…why? They’re in-field studies with that audience in mind. That serves its own, different purpose.

But post it outside it’s intended field and these very questions get raised. People in the field know that … and aren’t about to change.

….

nittany ram wrote:

Well, I can only speak to my own experience. I wrote a paper for a technical journal that was accepted with revision. Reviewer 2 wanted me to replace some of the technical jargon he/she thought was unnecessary even though the paper would likely not be seen by anyone other than my peers, and in grad school we were cautioned against using excessive technical jargon in a writing class for biomedical research papers. And they weren’t just talking about grant proposals or IRB applications where lay people are part of the process.

Okay fair enough.

And I didn’t give my own view.

I personally can’t stand that kind of writing. But it’s not the jargon per se, because really some of it does not translate, it;s the sentence structure too, which sounds like a committee of machines wrote it.

Like this:

ORIGINAL: This entails problematizing the assumption that the subject is always erased from the analysis, thus producing a myth about universal and objective knowledge.

POSSIBLE REVISION: This entails acknowledging and not erasing one’s own social position as a subject instead of simply acting as if analysis belongs to a mythic place of contextless, universal objective knowledge.

Hidden in the lack of voice is hyperbole. No piece of writing can PRODUCE the myth being referred to, it can only repeat it.

Also, once I revise it, it becomes clear that the original is actually committing the very sin it warns against.

Reminds me of a game I know about: Grad student first drafts of great movie quotes.

FINAL DRAFT: Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

FIRST DRAFT: I must straightfowardly inform you in a point-blank manner that I have come to be indifferent to your entreaties and concerns.

…

Billy_T wrote:

To me, good writers think in terms of how their writing works as speech, as spoken English — if English is the language in question, of course. They think in terms of breaths, rhythm, structure, flow, and how others hear that. They think about the best way to make this comprehensible for the listener.

Both/and. Written and spoken. But reading it aloud is a great way to make it work for both. With exceptions, a sentence, a paragraph, a page that sounds good, looks good on the page too.

One of the patterns I see in this kind of bad, academic writing is the lack of any concern for that. There is almost no concern for breaths, rhythm, flow. Most sentences are way too long, virtually breathless, and contain too much proposed information for the sentence structure to handle/support. They need to be broken up. Antitrust lawsuits should apply.

Also — and I admit this is a personal bias — the “verbing” of words is overdone and distracts from the points made. For me, it actually obscures those points. This is different from using field-specific jargon like scientific and mathematical terms, where no other word suffices. I think it’s a conscious effort to throw things out of whack with no real gain in overall understanding for the reader.

They need to cut that out!!

;>)

Research can’t always work that way though. It has its own conventions and norms, and in that world writing that echoes speech rhythms can often come across as deliberately being less serious. All fields of research have their own conventions when it comes to this and I have no quarrel with that.

One can approach the most complex topics with both a sense of being readable and attention to field-specific ideas about rigor.

Here’s an example from a review of this book: Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, by Stacy Alaimo. https://www.amazon.com/Bodily-Natures-Science-Environment-Material/dp/0253222400/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531925338&sr=1-3&keywords=stacy+alaimo

The review:

Barad proposes that there is not a subject, endowed with agency, set apart from the environment; rather, her insistence that matter itself is active, not passive, denotes an “agential” material world where “things, as such, do not precede their intra-actions” (21). Beck suggests that we all live in a “risk society” where the absolute probability of harm to us cannot be easily calculated. It seems to me that Alaimo reads Barad and Beck in quite opposite (but equally thoughtful) ways. Barad’s complicated ideas about materiality, it turns out, have rather simple, but significant consequences, for, due to what Alaimo calls trans-corporeality, human bodies and non-human natures are open to one another – thus what we do to the environment (such as pollute the soil, water, and air), we do to ourselves. Conversely, her innovative reading of Beck’s risk society, an idea somewhat easier to grasp, develops into a complex critique of scientific/cultural knowledge production. As part of her critique, she instigates an important conversation about what the idea of environmental justice really is – and what it can be. If we are not sure to what degree what we do to the environment harms us, how can we develop a tenable ethical stance, much less a plan for political, social, and/or legal action against environmentally irresponsible corporations? How do we address the paradox that while all are at risk, some are at more risk (for example, due to environmental racism, that is, the failure to address the disparate exposure of minority communities to toxins) than others?