Why is Academic Writing so Boring? 

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Imagine writing about liberating the working class in language that can only be understood after a hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education

I remember my professor telling me that they enjoyed reading my essay and that my style made it easy to comprehend and remain invested, but also, I definitely shouldn't do that in the future cause that's not how I come across as academic. Definitely sheds a light on how being boring and complicated is how you *perform* being sciency whether you are or not.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Einstein

When I did graduate studies (in one of those "soft" fields: medieval history), I HATED academic articles. Heck, I *was* their target audience, and even *I* found the overly-complex language to be both unnecessary and infuriating. The comment I got most frequently from my professors was how understandable my papers were, how easy to read, despite the fact that they were handling complex topics. I can't speak to the sciences, but definitely in the humanities a lot of the articles COULD have been written in a far more understandable way without losing any of the nuance or complex arguments. They just... weren't.

I'm getting a bachelor in philosophy this year, and imo this kind of critique is absolutely reasonable. Even if you write primarily for colleagues, you still can express yourself more clearly. Terminology is fine, but long, weirdly structured sentenses making my brain melt. Students are bored, general public is confused. Honestly, we can do better than this. ps. whached one Pinker's lecture, wasnt wery impressed

The irony of you saying "a touch more communicative" instead of "easier to understand" is amazing

I don't mind me vocabulary! The thing that drives me nuts is structural. You really can communicate complex ideas without paragraph long run on sentences, I promise!

“Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

I've been considering getting a PhD and I've been reading publications from academics in my field...and it is some of the most painfully boring bs I've dragged my eyeballs across. It's like trying to read a student's essay when the assignment had a 2000 word requirement and the student only had 300 words to say, so they paraphrased the same ideas repeatedly to push that word count up.

I'm currently finishing up writing a chapter for an academic book where I stress the importance for less-complex language and more engaging writing throughout academia. I really believe everyone should be able to access education but often feel that the omniscient scientific discourse used can create a barrier for many. Thank you for such an interesting discussion on this!!

it's important to keep in mind that higher vocabulary is meant to save time by fitting more concepts into one word, not alienate people, but it just so happens that often it is exploited for that

She made a point that using everyday language would restrict her ability to put across her point. Yet, the "translation" of her sentence managed to do exactly that. Make her point readily understandable by using everyday language. What those people have gotten mixed up, i think, is their inability to expain a complex topic in a simple way with a false idea that by confusing the shit out of everyone translates to deep thought. Notice that i said "simple way" not simple words. That was on purpose. You can use terminology all you want, because terminology can be easily defined. What made her sentences dull and borderline pretentious was the choice of going full pompous mode and forming sentences in a way that no one talks or writes, i would argue, ever. Basically the problem is not the words and specialized terms, but rather her style of writing. If Feynman managed to make quantum theory understandable to people, anyone can talk about anything in a way that doesn;t make you go "what the fuck does this even mean"

Y'all can write as complex works as you want but the moment your professor requires that you use "more complicated language" in your papers, thus forcing you to use fancy words to say a lot of nothings, then we have a problem.

In my experience (field of physical chemistry), it's a combination of: 1) Nobody is trained to write in an engaging manner, only encouraged to write objectively with no room for interpretation. Even though these are not mutually exclusive, it is still often seen that way. 2) Editors, reviewers, and probably your PI will not approve of a more 'fun and engaging' writing style if you are not a big established name in the field. I've read well written, easy-to-read articles, but only ever from big names. Yes, they have the experience of writing a lot, but most younger researcher wouldn't dare to submit anything like that.

I do wish that academic writing was more accessible, I can usually get the jist of it but I feel as though I may be missing out on certain contexts from time to time. I'm not a student or anything just a curious citizen.

Academic here! I can answer: because most of us are just bad writers. I come from a background of writing so I’m lucky but most academics don’t have experience in writing other than, well, for academia. Also we (myself included) use WAY too much passive voice, which just reads bad. Also I’m blessed because a lot of my more niche terminology is more widely known since I study the History of Anarchism and socialist theory has had a renaissance recently. So when I say Marxian, or historical materialism, or hierarchy, most leftists know what I mean.

One thing that I learned during my life in academia is that academics, in many cases, just don't know how to write. I used to work in a 'hard science', and it was maddening to read papers that were so unnecessarily obscure. Yes, many of the ideas we dealt with were very complex, but in many cases reading a paper was more about trying to read the author's mind than just thinking about the underlying story. It was taxing and I hated it. People in science are just never taught how to tell a story, and while some are amazing at it, the variability is huge and some are really, really bad.

My favorite (close enough) quote on the matter: People with profound things to say strive for simplicity. People with simple things to say strive to sound profound.

It's all about audience, and motive. They're writing for their fellow professors, in such a way as will establish their bonafides. It is in the interests of academic institutions to be as vague as possible, to avoid controversy and make themselves seem to be masters of some arcane subject. I was a college professor for some years. I think I might have skimmed a thousand articles in my field at that time. About once a year, I'd find something useful to anyone not in the profession. Maybe it's different in the "hard sciences," but in my field, Philosophy, the discipline is choking on its own smoke. Most work being done in Philosophy is so much useless "inside baseball," and the discipline is being defunded and marginalized because it has no utility to students, and to society as a whole. This is troubling, in that nothing is more "practical" than Philosophy. We all have to weigh arguments, make ethical decisions, and decide what the purpose and meaning of our lives should be. But the further Philosophy gets from these questions, or even denounces them entirely (looking at you, "Analytic Philosophers,") the less justifiable it becomes to spend public resources on Philosophy.

One of my teachers has also told me that sometimes journals will not publish something if they think it's "too accessible". That's just anecdotal though

This video seems to be conflating several different issues - the use of jargon or specialized terminology, the tradition in philosophy (beginning with Kant) of treating obscurity as a sign of profundity, incompetent stylists, the effects on writing quality of a "publish or perish" academic culture, and the limits of ordinary language in expressing difficult ideas. Seems like each of these should be teased out, defined, and discussed in relation to the others.

It does make me glad that Law already went through the plain language revolution, to be honest. It was much easier to understand. It was still communicating complex ideas (would anyone ever try to say that law is simple?), but the language was more accessible. There were still technical terms, I don’t think you can get away from that, but the language around those terms was understandable. I guess I just don’t see the need for a paragraph-long run on sentence, regardless of what technical terms are used. It also makes it seem very classist- in that “you must have studied this for 8 years to be able to understand us” kind of way. It completely bars the entrance of those who aren’t at least post grads. Who has the time and money to afford that, when all we are after is a way to understand and critique the society we live in? There has been discussion among the left, that if we want to convince others to join our cause, we need to let go of the overly technical language. We need to let go of the “well you simply must have read X, Y and Z obscure leftist academic to understand anything”. Nothing will change if this is the case (see The Left by Contrapoints). Maybe academics don’t want things to change? Maybe they’re happy to critique society, but don’t want that society they critique to disappear? But we need to make these critiques understandable to a general audience if we want to see any change. I try to understand philosophy and legal theory in order to understand what is wrong, and what can be done to fix it. I get the impression that many academics (and the more snobbish of those on the left) would far rather just talk about those issues, than actually change anything. (Wow, that rant kinda came out of nowhere!)

Interesting video, Tom! I have a graduate background in both the 'STEM' area (psych / neuro) and also in the 'soft' sciences and humanities (cultural anthropology, philosophy). As far as I can tell, there are two very different ways of accusing a text of being "difficult". If we accuse some piece of computational neuroscience research of being 'difficult', we typically mean that, despite its meaning being very precise, we just can't access that meaning because we don't understand the frame of reference - the math, the anatomy, or whatever. The problem in this case isn't in the text, but in the reader. The text is 'difficult' BECAUSE, rather IN SPITE OF, its being precise. If the argument were vague, then it would probably be easier to understand for the layperson. Because it is trying to say something very specific about something complicated, it has to use language designed for that purpose: if it used regular language, then it would end up losing some of the information it is trying to communicate. The critique levied against the 'studies' disciplines and philosophy, typically continental philosophy (usually by people outside the humanities), is usually pretty different. They tend to assume that, regardless of one's familiarity with the writer's jargon, the vagueness of the text would remain - i.e., that the text effectively doesn't "say" anything in particular- the problem is in the text, not the reader. But as you suggested with Butler's passage, this is often a disingenuous critique of the writers at hand. In my opinion, the vast majority of critiques of humanities' style being 'opaque' are instances of hand-waving that are designed to let the critic off the hook for not taking the time to understand the argument. An extreme example of this can be found in Chomsky's dismissal of Zizek, who he simultaneously accuses of being 'incomprehensible' but also of only making statements which could be 'summarize in 5 minutes to a 12-year old'. The work required to understand what is at stake in Zizek's argument is taken as evidence that nothing, in fact, is at stake. To sum up -- the opacity of a text is only a worthy critique if the opacity goes 'all the way down' - that is, if it becomes no less opaque once its tools have been learned. Writers like Pinker, who find 'common sense' sufficient to disambiguate complex things such as human history, are largely ignored by serious academics for the same reason a literature professor writing about planetary orbits in 'common sense terms' would be equally ignored -- he is unable to go beyond vague gestures.

But while I despise Pinker's argument, I will say that you're not gonna change much of the world outside the Humanities faculty walls if your language is otherwise inaccessible. Doesn't it create a small group of "us" who only communicate to one another in the proverbial ivory tower? I was for many years, without knowing it, primed for a lot of what you discuss here, but didn't know it because of the off-putting nature of "academic"-speak. It seems to me that real challenges to the status quo would be more...toothed and clawed. I see folks online dissect, critique, and reframe societal narratives in radical and intelligent ways without resorting to recondite linguistics. In fact, isn't such language how power is often (not always, but often enough) maintained or even amassed? --Ecclisiastical authority, medical authority, business authority, political authority, academic authority, gang authority: the institutions and habits of power often come with their carefully curated and maintained languages. It's spectacle to impress, impose, and intimidate. And yes, frequently those loving in that language do come to think it's actually important and actually real beyond their in-house conventionality.

So there should be two copies of every academic article, eh? One for the academic peers and one for the general public. I have been doing this for myself for a long time. I often reword articles and studies using a more "fun" register, so to speak. That way, it's easier to remember them :)

Gate-keeping: "the cognitive powers have extraordinary relevance for the dialectic" is not disputable by average joe, while he can say a lot about "thinking is of great importance" (Stolen from a German book about a talking kanguru)

I think the humanities are actually much more important for laymen to understand than much of the obscure "hard sciences" and it actually has a higher burden to be comprehensible for that reason. I'm skeptical that even the hard sciences "need" to use their jargon in order to communicate complex ideas - even when they do, it's generally the use of specialized vocabulary to refer to things that are entirely outside of normal experience, like the behavior of light in a thin film on a reflective surface. Even so, in technical papers I've read, complex jargon is often explained with simple pictures showing what the phenomenon in question would look like at a layman's scale. It's a bit odd to talk about society, a thing we are all constantly enmeshed in and which we all have personal experience with, and to use technical jargon almost exclusively. If academics (be they in the humanities or the hard sciences) are primarily writing for their peers, how can we judge their assessment that their use of language is out of necessity? Can we assume they can see their own potential blindspots?

A lot of these articles I’m forced to read just seem like people trying to sound smarter than they really are. They beat around the bush and are hardly straightforward. It takes them three paragraphs to describe something that could be condensed into like 6 sentences wtf.

I tried reading some of Jürgen Habermas' writings when I was in university. I remember single sentences being spread out over entire pages...

There is a book "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality", where Zizek, Laclau and Butler discuss their respective theories. It has the structure of three rounds, where each author writes an essay per round that is a response to questions by the others in the previous round. My understanding of that book was that a big part of the first couple of rounds was them just clearing out misunderstandings because they use the same technical terms in completely different ways. So even academics who have read quite a bit of one another find each other difficult to understand. I have also seen several self-professed Hegelians complain about the denseness of Hegel's original texts.

I'm writing a thesis, currently. Throughout my career as a student every supervisor or teacher I have had has made a point of telling me to keep things simple. Short sentences and simple language in any case that is not necessary jargon. The accessibility to the writing is through the level of knowledge in the subject matter, rather than linguistic flourishes. I suppose it helps I am not a native speaker, however letting the subject matter speak for itself is preferable in my opinion. Then again I am in microbiology, not the "soft" sciences.

This reminds me of the various pissing contests between Analytic and Continental philosophers. A typical criticism of Continental Philosophy by Analytic Philosophers is that it is verbose, obscurantist and often unintelligible as opposed to the Analytic philosophers who supposedly prioritised clarity and concise definitions and writing. Yet as a philosophy undergrad studying Analytic philosophy I often found it very difficult to follow the arguments that were being made by the supposedly concise Analytic philosophers and that their terminology was often pretty dense and unwelcoming to newcomers.

First, let me say that I love your channel and I think you operate in the goodest of good faith. I sit at your feet; you have my rapt attention. But I’m kind of surprised at what I take to be the final upshot of this commentary and not fully satisfied with it. I am actually a philosophy professor, as it happens. I’m the sort of person who is generally good with words but I lack that specific, felicitous type of brain that feels maximally at home in contemporary philosophy, as practiced academically. In short, I mean I have to practice and concentrate to count as a “peer,” but I’ve had about 15 years now to work on it - handling specialized words that name complex concepts and putting them to regular use. And while I agree that obscure words can be incredible, specialized academic tools and we shouldn’t frown on their coming into existence or being used, even used a lot, I don’t think saying the word hegemony is the problem. You said the word hegemony all over the place, and it was in an empowering and democratizing way, not an obfuscating and unhelpful way. It’s not the coming into existence of the words, it’s how they get strung together. The abstract thing abstracts the abstraction abstractly by the abstract means of abstract abstractitude. I can bear up with long-suffering under a sentence like the Judith Butler, but oh Father Christmas if you love me at all, at least follow it up with an example or a more plain-spoken clarification. Good faith writing, even for other academics, needs moments of clarity for the reader to check their interpretation against what the writer is and is not saying. Wall to wall abstraction is just headachy and badly ambiguous. You said it would be strange if Academics had to stop and define the big words for other Academics, but actually I think I’d be enormously grateful - and I don’t just mean beginning of grad school me, I mean now-me. I don’t know about atmospheric scientists, but I think they might use the word “stratosphere” more consistently than academics in the humanities use our specialized language. And I don’t mean it’s a bad kind of inconsistency; I mean we know the basic glossary definitions of the terms but that doesn’t always unlock or lay bare the sense or emphasis intended by a particular writer. I think stopping to talk about what the concept means to you, within the scope of your specific project, can be a mercy to the peer and to the lay person alike. Here’s the thing: if the state of academic writing were about us doing our *best* job of talking to each other while doing not so great at talking to outsiders, then I’d second the need for more texts that *do* speak to non-experts (and for creating them to be a respected academic endeavor), and otherwise be totally content. But I don’t believe we are, as a class, doing our best to communicate with each other. I have sat at conferences clenching *every* brain cell at my disposal trying to follow a paper to absolutely no avail. I have 39 years experience with what people sound like when they’re trying to be understood - even those same exact people who write the papers - and people who want to be understood may use the word hegemony but they don’t sound like THAT. Bell hooks writes about leading class sessions where students of color are encouraged to use their language of origin or vernacular. She says white students often complain about feeling out of the loop. She suggests to them that it can be a salutary experience to listen and struggle and fail to understand. The white students are bearing witness to their classmates feeling the power and welcome of customized language - words that name the complexities of experiences that are familiar matters to the poc but for which the white students have maybe never required a word. Vernacular speech and “hegemony” aren’t so different. They come into existence in the effort to name things no other word was naming - yet. But I don’t think me beating my brains out at the conference, listening to opaque sentence after opaque sentence, is the salutary experience of struggling to understand someone who is feeling the power and joy of commanding language that empowers them to be their most authentic and capture their keenest insights. Frankly, it feels hecka inauthentic. I don’t want to make accusations of willful obfuscation, but I think maybe academia is set up in a way that’s... not great and pressures and incentivizes bad habits. If you hang out with academics, you will meet some blowhards who just straight-up feel good about being hard to understand. Maybe if enough of them set the standards and practices, we all end up approximating and imitating them. If most of the papers you read are obscure, then obscure becomes your idea of academic style. But honestly, I think even we non-total-blowhards are often guilty of being complicit in an Emperor-has-no-clothes kind of situation. It’s not that the hard sciences are doing meaningful work and the “softer” disciplines aren’t, so we’re trying to cover up a collective bankruptcy. The humanities are chock full of meaning. I think it’s more a matter of insecurity and individual self-protection. I have watched how my own colleagues treat a VISITING EXPERT *THEY* BROUGHT IN TO GIVE A PROMISING PRESENTATION. The transparent one-upmanship. The Q + A “questions” that aren’t questions and don’t suggest any real interest in hearing an answer, much less learning from it. It’s sheep bashing horns and it’s embarrassing and saddening and not at all what we *say* we’re here for. My take is that the overly-convoluted paper is the discipline-mandated-output, safe-from-public-humiliation paper. When colleagues aren’t properly collegial, I don’t think it provides much of an incentive to sincerely try and be understood at all. But present a headache in written form and you’re just a little bit more likely to put a roomful of “peers” on the back foot. If they are not sure they understand, they will tread a little carefully before they @ you. Of course, I don’t know a single colleague who has ever mentioned *aloud* having comparable experiences of despair from just trying to keep up so maybe it’s just me, lol. Maybe I’m not much of a peer! At any rate, it should definitely be a valid and validated activity to choose to talk to people from all walks of life about complex ideas and to try to do it in words anyone could understand. If philosophy at its best consisted exclusively of ideas only experts could understand and aptly speak about, then honestly I don’t think it would be much worth doing. In other words, keep up the great work. You’re welcoming *and* you’re complex, and the Judith Butlers should be so lucky.

I think there's a difference between using technical terms without explaining them and writing paragraph-long sentences with no coherence. Even academics struggle to read some of their fellow colleagues.

Okay, on the whole I really love this analysis. But in the end I'm not totally satisfied. I am satisfied with your argument that specific/obscure terminology is necessary to communicate ideas which are new. But I'm not satisfied that that means the sentence construction has to be intentionally circuitous. That translation of Judith Butler's sentence -- sure, he replaced "hegemony" with "power," even though "hegemony" is more specific. But even if you restore "hegemony" to the translated sentence, it's still infinitely easier to read and makes infinitely more sense than the original, because the syntax is far more logical. As somebody below said, it's the damn run-on sentences that drive me up a wall. A theory writer like the late theater historian Claire Sponsler is one of the rare academic writers, in my opinion, who was able to use the exact right words for her ideas while structuring them in a way that reads coherently. I'd be really curious to know your thoughts specifically on the syntax of, say, that famous Butler sentence. Some of the clauses are so long that by the time you get to the verb you've forgotten what the subject is. I guess I've yet to hear an argument convincing me that that kind of ponderous writing is necessary to communicate its ideas.

I think a part of this is also that most people simply don't have the time to dedicate long stretches into reading complicated texts. When you're encouraged to work and work and not "waste time", no one wants to spend that time reading Derrida or Butler because of the added time investment of translating their style into something that's easier to understand

Great Video. I really do think academics should do a lot more to reach out to non-academics, but you’re right that the critique of impenetrable writing is too often used as cudgel against the humanities.

Could you do a video on Freud, Lacan, or just psychoanalytic theory in general sometime in the future? I find your videos really helpful for grasping complex theoretical concepts, and psychoanalysis is definitely the thing I have the most trouble with.

There is a difference in using new/complicated words and sentence stuffing. Usually if 1 or 2 words in a sentence or paragraph are unknown to you the rest of the context clues can be used to understand the meaning. This is actually how you are supposed to write. It allows the use of unknown or complex words to express ideas but the rest of the sentence gives context to those words. Anything else is word spam and gate keeping for no purpose other than trying to seem smarter than the reader. Any idea that can be expressed in word, can also be expressed by a phrase. Picking and choosing when to use which is what makes a good writer. Stuffing a bunch of unknown words can actually confuse meaning and intent due to the missing contextual cues needed to convey meaning. A word itself is not a complete idea. That is why we have incomplete sentences, punctuation, paragraphs, etc. The rest of the sentence gives meaning and clarity to any one word in that sentence.

I come at this from the angle of so-called hard science and mathematics, where the ideas referred to in papers are complex, and no simpler "plain language" equivalent exists. I do not believe that soft sciences are essentially different. These translations of so-called soft science to "plain language" do not seem to keep the nuance of the original text. An academic paper properly rewritten for a general audience would be much longer because more words would need to be spent explaining unfamiliar concepts.

Learning new terms: good and necessary. Constructing long paragraphs full of run-on sentences and obscure meaning: bad for everyone, academia included. The issue isn't so much about unfamiliar language (or even entire subjects) as it is about how easily it reads. If you write well, even people that don't entirely know what you know can still get the gist of it. Honestly, I think a good deal of these issues could be sorted out by working with a decent editor - you don't have to tell your audience what they already know to make your writing readable to both your peers _and_ people who are still learning more, you just need to be clear and concise.

butler's point at 15:01 exhibits bourgeois privilege, 'received grammar' is a needed vehicle for communicating liberating ideas because it's the best way to make it understood to the greatest amount of people - while I agree that specific terms can be helpful for precision and expressing unfamiliar or complex ideas, to suggest that as a defense of alienating language reeks of elitism, or at least shows a lack of care about how poor people can be involved in producing radical change

I really really really like your videos. They take questions I’ve asked myself and respond to them concisely and accurately, showing multiple viewpoints and allowing us to think with you instead of listening to you thinking. You’re doing a great job, keep up the great work.

I was always told to write as if I'm communicating my ideas to my second year university self. Someone who has been immersed in the broader topic for a little while, knows what's going on and has a grasp of some of the technical language but who is also not an expert in this specific field I'm chatting about. It seems to create a decent balance.

It's not just about the vocabulary used though. I've been an english lit and langue student for 5 years and a lot of the articles I have to read analysing a text are deliberately dense, to the point that I end up having to reread a sentence multiple times just to understand the meaning. That sort of writing, which is inaccessible to the people who study a discipline much less the general public, is just a sign that the author is a bad writer or that the discipline in question needs to take a look at its standards (if its a widespread thing). In other subjects, specifically french scientific subjects, the importance of short and clear sentences is emphasized precisely because the vocabulary and data are heavy enough on their own and equating that to bad writing on english lit (for example) does a disservice to the former.

I've noticed a trend on social media where some people will accuse others of writing that's too dense, convoluted etc (basically everything you describe here) largely when they don't like what the other person has to say - it's turned into an easy criticism. That's not to say this isn't a real issue in academia obviously - there were statements in Frames of War I asked my professor for clarification about and he couldn't tell me, we were both left to kind of guess (Frames of War is written by Judith Butler, just like that long sentence was, for anyone reading who isn't familiar. She's kind of low hanging fruit at this point!). This is a really great video (I'm commenting as I'm watching lol), very relevant to current debates I see all the time and the explanation of academic language is very illuminating. P.S Mark Fisher is fantastic!

Thank you so much for addressing this! When facing an academic text I often feel insecure for I'm certain I won't understand it in its entirety right away (hi imposter syndrome. It's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one who struggles) although it's also something of a challenge and it's rewarding when I get to finally grasp the scholar's idea, get to make sense of what they wrote. But it's so much difficult and even more so when nobody is there to guide me through it. Quarantine was interesting in that way. For I had to do it alone or with few opportunities to discuss with my lecturers/tutors. Anyway, similarly to what you said, I find that to further our understanding of things it is necessary to upgrade our linguistic abilities, and although it's at a different scale in academic works, it is not at all different from our linguistic journey through childhood, teen years, and adulthood. Only, In a scientific paper, the vocabulary is much more specific than in common discussions. But still, we don't use the same vocabulary at 8 yo and 20 yo and in an academic paper and a random discussion with you friends and family. So although we'd love to have easy academic text to learn from, that won't help us much. But only having academic texts won't do it either. It has to be a conjoined thing so we may take the better of both parts! Thank you again for this, it motivates me to go through my academic TBR during the holidays!

There are at least a few well-known well-written papers in almost every field, so I think that boringness creeps in slowly from insecurity leading to conformity and formalism in parts of papers where it's not needed.

Their audiences are themselves and their circle, but if they want to critique and change the world, their audience should be expanded. Butler writes about vulnerable subjects who would never understand her words and, to me, thats is very unfair, the academics use the subjects like objects. (sorry if my english is bad, i am chilean and ussualy dont write in other laguage)

I really agree with you. my main complaint about academic writing relies on the fact that liberal arts scholars often don't do a meta analysis of the potential implications behind the terminology they invent. For example, some sociologists just re-name concepts for no particular reason where the same meaning could be achieved by simply modifying an old sociological term or borrowing a concept from another field altogether. I like and understand the need for complexity, I just don't want redundancy, where sociologists, art historians, gender theorists, and philosophers are all talking about the same thing with unique specialized terms that really should just be combined into one metaphysical concept.

This was such a well done video! You took me on a trip. I started off thinking one way and then you took me somewhere totally different. Now I feel like I understand both so much better. Thank you! :)

Judith Butler's point at 15:01 echoes George Orwell's concept of newspeak in '1984', a language designed to be so limited as to make critical thought impossible. I think it is interesting that the style that authors are constrained to when making radical arguments in academia somewhat serves to gatekeep knowledge and understanding of these arguments by the general public who might stand more chance of making collective societal change if these were more accessible.

As an historian, I try to make my work understandable and you're right, that does differ somewhat by audience: if I tell you I wrote my doctoral thesis on a Montagnard representative on mission I will likely need to explain those terms, but if I'm publishing a journal article I'm not going to want to waste the precious few characters I've been given explaining these terms to people who already understand them. However, even there, the identity of my "peers" isn't a constant: the terms I just cited are known to French Revolution specialists, but not to all historians, so depending on how general the journal is, I may still need to explain them. As for more general terms like "hegemony," I'm afraid many academics may simply be guilty of having forgotten what reads as "technical" to a general audience: hegemony isn't a term I have to think hard about to interpret, so I might use it without thinking about how it might make my work less accessible. That said, most colloquia I attend are not well-attended by the public, but I did speak at one a couple of years ago that was and I'm pretty proud of the fact that a lot of non-specialists came up to me afterwards and told me they appreciated how clear my presentation was. I'm no doubt not a "captivating" writer, but I like to think I can at least be a clear one. On the one hand, history may be easier to make accessible than other disciplines (even without sensationalizing or replacing analysis with pure narrative, which academic historians generally try to avoid, myself included), but on the other I could definitely cite some colleagues who seem to write obscurely simply to look smarter than they are, or even potentially to avoid criticism (no one wants to look like they can't understand your work, so they will simply pretend they do while being unable to actually engage meaningfully with your arguments). So, tl;dr: this is a topic that's more complex than it first appears, but I don't think it would do any harm if academics - or anyone who publishes their writing - always tried to keep in mind whether the choice to use complex jargon and syntax is necessary and appropriate or whether they could be simplified or clarified without losing anything. Final note: This especially applies to syntax. As you can see, I have a tendency, like many academics, to use overly complex syntax, especially in a first draft (and I'm not doing multiple drafts on a youtube comment). But I find that my writing is invariably stronger when I break most of my long sentences up. It may just be that some academics don't want to take the time to this kind of editing and then come to believe complex syntax is always necessary to getting their point across (and maybe even that anyone who says otherwise is anti-intellectual)...

Original sentence: "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. " Edited sentence: "The move from an understanding of social relations as structured by capital to one of power relations as subject to repetition brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift to a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the rearticulation of power." Same thing, less words. Cut in half. Embarrassing how easy that was.

thanks, very useful and encouraging, brings out guidance, courage and motivation to read, I'm sure i'll get better at reading them

Tom, your videos and delivery are fantastic, sincere thanks!

This is so true. However, when I was in college, I studied politics, philosophy, and literature, we were taught not to write this way. I shit you not, we would have excercises reading this kind of academic, semantic vomit and would have to gleam any meaning we could out of it. It was taught to us to never write this way.

I knew a guy whose senior thesis was on sociology writings. He went through journal after journal after journal and summarized every article he could read in one sentence, which would include all their points. He succeeded, and often with very short sentences. I wanted to read it, but he said that being I was still in college I likely would hate my professors if I saw what blowhards they were. I ended up hating them anyways.

I have no idea how this channel is not more popular. Good luck to you in the future and I'm excited to see what else you create in the future.

I have recently discovered your channel and I really love your content and your style. I can only imagine the effort you put into your videos to make the as engaging as they are while also generally dealing with rather complex topics. Perhaps unintentionally, I believe you are also a beacon for students of humanities and a reminder to a more general audience of the importance of understanding culture alongside sience. P. S. I was shocked when you pronounced "hegemony" with a /g/ rather than with a /dj/ sound, guess I'll add the to the list of British/American phonetic discrepancies.

I think there's another problem with "hegemony" here: Butler is using a word that was made popular by Gramsci, who was a revolutionary, a Communist Party leader, and a political prisoner. Someone who devoted his life to inspiring the people to rise up and fight for a better world. His writings ain't easy reads, either, but they have a distinct popular purpose. Now this word is in a sentence that none of the "people" could ever understand, and so it's lost its power to move things in the world and become a husk of itself. Just like many other words in that sentence. The problem with a lot of academic writing nowadays is not even that it's boring, it's that it uses revolutionary lingo to write for a handful of peers and attain tenures. There's a good video by The Onion on this, on how a car factory worker who voted for Trump finally understands his mistake after reading through 500 pages of Butler.

The old argument from the humanities that "well the hard sciences use the same obscure language, so there!" is actually completely untrue. I've read through hundreds of medical papers and textbooks as a student and professional and never had any issues with the language. Often I'd have to look up a term or do some background reading on a certain concept to fully understand it, but the language itself is never the problem. In pure science fields like physics or maths, things can obviously get very complicated with all the terms and abstract concepts being discussed. However, again, they're not made more difficult than they need to be with run on sentences and multiple (often redundant) clauses. As much as I enjoy the channel, I really feel like this video lets the likes of Butler off too lightly and misses the point by focusing too much on individual terms like hegemony (not a particularly good example either since it's not an obscure word), rather than the overly complicated grammar and turgid prose. As for Pinker, even if he's wrong about his political views, which I personally believe him to be, that doesn't nullify his argument with regards poor academic writing. To claim that he's defending the status quo and thus only requires stale, establishment grammar and terminology, while Butler is a trailblazing rebel and thus needs this edgy yet unintelligible prose seems very specious reasoning. Anti establishment leftists make the very same criticisms as Pinker.

Hey Tom thanks for engaging so much with your audience in the comment section. Its so nice to see!

Thank you! This was very insightful and clearly argued. I appreciate that the video didn't stop at repeating Pinker's argument but discussed a counterpoint to it. There is certainly a degree of deliberate obfuscation in some academic writing. It seems to be even more pronounced in certain linguistic traditions: e.g., I find it much harder to understand most Russian scholarship in the humanities than I do when I read Anglophone authors, despite Russian being my first language. However, when I see style guides or courses on academic writing that aim to distill the process down to a set of clear, simple rules (don't use passive voice; avoid lengthy sentences; etc.), that also seems to reductive and counterproductive. So I guess it's a more of a balancing act between depth and accessibility?

"Enunciatory modality, indeed!" LOL... My hot take: Academic language is necessary but significantly overused. You just can't explain everything succinctly in plain language without taking too much time, so some concepts need names that most people won't know off-hand. That being said, a lot of academics seem to take pride in being indecipherable and this is definitely a bad thing if they aren't otherwise very good writers. If they do write more accessible works or their hard-to-decipher texts are really engaging and structured so people benefit from the density, I'd consider them good writers. I studied education back in the day, and some sociologists would spend a chapter full of jargon to describe concepts like "kids have to build one piece of knowledge on top of another."

My friend and I were discussing this topic a few days ago. I wonder whether you might help us answer a question we could not resolve: When did the contemporary style of academic writing emerge? With Marx or Freud? With the development of modern sociology and cultural studies programs? When new departments (African American Studies, Asian Studies, Native American Studies, etc) required new language to articulate their ideas? Also, I really love your channel!

yes,i'm planning on a great week....so invigorating,your videos. my favorite grandchild. the toys you play with. those abc blocks....

Wow. I really needed this video. Thank you!

Very late to the party, but here goes: I had the displeasure of attending an interdisciplinary conference on oceanography. Each presenter's presentation was pretty much unintelligible to those not in their discipline. The ecologists and zoologists did not understand the physics and climate people and neither group saw any value in the contributions of the sociologists who were discussing how real people were responding to climate change, fish poaching and the like. Jargon and really complex 3-D diagrammes and obscure statistical models abounded.

Looking forward to this. Got the notification just as I stepped away from the computer after a gruelling morning of thesis writing

In Butler's sentence, I see a lot bigger problems than this "hegemony" -- a word that is quite common and easy to understand. I studied engineering, I've got a relatively solid base in natural sciences (although I hate chemistry - - too much to memorize), I'm interested in linguistics and I occasionally read quite specialist books or articles on the subject. And still whenever I try to read a book on one of those "soft" fields, say cultural anthropology, I'm hardly able to say afterwards what it was about and what it tried to communicate. Oh, and by the way, Tom, your own communication style is not particulartly straightforward either.

Some excellent.points here. I especially liked what you said about Pinker uploading the status quo And no o e questioning the hard sciences for their jargon

Tom:"...mesophere, stratosphere and troposhere while most of us would describe it as..." Basic me nodding:"sky" Tom:"...Atmosphere" Basic me:"bollocks" New sub, love your stuff.

Historical articles are riddled with unnecessarily complicated verbiage. I agree that you need a wider vocabulary to communicate new ideas, however I have encountered numerous authors who are simply pissing into the wind to impress their peers. There is no thought given to anyone else who will encounter these articles. And yet professors will still assign these works to new grad level students and sneer when they don't understand the complex ideas. I have been fortunate to have some great professors who are willing to explain these ideas, but the "better than you" mentality is still very, very real.

Some of my favourite texts are ones with which I have profound disagreements - Nozick's 'Anarchy, State and Utopia' is a prime example. I partly enjoy reading it because you can tell that Nozick enjoyed writing it. The style is clear and direct, and it contains moments of real humour, and other moments of sincere passion. He's also quite an honest writer, and often signposts gaps in his own argument. I'd actually hold it up as an example of how to write well. Because its so well written, its also incredibly easy to debunk! You don't have to spend hours deciphering what Nozick might mean, picking apart opaque sentences, because he writes precisely what he means in plain (but still technical and thoughtful) English. Its definitely one of the major benefits of the analytic tradition that this is generally the style of writing employed. I remember having an interesting discussion with my lecturer, who'd written his PhD on the subject of philosophy as literature. My basic complaint was that Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) spends pages saying what could be said just as well in a single sentence, and dresses it up in the most obscure terminology and pointlessly convoluted language, and seems to want his reader to have as hard a time as possible in getting to grips with what he's trying to say. My lecturer replied that this was, in fact, the point: by forcing the reader to grapple with the text, the reader comes to a deeper understanding of it, whereas if the language is too straightforward, the reader might not actually take in what has been said. Now personally, I think that Sartre writes that book the way he does in order to hide the fact that its mainly bollocks (okay that's a kind of joke, but some of this other work is written in a much more straightforward style, so it makes me wonder...), but its definitely an interesting thought.

Unnecessarily opaque academic writing isn't always about technical or advanced vocabulary. Sometimes it's about long and winding, sometimes incoherent, sentences combined with the vocabulary.

Sorry Tom Im gonna have to call absolute rubbish on this. I actually completely agree that we shouldn't ever water down what is being said in order to make it easier to understand, IF that means sacrificing some meaning. But the "translation" of what butler said is a perfect example of how what she actually said was just plain obtuse. Which made her response just ring hollow because she's essentially defending her choice to talk in damn riddles. Like that translation is so clearly the better choice for how to get across her ideas, and if her carrier relies on impressing people by making her work in-accessable then what's even the point? Who is she helping? For example even just a glossary for all those big words, that yes sometimes are needed to communicate new ideas, would have gone a long way. It's not just as simple as saying they need these words because everyday language hasn't "caught up" yet misses the larger point that what they are saying is still structured obtusely on top of that. Besides saying " well, the current zeitgeist defines what words are considered everyday so therefor we must use these more fringe words because it's the only way to communicate these futuristic ideas" just isn't true, you might have a higher word count but it's certainly possible, we should be trying to get these word into the mainstream by helping those who seek to better thier understanding to understand. Otherwise aren't all these books just really expensive and clout chasing ways for academics to run their own blogs. Or I suppose a better way of putting it is if you want to be a part of Thier club you ether have to be a mod and have posting privileges, or pay THEM and their peers to teach you all those fancy words otherwise you can't understand the posts. Or like you can just try and learn it all on your own from the internet I guess but I just think thats wack honestly. Your right there is no shame in needing additional material to help you understand complex ideas, but there is shame in overcomplicating your ideas if you didn't have to and I am unconvinced by your argument that that isn't what butler was doing (and by extension alot of other academics) I want to make it clear however that I think Pinkerton is a hack and I hate to be seen even slightly agreeing with him, and I do actually I think butler is simply abit to fond of the smell of her own farts but actually seems to make good arguments. Again tho, what's the point of only a handful of other, similarly gassy, scholars to whiff then what's the damn point of it all?

Speaking as a linguist, the theory which Butler espouses, namely that language defines thought, has been discredited for the most part.

Thank you for that video! As a young academic (working on my PhD), I'd agree that the specificity of academic language is important in order to develop comprehensive and coherent thought: each word kind of needs a single meaning in order to reduce what I'd call the "problem of interpretation", which is the distance between the ideas written about and the ideas that have been interpreted by the reader. An argument could be made that metaphors (created in an attempt to "dumb it down" as one could say) increase that distance. There is that vague idea of betrayal in any popularization attempt. The use of the passive voice gives an aura of scientificity, as if reality was writing itself; as if objects described themselves. (A lot could be said about that in another video of yours. I just watched the one about Foucault and, as someone who encountered him in French as I'm a French-speaking Canadian, I asked myself if the theory "moves" because of the translation. This comes to me as a bilingual academic who refers to theory both in French and in English. Food for thought.)

My PhD thesis was celebrated as "very comprehensive and engaging writing". It was not on purpose though. I wrote it in my third language and I couldn't write it the usual way :D It turned out juuuust fine!!! It was even selected to be published as book by very established editorial (which didn't happen only due to lack of funding).

Coming from Biology I usually tell my students that academic writing should strive to make the already complicated matter as easy to understand as possible. While specialized terminology is necessary to talk about the subject at all and often helps to bring the point across concisely, the structure of a sentence, a paragraph and also the whole article should be as straight forward as possible. Short sentences should be prefered, which is difficult for Germans sometimes. ;-) And for every phrase one should think about whether it actually adds something. Otherwise it might be better to leave it out.

This seems like an easily fixed problem: create two editions. One academic edition and one layman edition.

Such a good video. I think academic texts are so difficult to exclude as many people as possible to make it exclusive.

What an interesting video! I hadn't thought of it this way

"I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one" -mark twain this is just academics being lazy, nothing more. its cool to use some complex terms but for 99% of it there's absolutely no excuse.

THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS VIDEO, LOL! I feel so seen! When I saw the thumbnail, I was worried you were going to come down on Pinker's side. If you haven't already read it, Butler's NYT op-ed 'A Bad Writer Bites Back' is worth checking out. That it might be good for some writing to resist our desire to 'master' it and that easy consumption isn't the only possible virtue a piece of writing can have is a position I rarely see defended; you're doing the good work, haha. Also, for any conservatives who are convinced that hard-to-read writing comes only from the left, I invite you all to check out Maps of Meaning by our dear Dr. Peterson.

Goddamn, this video's narrative and its different points of view and arguments is pretty fucking nuanced, in a way that I have never been able to, I guess, think about these things myself. As someone who wants to go further into academia within fluid and thermal sciences, this was really interesting to watch, because now I am more aware of the purpose of academic writing, and it helped me understand why I have run into troubles describing what I'm studying or find interesting in my graduate level courses to my parents, or other people outside of my field for that matter.

Amazing video, as always :D

I'm on the fence. I understand the need to create new vocabulary for changing conditions but, specifically in the case of Marxist theory and critiquing capital, to who's benefit is the new thought if it's not accessible to the broader working class? Actually I would further that any work that seeks to explain the oppressive natures of power structures is doing a disservice to the underclass by not being accessible to them. Like finding someone's glasses and saying they have to pass a vision test to get them back.

“If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.” ― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

There's an easy solution: write your publication for your peers, but you may also choose to hand it to a "translator" to unknot the work for students or the general public.

What annoys me as a non native speaker more than the specific vocabulary are the mile long sentences. You can learn the meaning of words in a minute nowadays, if you don't know them from previous reads. Overcomplicated or overlong sentences however are a massive roadblock and a lot of times unnecessary

Your channel is a treat, Tom, but I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with you on this one. You can argue that the intended audience is the key for chosing how to write, but even if one's writing for their academic peers, I see absolutely no advantage to adhering to such convoluted style. Other than "coming across as academic" , long sentences teeming with subordinated clauses make the audience no favour, regardless of who this audience is. It seems to me that, if academics feel this complex writing is the proper way to do science, they're suffering from a weird sort of Stockholm syndromme. They write like this because they're stuck to stifling, superannuated traditions, not because this style of writing brings any benefits to academic discussion.

Being able to present yourself as interesting and entertaining can be very useful when you have something important to share, and it applies to all walks of life. I work with magicians and I always find it very interesting that some can be technically brilliant, but their performances are boring and audiences can't tell that what the magician is doing is of a superior standard. Other magicians may be impressed, but the lay person is not, and these magicians often maintain that it's the fault of their audience. There are others who focus a lot more energy into the performance aspect and are always more successful. If you want to create something that only the elite of your field can understand or be bothered to look at then you limit your contribution to society and your potential gain from it. Mainstream appeal can be noble

thank you for your videos, as usual this was very clear and easy to understand. i was wondering if you could maybe do a video on ecofeminism/ecological theory one day? i'm very interested in the subject but it's very unapproachable to me. i feel like it could be an interesting subject to explore. i hope this isn't rude and i'm thankful for all the ideos you make!

I wasn't going to leave a comment, but then your outro. I know this is an older video, and probably without much ongoing consideration or discussion. One thing I did note, and love, is that when you quote Butler at 15:10, she is using "grammar" in a way which is common throughout the social sciences but not the normal way for a layperson on the street. In effect, while it doesn't confuse the meaning of what she is trying to say, it is actually an example of the argument of specialized language which is being discussed at the time. I think it also leads towards one other reason for incomprehensible writing in academic (albeit probably not as significant a factor as the ones you discussed): an assumption of background knowledge greater than actually held by the public. I notice that factor a lot in my line of work, wherein I am trying to preemptively simplify a concept because I think my audience won't understand it -- only to discover that they don't understand a far more fundamental portion of the discussion which is required for them to understand the simplified text!

I think your interpretation is so charitable that it becomes almost completely wrong. First, writing is hard. Communicating your thoughts in clear and enjoyable text is a skill. It takes time and effort to get even halfway good at it. My experience of academic writing is that much of it sucks ass for the same reason that so much teaching in academia does: the scientists doing it have neither training nor inclination. People who become scientists are generally in it for the research. But in order to get to do research they are forced to teach basics to grad students. Same goes for a lot of academic texts; scientists who are focused on the pleasure of finding things out are forced, in order to get their next research grant or assignment, to document what they have already found. For many it’s a tedious and uninteresting chore similar to how programmers are forced to write documentation describing what their programming does. And despite extorting all their scientists into teaching and writing, most institutions offer little or no training in it. Third observation. A lot of students write in a pompous convoluted way because they are insecure. They are afraid that put in the plainest possible language their analysis will be revealed as shallow and unoriginal. They fear that any touch of humor or humanity in their language would give the impression that they don’t take the subject matter seriously enough. Too often their teachers don’t reprimand, some may even reward this, because they do it themselves. Thus foundations are laid for lifelong bad writing habits. Four: some corners of the softer sciences are burdened by centuries of minority complex toward the hard sciences. Advanced physics, chemistry and biology study things and processes that have no everyday equivalents. Thus they are forced to develop a complicated language that is impenetratable even to their own beginning students. So in order to seem more ”scientific”, some disciplines within sociology and philosophy the have taken pains to generate a complicated apparatus of insider jargon. Five. Institutional culture matters. Some fields are just unlucky in having really important, even foundational, star contributors who happened to write like assholes. Postcolonial sociology for instance happen to have Pierre Bourdieu. Now he’s actually super important, his findings on how opressed and opressors think about themselves, or on how social capital works in the ”old wealth” classes are groundbreaking and essential. But man, he writes like a jerk. His convoluted sentence structure and walls of verbiage can make you throw a text against the nearest wall in despair. Or maybe just start laughing, because you realize that at some point he’s just trolling you. (He could actually write really well when he wanted to, and I think he’s on record saying that the reason his academic texts were so different from his private ones, was that if he had used an accessible and enjoyable language for his academic work, he wouldn’t get published.) There is no doubt that some unfortunate disciplines have an inherited tradition of shitty writing that they enforce upon themselves, because ”that is just how you write in our field”. Six. Some fields of academia are so bogged down in their habits of shitty writing that they can’t defend themselves against charlatans. Writing really badly is a skill too. Some people have made successful careers intentionally writing unintelligable gobbledygook, protected by the fact that in order to call them out, a critic would first have to admit that he didn’t understand one bit of it. There’s a famous hoax where pranksters submitted word salad to a prestigious postmodern journal, and got published, because the editors couldn’t admit that they couldn’t understand anything of it. (Google the Sokal affair. It is hilarious!) Actually, this prank has been successfully repeated several times. Seven. In fields that produce ideology, or at least prescriptive philosophy, it is particularly advantageous to be hard to read. People in the business of telling you how you should live and what the world ought to be like are extra keen to make their prescriptions appear as objective and scientifically fact-like as possible. And to achieve that it is important for them that their end product findings come as results of a scientific process that is really really *really* hard to access. I know that postmodernism and/or gender studies are prone to this, but in my mind the entire field of neoliberal economics are equal offenders. The strategy is the same: they give you a conclusion, paired with some very unambigous admonitions on what to do, and if you just take the prescription it looks like a political or ideological statement. But they claim, very confidently, that it is nothing but pure rational science. And in order to challenge their statement, they demand that you engage seriously with their scientific process. Which is by design incredibly filled with jargon and complications, and sometimes esoteric math. So the idea that Judith Butlers language is the way it is, simply because it needed to be that way in order to express her scientific findings, is pure bunk. After listening to your excellent vids about shitposting and neoliberalism, I don’t understand how you failed to make these connections in this video. Ah, well. I’m just getting started on this channel. Maybe you’ve adressed this elsewhere.

Because it's designed to look more complex than it is. And it is badly written. Legal texts are similar. A well written judgement is easy to read and understand. Contrast with the incomprehensible drivel that emanates from many legal academics and professionals.

It also needs to be accesible not only for the masses but for people with intellectual disabilities, accesibility may be a choice for dealing with the masses but it is a requirement for us