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Academic Writing Quotes

Browse 24 quotes about Academic Writing.

Academic Writing Quotes

“Equating obscurity with rigor, while at the same time equating a clear and creative language with lack thereof is one of the most serious ills one faces in Western academia. Neither of these equations are accurate. They are certainly not mutually exclusive. Often feeble minds with mediocre arguments hide behind obscure and convoluted language. I am sure most readers have seen enough examples of clear writing that is profound, deep, and able to convey very complex ideas clearly. We simply must be careful not to confuse complexity with rigor and profoundness, as drunk people mistaken their foolishness for wisdom. Nor should we dismiss a clear language simply because it is conveying the point without unnecessary complexity or beating around the bush.”

WritingCreativityPowerCreative WritingCurriculumAcademiaHegemonyDecolonialityAcademic WritingKnowledge Production
Author:Louis Yako
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“The Cubs are a major league baseball team based in Chicago. Apparently, the team was once cursed by a goat and is doomed now to never win the World Series. The 71 seats [auctioned by the Chicago Board of Exchange] are adjacent to the Cubs' dugout on the third-base line. This is an unnecessary detail needed to give color to what would otherwise be a dull and uninspiring narrative.”

Humor2012Chicago CubsAcademic WritingAuctionFootnote
Book:Principles of Pricing: An Analytical Approach
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“Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted... But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness—and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability. [...] Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful.”

Academic Writing
Author:Gloria Steinem
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“None of these classy locutions mean anything different from the simpler ones they replace. They work ceremonially, not semantically. Writing in a classy way to sound smart means writing to sound like, maybe even be, a certain kind of person. Sociologists, and other scholars, do that because they think (or hope) that being the right kind of person will persuade others to accept what they say as a persuasive social science argument.”

Academic Writing
Book:Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article
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“One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between "concepts." There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience... Sociology—by its very nature?—seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died”

Academic Writing
Book:Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process
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“When teachers participate in a literary experience with a professionally presented children's play, they are offering their students a text quite different from anything that they will experience within their classrooms. Within this literary experience, teachers join as equals with their students, and each, as audience members within the darkened space of the performance, create their own poems to hold within themselves or share with others.”

ResearchTheaterChildren S LiteraturePedagogyAcademic WritingEducation Knowledge
Book:Three Moons Till Tomorrow: An Examination of the Interactions, Transactions, and the Construction and Co-Construction of Meaning by Elementary School Students, Teachers, and Theatre Professionals with an Original Children's Musical Play
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“U.S academia has long operated under the mediocre slogan of “publish or perish”, not taking into account that very often writers may perish the minute they publish, if they do not have something meaningful to say. As though adding to human knowledge can occur simply by killing some trees and publishing (mostly recycling) a couple of articles a year or one book every few years. Many academics that operate according to this slogan do not seem to remember Dostoyevsky’s words that the most difficult thing in life is to actually say something new, or George Orwell who once stated: “Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”

WritingCreativityPublishingCreative WritingAcademiaAcademic WritingAcademic ResearchAcademic Politics
Author:Louis Yako
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“The more passive one's life in the field, the greater the need to reverse the situation when one returns home, which is why the arcane and authoritative character of academic writing may be seen, to some extent, as a vengeful reaction to the inertia, uneventfulness, and waiting one had to endure as a guest at someone else's banquet. A way of redressing an existental imbalance, as it were reclaiming authorial will by superimposing one's own meaning on theirs...”

WayNeedsWritingMayCharacterHomeWaitingSituationGreaterFieldsReturnEndureRevengeReactionsGuestsAcademicPassiveReverseInertiaImbalanceBanquetsVengefulArcaneAcademic Writing
Author:Michael Jackson
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