Currently reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. How the fuck has this man managed to fit so much jargon and waffle into just 80 pages?
Don't get me wrong, a lot of it is super interesting and every now and again I'll read a parapgraph and go 'woah, holy shit' - but there's a lot of stuff in between where it feels like the author is just flexing on me or namedropping for the sake of intellectual credibility rather than actual content. So that people will read the book and go, woah, what a smart guy. I believe what he says.
Is this just a sign that I'm insecure that there's people way smarter and well read than me? I don't think it is, but if none of y'all get this problem then it could be.
I don't know, maybe it's just that I dislike formal writing styles. It doesn't seem useful to me. I love words, I get called a human dictionary every once in a while, but when I write I never throw around all the big words I know. What's the point in being hard to understand?
I get that some topics require a lot of linguistic precision, and sometimes you can't get straight to the point unless you use a sentence with a million punctuation marks, but some of the shit I read in these books is completely alienating. Doesn't even flow nicely either - just clunks along with every sentence giving you more of a headache than the last.
I write the same way. It’s because in higher education we learn how to write using historical examples, which themselves are super formal and old fashioned. For lots of scholars, it’s harder to write in modern English.
Yeah, I mean every single academic journal I've ever referenced has been gross to read so I see where you're coming from. On top of that, if you write an essay that doesn't adhere to the strict rules of formality and formatting, you get marked down. A backwards system in my opinion.
Academics are surprisingly very insular. If you write a paper in a journal, most likely only other nerds will read it, and since we’ve all been trained in the same old fashioned writing system, it’s fine if it’s gibberish for the modern man. Proper communication to the average person is probably one of the most under rated but most important skills a scholar can have.
Yeah that's true actually, I'm ignoring the intended audience. Now that I think about it, two books that made the mainstream, Natives and Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race are both very digestable.