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Subject:Re[2]: Academic Pomposity From:Don Smith <dsmith -at- ACCESSBEYOND -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 4 Mar 1997 12:56:29 EST
Susan Brown wrote, in part:
"I am continually amazed at the poor quality of academic writing. All
of the things we have learned to avoid like the plague (3rd person,
passive voice, convoluted sentence structure, excess verbiage)
proliferate."
Could it be, Susan (what I have always believed), that this is writing
designed to "snow" the reader with the writers vast knowledge of
either the subject or the writers vocabulary, or both. This kind of
writing is what brought me into the writing profession in the first
place. I wanted to try to take highly technical things and explain
them so that (almost) anyone could understand them. It is my
impression that academic types write in the opposite way, for an
opposite reason.
MOO
Don Smith
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