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The bad boys and girls of academic writing
21 May 2012
By Sandrine Berges
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The nature of academic work depends in great part on careful research, spending weeks reading an obscure text that no-one in their right minds would spend even an hour on, spending the summer months buried in archives while your friends are at the beach, checking your references meticulously, making sure you have all the right capital letters in the title (ref to Bianca). This is all very dull, of course, and academic writers are not renowned for their impulsive or passionate nature (which is not to say we can't be passionate about what we do, just that to others, it may not look that way).
But is this an accurate representation of what academic researchers are like? I can think of at least two giants in my field of ancient philosophy who are not. They are writers or genius, one woman, one man, whose use of ancient texts is both inspiring, and at times, inaccurate. Not always inaccurate, of course – otherwise we wouldn't read them. But let's just say that it's always a good idea to check up on their references before you use their conclusions.
How did these people ever make it to the top, you may ask? My experience, whenever I send out a paper to a journal, or ask a colleague to read it, is not quite that positive. No one finds my sloppy referencing endearing. No one is really amused when instead of a solid argument, I try to get away with a flippant line or two.
It is tempting to conclude that in Academia, as everywhere else, we admire rogues who have made it, but demand boring precision of everyone else. We all like a bad girl or a bad girl, as long as we don't have to work with them. But that would be too simple, I think. The people I used as examples weren't always sloppy in their references. They wouldn't have made it that far if they had been. But at some point in their career, they somehow got carried away by their bold interpretations and stopped being so careful. We decided to forgive them, but not those who would emulate them before they have shown themselves to be worth it. Does that make any sense? And does it apply to any research area outside the humanities?
Mark Ingham27 July 2012 at 04:25 PM
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Helen Sword in her book 'Stylish Academic Writing' (2012) debunks maithaca the myths of what is expected when writing 'academically'. It does not have to be as dry and boring as is often expected of us and our students, she argues and I agree wholeheartedly.
Sandrine Berges31 July 2012 at 01:48 PM
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Thanks, Mark, I'll check it out. I think I"m likely to agree with her and you.
Blanka Sengerová03 August 2012 at 10:35 PM
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I am a real pedant and the person who's most likely to be found tut-tutting at the missing apostrophes in shop names, misspelt notices in public places and spotting the proof reading omissions in books that she reads. For instance, I really enjoyed Eugenie Reich's book about Jan Hendrik Schon's perpetration of scientific fraud, but found the author went down in my estimation because of the number of simple proof reading errors that made it through.
As a result of this attention to detail, I have often been given people's manuscripts to read. I do think that scientists need to be meticulous in their writing because if your writing is sloppy does that suggest to the reader of your article that your experimental techniques are also sloppy? I know a lot of people still have the "scatty/nutty professor" image in their mind when they thing of an academic, but I am not sure this is a particularly helpful stereotype.
I think people are generally getting more careless at their writing, whether they're academics or not, which is probably related to getting used to text speak (I would never write C U L8R even in a text, but I am probably in a minority) and it seems acceptable to write emails without proper punctuation, capitalisation and similar conventions of written communication. But I certainly think this is not something that should become the norm in academic writing.
PS. As we're on the topic of proofreading, I expect "making sure you have all the right capital letters in the title (ref to Bianca)" should have linked to http://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers/156431-533621/Capitalisation-in-journal-articles.html and I will go to point out that my name is actually Blanka (I wouldn't usually bother, but since it's the topic for this post!! :o)).
Can you imagine how horrified I was when my boss managed to submit a paper with the wrong surname for me?
Sandrine Berges03 August 2012 at 10:52 PM
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Blanka - I can't believe I managed to get your name wrong again! Must have been the spirit of the topic... Also, the missing hyperlink tells me that I somehow managed to post a draft of the post rather than the finished one. That's one inconvenient of working while on the move. The ipad is great, but it's very easy to get things wrong with it, and trying to finish off work while travelling doesn't yield the same concentation as working from your desk. I wonder if we're going to see a big increase in typos now more people write on ipads. Really sorry about getting your name wrong again... I hope you were less forgiving with your boss than you are with me. I got cranky just because my phd supervisor couldn't pronounce my last name properly!
Blanka Sengerová09 August 2012 at 10:05 AM
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No hard feeling, Sandrine! As for my paper and the surname, I pointed out the error to my boss and we've managed to correct it before the final submission so in the databases it is now correct. Phew!
>> Also, the missing hyperlink tells me that I somehow managed to post a draft of the post rather than the finished one.
That is an issue with submitting things when you have many different drafts, contributed to by many different people (see Rob Hardwick's post on different authorship of course), because you have the issue of keeping track of what is the most up to date version, making sure that tracked changes and comments are not included in anything that is submitted. But I guess that comes back to being painstakingly careful when submitting final articles...