> The verbiage/obfuscation that has come out of academia in the last
> thirty years has depressed the level of writing (and intelligence) and
> removed the ideal of a common public discourse from our consciousness.
> It has narrowed both discourse and audience. No giant stands on the
> many bowed shoulders of academicians chasing stardom or tenure in the
> last thirty years. There has been no Dante, no Casirer, no Orwell,
> etc.
I think there may be two tendencies at work here. One is the proclivity of academics in the humanities and social sciences to adopt a more technical-sounding language in order to up their prestige in the academy vis-a-vis the hard sciences and philosophy (the latter having developed several fields with technical vocabularies, such as phenomenology and linguistic analysis, in recent generations), until the impenetrability of their prose has perhaps outrun the profundity of the actual ideas expressed therein.
The other is the increasing percentage of the general public that has had some post-secondary education; having been exposed to this stuff in college, these ex-students form a larger market for books aimed at the general reading public, but written by academics who make little effort to tone down their "technical" style. (Perhaps these professors are also motivated by the shame they would feel among the colleagues if they wrote in a "popular" style. In the university where my wife teaches, a friend of hers, a physics professor who is tenured and therefore doesn't have to worry about bulking up his list of purely academic publications, was apparently recently subjected to some negative comments in his absence by colleagues for writing -- in quite simple, clear language for the subject -- a series of books popularizing various topics in physics.)
In other words, the fine old tradition of academics writing books deliberately aimed at working-class readers who had had no more than a few years of schooling, if they were not completely self-taught, has been lost.
Unfortunately, however, these "popular" writings in an academic style are actually largely incomprehensible to the public, but no one wants to appear stupid, so no one complains about their inability to understand what they are reading (if they are reading these works at all, and not just putting them on their bookshelves for display. Therefore,, the writers do not get the feedback they need.
And in any case, when was the last time you heard of a university prof who had actually made an effort to learn how to write well?
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _____________________________ "Simply by being human we do not have a common bond. For all we share with all other humans is the same thing we share with all other animals -- the ability to feel pain." -- Richard Rorty