Sunday, February 21, 2010
Post-Class 2/21, on academic writing, i'm asking questions
I get the gist of this week’s material, so I’d like to take this opportunity to comment on writing. Why is that we have to read 10, 20, and 30 page articles that can always be summed up into a half-dozen quotes and concepts that could have been explained in 5 pages? Why in academia do authors write so redundantly? When will they stop beating around the bush and just say what they need to say? Its as if they are trying to reach some kind of benchmark in order to establish credibility. But why? How did this start? In CMC 200 we read two articles (unfortunately I cannot find them, or recall the author), one on simplicity and the other on a similar topic. Both were only a few pages and discussed how and why to make your writing more to-the-point. We were then asked to take our favorite blackboard post and shorten it from 300 words to 150 or less. Why are we not asked to do this all the time? I understand there is a line to be drawn in order to make sure students actually read the material and are making critical, useful contributions, but when we are asked to meet a minimum requirement for length, our focus is taken off of our critique and put onto how much white space we can cover. Instead of trying to write a clear and concise paper that makes the best point possible, we are forced to start packing in redundant and often unneeded information; I would think this would make the piece less valid, but in academia this does not appear to be the case. And now I have to “bs” seventeen more words in order to meet our minimum three-hundred word requirement. And now I have 300.
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Very well said Joe. I could not agree any more. I feel that when a teacher asks for a specific length most of the time I am search for things to write about or repeating what I already said. I understand that in the academic world we have a certain standard but when in the end we are supposed to get the main points of an article wouldn't it just be easier to just state them? It seems like in some articles we have to jump through hoops just to understand a paragraph of the writing. Most of the time students skim their reading just to get the main point. With our reading I find myself lost in the language a lot of the time and unable to decipher what is actually being said. I have had a hard time blogging because I feel as if I am just repeating myself or what the author says. I would much rather outline the reading in bullets because that is essentially what I do in my notes. The quotes that we pull from the reading do help me to better understand the entire reading with they are "out of context." There are certain things that I cannot pull from the reading, or is too complex for me to see in the first reading. I agree completely that having a length requirement makes writing less to the point and more repetitious.
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