Hear, hear, Colin.
Hope that is brief enough!
Janet Godwin
Upgrade and Dyslexia tutor
Oxford Brookes
C Neville wrote:
>When I came back into education as a mature student in the
>1970s, I remember feeling thoroughly intimidated,
>frustrated and angry at the academic texts I was expected
>to read in the social sciences and arts.
>
>It seemed to me then - and still does - that too much
>academic writing was dry and lifeless, obtuse and
>unfathomable, exclusive, rather than inclusive.
>
>However, I persevered with it, resentfully.
>
>Later I discovered Hudson's 1978 book 'The Jargon of the
>Professions', which argued that the less secure a
>profession feels about itself, the more excluding jargon it
>spouts; Hudson singled out education, business & social
>sciences at that time as the main culprits!
>
>From my work in learner support I know that many students
>still feel thoroughly intimidated by the set reading, and
>some disengage from it, or serve it back undigested and
>unintelligible in assignments - a link with another
>discussion on plagiarism is here, perhaps.
>
>I spend time with students now in workshops encouraging
>them not to be intimidated by extracts like the one,
>immediately below, taken from an academic text book:
>
>"Garfinkel argues that the relationship between the act of
>representation and represented object is dialectical not
>unidirectional.
>The character of the representation changes in the attempt
>to explain the perceived nature of underlying reality while
>the object 'changes', in turn, to accommodate the language
>employed to represent it. Representation, in other words,
>is a dynamic, interactive process in which the 'actor', and
>the form of representation, that is language, 'constructs'
>some at least of the reality under investigation"
>
>
>In the workshop students try and work out what the author is
>saying. Eventually, and together, they crack the codes and
>work out that this particular writer is trying to say that
>it can be difficult to explain the nature of <LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK>reality<RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK>,as
>it depends who is talking about it, how they perceive it,
>and the words they use to explain its meaning.
>
>They will then usually comment as to why the author did not
>simply say that in the first place.
>
>Motivating students to read? Let's mount a LDHEN campaign
>to encourage more clarity, less pretension, and better
>communication, in academic writing.
>
>Colin Neville
>Bradford
>
>---------------------------------
>C Neville
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>
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