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

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C Neville
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