How academic writing experience led me to blog
One of the main reasons I’m starting this blog, is the experience of writing I had this month. As a PhD student, I was preparing a text for a presentation and a review at my home university. Usual academic text production. However, this time I just felt disgusted with myself. But let’s start from the beginning,
Why was this time different? Writing in humanities has certain similarities with meditation. It’s constant awareness that makes them similar and the fact that after some time it is impossible to go back to the state when text production, or bodily reactions and emotions in case of meditation, go unnoticed. So… Lately, I’ve been taking a wonderful course in Coursera on academic writing. The main idea behind the course is simple: Cut, Cut, CUT! Yeah, I already feel the skepticism from the colleagues in humanities. Another scientist, or worse, analytic philosopher tries to universalize her agenda. But stay with me, I’m as Continental as you are.
Consider these examples shown by the tutor:
And
Such examples got me wondering, why do we produce so much cutable material in philosophy? And I am not talking here about “philosophical lexicon” and idioms, designed by philosophers to express themselves more clearly, with greater precision, or just to differentiate their meanings from the usual ones. The words like difference, dissemination, Dasein are not what worries me. Nor I’m worried about the supposed unreadability of Heidegger, Derrida, Hegel or Kant. I find them perfectly lucid. The examples from the Coursera course rather pointed to a theoretically unmotivated lump of passive voice, adverbs, adjectives and so on. Consider this sentence I wrote (maybe not the most representative one, but one I found quickly):
“The question which philosophical discipline the core of Critique of Pure Reason belongs to is as problematic as the question of Kantian Standpunkt”.
I remember dwelling on this sentence for a long time. Suppose I wrote “The question which philosophical discipline the Critique of Pure Reason belongs to…”. I think the problem I’m indicating would be clear in this way, but… The critic (or reviewer) could immediately point out, that different parts of the Critique address different problems, so my question is simply incorrect. So, despite the fact that there are actually ontological, epistemological, deontological interpretations of Kant, I would have to do some mea culpas, and rephrase the question differently. That’s why I put rather vague “the core of” in my sentence. Suck it, reviewer.
Yeah, so this was the feeling I had while writing text a few days ago. Constant thinking about how to phrase everything so “the reader” would find nothing to criticize. This all resulted in very indirect sentences. Contrary to what Steven Pinker thinks, writing for most of the undergraduate and postgraduate students is nothing like enlightenment inspired interchange of opinions in ideal speech situations, but more a field of conflict in which you always have to be ready.
That’s how I came to the conclusion that all this cutable material is in our texts is just there to make us feel safer. In the end, most of the texts are perfectly safe. Nobody reads them.
For this reason, I’m starting this blog. To be more direct, more daring, more open. This weekend I’ll post the entry on why should we abandon philosophical hermeneutics. See you then!
