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No, Academic Writing isn’t Getting Harder to Read
— But Serious Journalism is Getting Harder to Find
In December, just before the holidays, a “quick read” article appeared in the Economist Science and Technology section. It’s headline proclaimed that Academic writing is getting harder to read — the humanities most of all, with the promise of in depth analysis of two whole centuries of scholarly work. It’s a harangue we’ve all heard before, though the promise of 200 years of data had us intrigued. We are historians, after all: Waitman Wade Beorn is an American historian and former US cavalry officer who specializes in Holocaust studies at Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK; Brandy Lain Schillace is a public historian, editor, and award winning author who specializes in medical and science history. Two PhDs, one operating in academia in the UK, the other a former academic who writes for the public, we were perhaps the perfect readers for such a piece. But in the end, the original piece offered empty promises and the same old hollow double standard pitting STEM against the humanities.
Waitman Beorn
Most of us agree that communication should be easy to follow; otherwise, what is the point? But there is a world of difference between making complexity understandable — and pretending a complicated issue is simple…
