Bad Academic Writing
It is probably tempting fate to opine on mistakes made by writers. I have, after all, quite a few pieces in this blog for you to pick holes in. Nevertheless, here goes.
All writers make errors: typos, repeated words, missing apostrophes, sentences that clunk, and so on. The best writers edit until the bulk of these errors are eliminated. This is a laborious business and there is no shortcut. Without fail however, the moment the final version of a document is consigned to email or published on the web, a few more will show up. Such is life. For the greatest part, minor errors do not greatly distract the reader, though there are a few, more pedantic, souls that are pained by them.
The most difficult part of academic writing is getting the 'narrative structure' right. This is the real intellectual stuff. The essential difficulty for the writer is putting him or herself in the position of the reader. The common temptation is for the writing to structurally mirror the process by which the idea came about, that is the personal journey of the writer, without appropriate signposting and context. This will not, generally, be the best way to explain something. Getting 'the story' straight is the essence of the craft and even the best writers struggle with it.
The problems of poor writing however go beyond the larger narrative and manifest themselves at the fine grain, that is at the sentence level. This is where difficulties are most common and for me, speaking personally, most troublesome. Poor sentence structure is a common result of a process of mental translation from a language other than English. Reading this sort of writing is uncomfortable and impedes the reader but, with a suitable degree of tolerance, it is not an insuperable barrier.
The worst problem, by far, is bad choice of words. I do not mean choosing a word that is less expressive or that does not catch a nuance, I mean choosing a word that does not actually mean what the writer believes it to mean. Let me illustrate this with a recent example I have encountered, not from one of my students I should emphasise. It comes from a questionnaire instrument intended to elicit views on the topic of information systems failure: "How would you assess the impact of managerial concern with regards to IS failure? What are some of the various difficulties in managing?"
The words give (and now I am struggling for the right word) a broad impression, but the precise meaning eludes me. I guess the challenge is that at the first pass of reading I do not spot the problem, I am moving too quickly. Once I feel myself grasping for meaning I return to the sentence, working on the assumption that there is a simple error in the English, easily surmounted if I pay some attention. Unfortunately, this is not the case, so perhaps I have failed to understand and I wind back several sentences and reread to ensure I have not missed something ... but no. So, now I believe that the author has made an error. It could be a slip, further careful examination rules this out.
In academic writing, 'approximately right' simply will not do, the cost to the reader is too high. I am really not sure how, as an academic educator, to deal with this, because the writers, for the most part, believe that they have said what they wanted to say. Very few editors catch this, unless they are reading for sense rather than surface form, which would be unusual.
I am not sure that enough attention is paid to writing at a postgraduate level or beyond. Good writing must be seen as a firm prerequisite for research at a postgraduate level. The time spent decoding the clotted texts of poor writers is a greater tax on the collective research community than is merited by their aggregate contributions