Reading for Work Versus Reading for Pleasure

Cat reads? Photo by KitschKat.

This sounds like a rant. It might be. It’s not because I think some academic authors are spouting boring ideas. Rather the opposite I think there are some really exciting academics out there and it’s a shame that they seem to be doing their best to hide it. This has been brought on by a feeling that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to read all the interesting papers being produced. I was in the library scanning the shelves to see if we had any new journals. I saw we had Public Archaeology, and found a paper on teaching archaeological theory. At the moment I can’t remember the authors name’s nor the title, but you’ll be hearing about them both because it was an excellent paper. You wouldn’t think so. For many archaeologists the only thing that could be duller than a theory paper would be a paper about teaching theory. That’s their loss. This paper was brilliant. It was full of ideas, some of which sounded like complete nonsense, but they defended their position well. By the time I’d finished reading I wasn’t totally convinced by their argument, but they had ideas that were definitely exciting. Best of all it was written in English. Reading it didn’t feel like I was wrestling with the authors.

This is not trivial. Perhaps my case is extreme but at the moment I’m reading material on colonisation from a few periods, Classics, Archaeology, some Maths, Biology and Psychology. I’m not going to run out of material that relevant to my research any time soon. If this paper had been written badly what would be the correct response? To persevere and hope I could make some sense of it? Or to write it off as a bad job and spend the time more fruitfully by reading two other better written papers instead?

It’s frustrating to try and read something where the author has spent a lot of time working on the concept and no thought to how the paper reads. There are academic texts that read like the author has vomited their brains onto the paper and tried to scrape the mess into a vaguely coherent order. There are some good reasons for this. Journal papers and book chapters are often to tight word limits, so there’s a need for economy of language which can become a haven for jargon. There’s also the tendency for authors to write for people with similar knowledge of an area, which unintentionally creates a language barrier. This is unfortunate and sometimes unavoidable, but that still doesn’t make it a form of communication we should aspire to.

There’s a reason that many authors write in English rather than their own language. It’s not for my personal benefit, but because they want to expose their work to as many readers as possible. Some don’t and their readerships may be smaller as a result. Similarly I think that writing in accessible English is an advantage. There are some prominent professors whose work will be read because it has to, they’re simply too eminent to avoid. But for many authors even in academia, I don’t think readers can be taken for granted. —–