PhD blog: 16
Graham Foster is a PhD student at the English Research Institute of Manchester Metropolitan University. Postgraduate study: a glossary It’s been a quiet few weeks, PhD wise. I have been reading. That’s all. Just reading for hours each day and making notes. While this is a fascinating endeavour for me to pursue, it doesn’t exactly make for the most dynamic blog post. But it is this reading that has made me consider a certain aspect of academia that is frustrating, exasperating, and … well, it turns my stomach on occasion.
The villain of this piece is the oblique language that is used in academic books, theses and articles. It seems prevalent in these texts that the writer will deliberately obscure the (often very erudite) point with needlessly complex language. It strikes me that it is a form of jargon, like that of a middle manager and his ‘information cascades’ and ‘blue sky thinking’, and I’m working hard not to let this infect my own academic writing. I should say that this complaint is nothing to do with the complexity of research, and those academics who are opening fields in the most intense theoretical discussion – that is admirable and necessary, but there is a vast talent in being able to disseminate knowledge in simple, straightforward ways that allow for thorough analysis and understanding without having to wade through the quagmire of Academy Speak. Below is a list – a glossary – of some terms I have discovered in my secondary reading that illustrate my point: Problematise - This is an odd word that sounds made up. It isn’t, but it doesn’t make for fluid reading. This is used when an academic is explaining a problem in research that needs a solution. For example, ‘Frederic Jameson’s work problematises earlier theories of the political unconscious’. I have also seen the word ‘problematisation’. 'Delineate a trajectory of...' - I’ve been guilty of using this one. I felt guilty as I typed each and every word. For example, ‘McLuhan delineates a trajectory of change in the use of mass media in the latter part of the 20th Century’. Scrutineer - as in someone who scrutinises. This is usually found in bureaucratic dispatches and sounds ridiculous. Especially when that episode of comedy show The Day Today is brought to mind, starring Steve Coogan as ‘The Scrutineer’… Corpus - as above, this is not necessarily hard to decipher, I just think it is overused. It explains a body of work, for example, ‘I will closely examine the selected corpus of work’. There are so many more, but merely listing them is giving me a headache. It’s easy to be intimidated by this language, but no one should be. In my (humble) opinion, embarking on postgraduate study has nothing to do with a person’s grip on big words. Original and thought provoking research is the key to success. That and being able to share it. When I think of good examples of complex thinkers that use simple language, I think about the late Terence McKenna, a man who had a huge reservoir of knowledge that he processed into simple, but no less detailed and erudite, lectures and books. I think about Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist whose books are entertaining as well containing a dazzling breadth of information. Whether or not this brief blog post will incur the wrath of academics everywhere, I don’t know, but I’m trying to illustrate the fact that theses are not graded on how indecipherable they are, and the real challenge for the academic, for the teacher in general, is to inspire others with the knowledge that they have gathered. Not to bury that knowledge in jargon. Read Graham's previous blogs:Graham's other blog (on BlogSpot)
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