In the field of US history, this is already happening. When I read other fields of history or other disciplines, I am shocked at the awfulness of the writing. Sometimes, it's because of highly theoretical arguments. Usually, it's just egregious prose.
slate.com/human-interest…
slate.com/human-interest…
I mean, really, there's no reason that the majority of academic writing in the humanities and social sciences shouldn't be more or less understood by a college graduate. And the sciences could also have easily digestible summaries of research for the general public.
But I sometimes feel I am not taken seriously, especially when I apply for fellowships or international conferences, precisely because a big part of my career is taking scholarship and digesting into narratives for the general public. And it bugs me a lot.
I get that there are reasons that people working out new ideas want to have conversations with just a few other scholars. I don't do that, but I can understand it. However, as a whole, it's almost as if the writing in academic books is intentionally bad.
It's as if a lot of academics think they won't be taken seriously if they don't write in the most unnecessarily stunted prose humanely imaginable. And given some fields (Hello English!) this is almost certainly correct.
And then there are the sides of Political Science and Economics that take a lot of insights that are common knowledge to historians and run it through regression analysis that really add little to our knowledge, but make it properly unreadable so it can be called scientific.
I know I can be really cranky on this topic. But why the hell are we studying this stuff if we don't want to make a difference in the real world? And one big way you make a difference is producing materials for the public to understand!
