The gutter-low standards of academic journals
To have somebody say you “write well in an academic context” is like being called the handsome one in an ugly contest.
Academic writing has a bad reputation – a reputation it usually earns. Academic prose is dense, dry, formulaic, habitually bloated and often pretentious. By straining to look intelligent, the worst of it just looks silly.
This is not to say that intellectually-stimulating, life-changing writing doesn’t appear in academic journals. But for every eye-opening article, there are a dozen that could make a person stupider – if anybody bothered to read them.
The latest proof that ‘academic’ does not mean “intellectual’ appeared in the online magazine Areo.