As a doctoral student, however, I never felt that I properly belonged to the world I was entering. My big problem was that I could not master the academic language which I was expected to use. I would struggle to read articles and books with complex, technical terminology. I would try to translate the unfamiliar words into simpler ones, into the ordinary language that I used in daily life. Sometimes, I succeeded in doing so, and sometimes I didn’t. And occasionally, when I’d finished the translation, the ideas and the sense seemed to dribble away, leaving truisms and little else. Then, I would be perplexed. Was it my failure to understand or was it that a writer, who had actually been published, really had so little to say? I could hardly believe the latter possibility. [omg yes i remember when i first figured this out in both academic and curatorial writing. i was so pissed off.] [...] So, it has continued over the years. I have avoided reading the technical journals which I should read and which I occasionally publish in. I have never taken on the technical terminology as if it were my first language. I still have to translate if I wish to understand the academic articles that I do read. But I no longer feel ashamed. Today, I can see young postgraduates struggling to understand what they know they must read. Sometimes, I see their confidence draining away in the face of big words, as if they were failing the test that defines whether they are fit to think intellectually. I want to tell them to trust their own supposed inadequacies, for their failings might protect them from the onslaught of big words.I hope that some young academics, who are today as uncertain as I was years ago, may take some confidence from this book.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 05:19:44 +0000