Academic Writing

Perhaps I am completely out of it but I had no idea what “Fab Labs” were before I read the Troxler article. I found myself scrambling to figure it all out. But then again, I often do that when reading a new subject area. I hear myself repeating in my inside voice: “what the hell is he trying to say”.  I hear it an awful lot. Now this may not be always because the articles are over my head or outside my comfort zone of understanding. Though, sadly it is often the case. Sometimes though (quite often in fact) academic articles are obtuse, rambling, jargon laden pontifications. In these cases, I do find it hard to delve into the topic and become interested. As a previous English major (I'd rather be reading Chaucer if the truth be known), I find a lot of academic writing is difficult if not impossible to suffer through. Not exactly junk, but often there are great ideas disguised with excess wordiness. While I really am fond of theorist’s like Judith Butler, I cringe at the memory of plodding through these theories in my undergraduate years. It reminds me of those crazy attempts at showing academic writing to be more farce than substance, like Alan Sokal’s nonsense article hoax in the mid-1990’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) that was jam packed with postmodern and deconstructionist babble and fooled the best and the brightest academics. The communal efforts of altruistic creation in the Fab Lab article also reminded me of some silly open source projects such as the Postmodernism Essay generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/), which is a lot of fun when you have some spare time between assignments. Ok - lots of fun but, let’s get back to the reality at hand. Academic writing isn't all bad. And, all that being said, I actually enjoyed the three peer review options. Don’t get me wrong … there is definitely some criticism to be had but going through the articles made me think about writing styles and of why we write the way we write when writing for academia. What makes us want to say so much that we end up saying so little? When I have to think about critical reading tips that help me get through articles, I guess the most helpful and effective tip that I continue to stick with is the practice of asking questions about each section of an article. "Does this make sense?" "What is the writer trying to say?" "What is the writer attempting to prove?" Writing down these notes in the margins is probably the best reading advice I have ever learned and have stuck with throughout grad school.