Some thoughts. I found this comment interesting, and it wouldn’t surprise me:
You guys have not read many manuscripts from academic writers, have you? As a long-time academic editor, I read hundreds–hundreds that were submitted for publication, no less.
Academics do not write well at all–most quite poorly. The three I knew who were truly gifted writers… to have lunch with them was to begin to study the wall for crack patterns, they were so introverted. Department chairs were absolutely incoherent, but there was substance there–they were simply quite used to having secretaries and copy editors do the hard work of making it readable for them. The legions of humanities and social science assistant and associate profs… one wanders across the tundra of their boggy prose delighted for even the tiniest patch of semi-solid jargon-free verbiage.
In my experience, good workman-like writing at any education level is quite rare.
I’ve often suspected that this is true of many “journalists” as well, and was one of the reasons that there was so much initial resistance to blogging — a lot of them really do need “layers of fact checkers and editors” to create their “product.”
To get a paper accepted by peer review requires a significant contribution to the field along with correct math and scientific reasoning, but it requires much more than that. Beyond satisfying these basic requirements, the peer review process is ultimately about framing persuasive arguments to the reader, the reviewers, and the editor.
To be a good scientist, that is, one who is recogized for their production of journal articles, one has to be a good lawyer, that is, someone who is skilled in framing an argument to be persuasive. A scientist is someone seeking some underlying truth to the physical world; a lawyer is seeking some underlying truth regarding the social world of laws, contracts, and promises.
Perhaps the English Common Law adversarial justice system is taken too far in the U.S. and what many lawyers are after is not the truth in any recognizable form. The peer review system is also adversarial, and perhaps many papers are published or rejected, not on their intrinsic merit but on whether the author has more bluster than the reviewers.
All I can say is that reading Web pages such as this and participating in the give and take of the comments section as been good cross-training for the inevitable “responding to the review comments” in getting an academic paper published.
I taught college writing for much of the 90s, both as a grad. student and then as a visiting junior faculty member at a small college, and what it says there about the importance of detailed feedback is true. What it doesn’t explain so clearly is that in the current academic environment, teaching writing well is nearly impossible because students don’t want to be challenged on facts or logic, nor do they want to be told that their prose is disorganized, incoherent, or overwrought, nor do they want to receive the grades they deserve. If an instructor strives to maintain high standards, most of the students will exact revenge by savaging him on their course evaluations. So instead, many choose to play the game of talking tough but caving so as not to offend the precious egos of the “customers.” And many others don’t even talk tough–instead it’s all a matter of teaching by validating “feelings” and downplaying structure. Needless to say, it’s no surprise that few learn how to write and that most academics can’t write, either.
Unfortunately this problem is not confined to the academic field. I spend roughly a third of my time at work re-writing the texts of my client’s degreed engineers, not to mention proof-reading all of the notes on the drawings that I am supposed to be updating.
What really grates is when the checker is not a native english speaker and is off site, who tells me that obvious mis-spellings are correct. His own writing at times resembles Old High Martian; it is such gibberish.
BTW, I don’t have a degree in English, but I read a lot, and love the beauty of the written word, which at its best conjures up vivid images and descriptions of other places and times.