Why Academics Stink at Writing by Steven Pinker.
From the post:
Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time low: “Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development.” In a similar vein, Bill Watterson has the 6-year-old Calvin titling his homework assignment “The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes,” and exclaiming to Hobbes, his tiger companion, “Academia, here I come!”
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Steven’s analysis applies mostly to academic writing styles, although I have suffered through more than one tome in CS that apologies for some topic X being in another chapter. Enough already, just get on with it. Needed a severe editing which would have left it shorter and an easier read.
Worth the read if you try to identify issues in your own writing style. Identifying errors in the writing style of others won’t improve your writing.
I first saw this in a twee by Steven Strogatz
PS: Being able to communicate effectively with others is essential to marketing yourself or products/services.