Fatally flawed

[terriko]

I was browsing around, and found this article where someone is asking the author if she'll be putting her thesis online. She replied that she'd be using the ideas and reworking them to make them easier to read. "The writing style is pretty academic and not terribly accessible, which is a big criticism I make of feminist scholarship."

And here I had to laugh. Because you know one of the comments I got in my proposal defence? I got told that my thesis proposal was too much like a novel and basically too readable for a scholarly endeavour.

If you ever wondered why academics are so boring, now you know. ;)

Comments

[terriko]

And to be fair, he had some very valid critiques about some of my formatting and writing style. But the idea that my thesis proposal was too pleasant to read still makes me laugh. :)

[unregisteredpseudonymspls]

I got it for not having a "The Thesis Of The Work Is That..." kind of statement, you know the ritual formulae that kind of make you (well, me at least) wince?

[terriko]

The one that gets me is the "The body of this work proceeds as follows: in section 2, we..."

I suppose it has its uses. But in a thesis, if I wanted to know the chapters I could probably just read the table of contents, you know?

[(Anonymous)]

I've been accused of journalistic writing before... And apparently I like digressions. Surely both things are not crimes in academic writing. /Andy

[terriko]

Sometimes I *wish* digressions were crimes in academic writing, but no. ;)