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complexmeme comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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That "Engfish" essay is strange. It's right that textbooks and so on encourage students to write in a way that's impersonal and overly verbose. But it doesn't recognize the advantages of academic English. It doesn't even seem to recognize the role (or existence!) of dialects in general. Instead, it takes bad examples of academic English (the writing textbook) and suggests they should be more like bad examples of informal English (the third-grader).
Can you link to examples of irreducibly good academic writing?
Anything by Knuth.
E.g. http://cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/
I've got to agree, things by Knuth are pretty damn irreducible.
What are "the advantages of academic English"?
It is stuffy and turns off many people, so it sounds prestigious?
Good academic writing is concise, precise, and gets quickly to the point, delivering a huge amount of information in a short amount of space.
(Also, by sticking to the point, academic writing minimizes digressions to emotionally charged or controversial topics. This reduces the risk of distracting the reader by getting into mind-killer territory. But that's more about what academic writing says, not how.)
If informal English and academic English are the two extremes on a normal distribution of writing styles, and exhortations to alter your writing style tend to have a smaller effect than their intensity should dictate (because writing styles are well-ingrained), this advice should push academic writers towards the middle of the distribution but not far enough to get into informal areas.
So... They're overshooting because it takes a lot of persuasion to get people to change their writing style just a little?
Jeez, why didn't you just say so?
As you have noted, I wrote it academically.
As a sort of example and a great discussion on academic English, I recommend David Foster Wallace's essay Tense Present. You will probably want to skip the paragraph that immediately follows the St. Augustine quote.
(And, edit: this was intended to be in reply to GabrielDuquette's post here )