= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
fubarobfusco comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (289)
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).
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.)