Does Academic Writing Style Prevent Knowledge Application

Rachel Toor has an excellent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (online) which discusses the writing style of academics. This article explores some of the problems with academic writing and prescribes some solutions from Orwell, who evidently recognized the pompous and unclear nature of academic writing during his day.

While this subject might initially seem tangential to KM, I think it is central to the gap between practitioners and academics. I am not advocating we turn complex research or ideas into bulleted lists. But the passive and obfuscating writing style that academics use is not conducive to knowledge sharing. Fellow academics will admit to not reading journals as thoroughly as they should (and they are the primary audience!). It is rare to find practitioners who read academic articles.

The solution? Reward the idea and the application of the idea, not how complex we can make the idea sound. This might actually be possible as journals lose their print foothold (read dominance) and are forced to consider alternative audiences, channels, and revenue models. However, if we stripped away some of the complexity behind the description of academic ideas, maybe many of the ideas would look a little silly and underdeveloped. But that's ok. Because we could widen the audience and succeed in building upon and applying ideas across disciplines. The comments to Ms. Toor's article seem to support the idea that even academics understand the problems with their writing. But I really don't see change coming. Many people have gotten tenure with silly or underdeveloped ideas cloaked in pretentious sounding language.