Reading: Academic writing: why does it have to be so dull and stilted?

Higher education is about learning, but we do ourselves - and our students - no favours by writing arcane tripe that obscures rather than illuminates, writes lecturer James Derounian

Think of writing that has lodged in your mind - for all the right reasons. A novel such as Yann Martel's Life of Pi or The Damned United, a fictionalised account of the football manager Brian Clough. Or Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy featuring the heroine Lisbeth Salander. Or maybe the actor David Niven's autobiography, The Moon's a Balloon. What's the common denominator? They are all memorable, the writing demands that you turn the pages, and you are avid to discover what happens next.

And this is what we demand of our students' writing. Take a look at your assignment marking criteria: clarity of communication, supported with evidence, assembling a coherent story. Contrast this then with the conventions and reality of much writing in academic journals. Can you honestly say that you look forward, with certainty, to reading articles published in august journals? If not, then why is this the case?

I think there are a host of reasons: first is the impact of inertia - this is how it's always been done, therefore this is how it stays. In this respect, it seems to me that academic writing resembles administration - in both cases, precedent is viewed as dangerous; best to stick to the plan, the format, tried and trusted. But, after a cursory glance, this must be called in to question because the same approach has been around for yonks and over time there has been a revolution in communication - by internet, digital media, blogging and texting.

Shouldn't academic writing be open to change and progression, to move with the times without - of course - losing precious rigour? The status quo is reinforced by the blind reviewing of articles by those who know the convention, expect certain styles and approaches and enforce these.

Not to mention the time delay. Can it be right or acceptable that in an age of 24/7 communication you submit an article, wait months for feedback and then - in the happy event that the revised work is accepted - the article is finally published maybe a year later. Currency? Relevance? Agency for change? And if it is printed, you then have the issue of it being read by three people and a dog.

Research and accuracy are, of course, vital but, surely, so too is dissemination:

getting it out there, connecting beyond the academy. In many or most disciplines, practitioners can learn valuable lessons from the latest research - in areas as diverse as education, social welfare, planning, music and business studies. So why not publish and reward publication where material will reach people and be read (widely)?

So two hurdles negotiated - submitting an article and then getting someone to read it. But then, what are we actually reading? Take the following chapter title from a 1994 book: "Something Resists: Reading-Deconstruction as Ontological Infestation." And what made me laugh like a drain when I reviewed this was the fact that one of the editors actually commented, without irony, that some readers had "suggested that all we had done was to present some very obvious and well-known ideas and dressed them up in fancy conceptual language - designed to appeal to restricted elite audiences who shared the common code of jargonised text". Fortunately, when I showed the aforementioned chapter to a professorial colleague, he uttered the immortal words: "It's a complete load of bollocks, James." And where else do you encounter depersonalised writing along the lines of not "I discovered" but "the author discovered", "the research showed" - how stilted.

Post-modernist writings seem to be the worst for linguistic slaughter - how about this recent Institute of British Geographers paper featuring "naturalistic video recordings of drivers and passengers pioneered by Mondada's praxiological studies of ordinary action during car journeys in France." Really? Just ask if you'd like to see my holiday snaps. Not to mention the following papers randomly taken from the 2011 Association of American Geographers' conference: one paper discusses an "in-progress video project ... that examines the multi-faceted position of dogs in the Philippines"; another reviews "onto-political lacunae". Higher education is, of course, about learning, about broadening horizons but we do ourselves (and our students) no favours at all by writing arcane tripe that obscures rather than illuminates. Maybe some of this emperor's new clothes syndrome (ENCS) links to emerging subjects that display a certain insecurity and therefore insist on fancying up their credentials.

It seems to me that the measure of genius is the ability to explain complex matters in intelligible form, so I'm all for great popularisers like David Attenborough and A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor. Let's get off the high horse, vacate the academy and connect with people - to mutual advantage. As the American educationist John Dewey said more than 100 years ago, the university "shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons."

In similar vein, Einstein observed: "It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid." While the physicist Richard Feynman opined: "The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought."

Can I reiterate that I have no problem with difficult concepts but I hold with the words of a contemporary philosopher, Peter Singer: "My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues."

I'm with you, Peter

James Derounian is a principal lecturer in community development and local governance and National Teaching Fellow, University of Gloucestershire.