Steven Pinker Uses Theories from Evolutionary Biology to Explain Why Academic Writing is So Bad — openculture.com

I don’t know about other disciplines, but academic writing in the humanities has become notorious for its jargon-laden wordiness, tangled constructions, and seemingly deliberate vagary and obscurity. A popular demonstration of this comes via the University of Chicago’s academic sentence generator, which allows one to plug in a number of stock phrases, verbs, and “-tion” words to produce corkers like “The reification of post-capitalist hegemony is always already participating in the engendering of print culture” or “The discourse of the gaze gestures toward the linguistic construction of the gendered body”—the point, of course, being that the language of academia has become so meaningless that randomly generated sentences closely resemble and make as much sense as those pulled from the average journal article (a point well made by the so-called “Sokal hoax”).

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