Eira TanseyDecided that effective immediately upon a request for a review of an academic manuscript, I will no longer be a manuscript reviewer for a fully paywalled journal unless I already have access to it through a professional association. I no longer work in academia, and so the gift economy of peer review already is difficult for me to justify in my current role, but the fact that I can no longer access journals due to institutional paywalls is all the more reason to withhold my labor.
Also: I fucking hate the tenor, style, language, and pseudo-authority of most academic writing. But the largest crime of most academic writing is that it's BORING. I'd rather offer to be a second pair of eyes for a friend writing an explosive blog post than something that might get a handful of citations on Google Scholar over ten years.
ShadSterling@TeamMidwest I once had a roommate who was in grad school and talked about writing a paper so people could understand it, and getting penalized for not using enough inscrutable academic terminology. I understand using lingo for specificity, but intentionally making things hard to understand is just bad all around
@TeamMidwest maybe the least boring paper I’ve read is Edwin Hall’s original publication of the Hall Effect, in the late 1800’s. Much more like a narrative of the discovery, almost reads like a mystery. Used it as a reference for one of the papers I wrote for the class about how to write academic papers, and the contrast was striking. Some of the standardization of the structure of a physics paper is good, but we’ve definitely lost something I’d rather have kept
@ShadSterling oh there are definitely some terrific papers out there! i think the fact that they are such a pleasure to read is what makes them an outlier, because they are the exception, not the rule.