September 26, 2014
Why Academics Stink at Writing
Excerpt 1): “Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?”
Exerpt 2) “Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook.
Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory applies to some academics some of the time”
My comment: See The Great Pheromone Myth by Richard L. Doty (p. 3)
“A key element of my thesis is that it is erroneous to infer that a plurality of mammalian behaviors and endocrine responses is uniquely determined in an invariant way by single or small sets of chemical stimuli and to apply a generic and misleading name to the presumptive agents in support of such an inference.”
See for contrast: Human pheromones: integrating neuroendocrinology and ethology
“The importance of the human sense of smell has been largely underestimated… the affect of pheromones on our emotions is linked to the effect of pheromones on the hormones of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis – an unconscious affect.”
