Laurence Sterne Quotes

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

Academic writing is such a different way of writing.

If you want to be a Roman Catholic scholar and write, you've got to write in such a way that nobody understands what you're saying, and then you're thought to be profound.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

I'm not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.

I don't think, in my entire 18 years as a student, I ever used an exclamation point in an academic paper.

History belongs to everyone. I don't think you have to give up scholarly standards. But I also don't think you want to write something that is impenetrable. You try as hard as you can to be readable.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose, high-lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense, but I thought that was my problem.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

I suggest to young professors that their first work should be written in a jargon only to be understood by the erudite few. With that behind them, they can ever after say what they have to say in a language 'understand of the people.'

There is a culture among academics to be obscure. If you're too clear, you can't be saying anything interesting. The issue isn't word length. The issue is a commitment to speaking in a way an audience can understand.

Sociological prose is generally written without images in an exact form for an academic audience.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I could never figure out or probably did not take the trouble to figure out what the great philosophical problems are about. The momentous statements I come across are at best a storm in a teacup. There are quite a number of people who have a vested interest in the stuff, make a noble living out of it, and they conspire with one another to keep it alive.

I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

I really am a very research-oriented writer.

If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.

The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon.