Bret Devereaux

So there's that tweet floating around about bad academic writing in literature. I have thoughts. First: the text in question, I can almost guarantee, has never been assigned to an undergraduate. No one gets to lit-101 and opens up their book to that. 1/8

This https://twitter.com/KBAndersen/status/1373277502735585284 … is very clearly field-to-field communication. It's the literature equivalent of an experimental white paper in physics. (Also, pulling jargon-heavy passages like this out of context always renders them difficult to read) 3/8

Now I will say that I cordially dislike that style of academic writing. I very much prefer arguments that can be put in plain language (but then again, that's part of why I don't do a ton of narratology). 4/8

Great. Now I have to go look up " narratology."

The study of narrative. In a history context, it's how the nature of narrative shapes the telling of a historical event. E.g., the way that a narrative source (e.g. an account of the event) has to be linear, whereas events may not be (many things happening at the same time).

I looked it up but I thought it was funny in a paragraph about jargon.