I don’t know why academic writing is so bad. It could be that the skills that make you into a decent scholar have little correlation to the skills you need to communicate effectively in writing. Or maybe people try to shield themselves from criticism by being intentionally ambiguous. When I was studying German philosophy, I came to the conclusion that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was the worst writer in the history of the world. At first, I thought it was the complexity of his system of philosophy that was confounding me, but then I read Arthur Schopenhauer and he wrote clear as a bell. I came to the conclusion that, in addition to being a bad writer, Hegel was also immensely insecure, and so he wrote in such a way that he could evade criticism. And then there was Nietzsche, who could write beautifully but not rigorously.
Not About the Oscars
