aella’s obtuseness toward academic writing
At this party, someone tells me I should publish my research in a journal. This sounds nice, but the ease of their suggestion makes me think they don’t understand my cultural background. I have no idea what it takes to publish research in a journal. You have to make a google doc and then type up stuff in formal, cold language that sounds like a study, right? I read studies sometimes — I can write something that sounds like an ‘abstract’ and a ‘methodology’ section. But then what? Do I google “science journal” and then find an email for someone and then email them my google doc and say “can you publish this please”? Do I have to pay them? Do they pay me? Are there any forms I have to fill out or approval processes? I don’t even know what a journal is exactly — it’s a group of people who run a website and they pick stuff people email them to publish? It’s as though a sports person casually told me I should just join their football team.
this is from something aella recently wrote. I think I should respond to this for several reasons:
1. there’s a decent chance, gut estimate 25%, that I am the person this is describing
2. if I’m not, I said something similar but crucially different from this once, and it was received in a similar way
3. disregarding the above, a lot of people have talked about this and will continue to talk about it, so it’s something worth clarifying.
if I’m indeed the person here, what I said was that she should collaborate with a social scientist who could not only take care of her gaps in knowledge but teach her some of the methods along the way. I gave jonathan haidt as an example of a someone who would probably do this, and I gave aziz ansari as an example of a non-academic who successfully did this kind of collaboration.
her immediate question in response was, and this is a verbatim quote — “why? is it because academics will think I’m stupid?”. despite my effort to help her understand, she did not seem to understand that her ability to write and sound a certain way was not the problem. her writing *ability*, as in her actual ability to form sentences and paragraphs, is quite good — and I’m saying this from a position of resentment. she’s more than capable of writing well, but she’s obviously not going to go through the slow process of formal education given the pace of her lifestyle, so I recommended collaboration as what was in my mind a very obvious and feasible middle ground.
this obtuseness is and has been my central beef with aella since the very beginning; since before we briefly knew each other IRL. she seems unwilling to understand why practice — as in, methodology and citation — actually matters, and for whatever reason engages literature on primarily social and stylistic rather than epistemic grounds. this passage reaffirms the same tendency, which I sincerely hope she grows out of.
you, as the randomly sampled reader, are more than capable of collaboration and if you believe that you have unique insight I strongly encourage you to cold-contact relevant academics from departments you’ve googled. I’m frustrated at how seldom this practice is encouraged, and if I can get even a few more people to do that from this post it’ll be worth it.
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thread/discussion here.
