I love reading nonfiction books, but the ones I am usually very weary of are those written by academics. Now I’m not going to throw all academics under the bus, because some can certainly write, but many only write from the perspective of having an academic audience. There are some who write non-fiction books for a general audience that just don’t read well. Now these books have a pretty good tell-tale – at the end of the book there is often a large bibliographic section full of notes, the book almost becomes a very large academic paper (sometimes there are copious footnotes as well). Now in a non-fiction book, I have no problem with providing notes on topics discussed, and providing the reader with “further reading” should they be so interested, or perhaps a link to the source of some vital piece of information. It is when nearly everything written has a citation that it becomes a problem.

Academic writing is often hard for people to read, because it is often not written in a style that makes it the least bit interesting. Maybe this is down to the fact that academics don’t read enough non-academic material, or perhaps in disciplines like STEM, they were never taught to write in anything but a staid fashion. Or perhaps use non-conventional words like staid – it would have been better if I had used written stuffy instead. Ask a first year student to read an academic paper of some sort, even on a benign topic such as food history, and they will often baulk at the task, explaining that the article was boring to read. Yes, it likely was. Like in all walks of life there are people who are good story tellers and others who can string a series of words together int a sentence, but who cannot write a convincing story.

One academic whose writing I greatly admire is food historian Annie Gray. Ms Gray can’t write books fast enough for me to read. That being said, you are more likely to find good writing from humanities academics, probably because many have exceptional writing skills. STEM students are never taught to write much beyond scientific things as undergrads, and never really learn how to write. Ever read a scientific journal paper? They are on the whole pretty boring. The more degrees people get, the more their writing becomes pigeonholed into being pretty monotonous. Humanities profs also tend to actually write books throughout their careers, and perhaps the broader their audience the better? STEM academics very rarely write books, because career advancement is all about writing journal papers. That’s not to say that the humanities are perfect. In the past few years I have glanced through a couple of books on food history that had titles that implied they were worth reading. But both were uber heavy on referencing, and lacked flow, making the books far to formal for the interested reader (almost like a thesis).

This is the one thing I always disliked about academia – the computer science articles are often super boring to read, with the likes of physics and chemistry being even worse. It’s no wonder the average person doesn’t understand what goes on in academia. It’s one of the reasons I started blogging. Because writing blog posts allows me to write in my style of writing, rather than the style expected by some publisher (or heaven forbid some self-absorbed “peer” reviewer). It also allows me to express things that I want to express, rather than touting someone else’s standard way of thinking about things. Personally, one of the worst tasks one has to perform in academia is reading other people’s work, either peer-reviewing papers, or heaven forbid reviewing a thesis (these have become progressively worse over the past two decades, as writing skills have declined).

At the end of the day, the best writers are often those with little or no formal training. They just write. Some are natural writers, others hone their craft over years of practise. But as I have said before, good writers are also prolific readers, as writing is not a craft that exists in a vacuum. If you don’t read anything, then I doubt you will ever become a good writer.