Academic Reading is Ballz

Superman

Now i'm doing 2nd yr. geography ,(pause while you laugh) and Overall its ok but I can't get a grip of all this academic reading, it's not that I got stacks I just find it completely confusing and not very intuitive;

for example:
This morn i cam in at 10 to 9 and said i'd do some reading so i got my text and started reading after half an hour I had got roughly 2 pages read and still had very little idea as to what was going on!

Now i'm not bad at english and did pretty good in the ol' leavin. Is there a trick to academic reading or is it just wrote for a select few nerds.

here's the shiz i'm talkin about:

the scalar interpretation of the geography of globalization
. . . has to do with the possibility that the very
ontology of place and territoriality itself is becoming
altered by the rise of world-scale processes and transnational
connectivity. The language of spatial change
remains that of assuming organization along scalar and
territorial lines: reterritorialization follows deterritorialization,
and spatial scales are relativised under globalization
. . . Little concession is made to the possibility
that traditional demarcations between spatial and
territorial forms of organization might be blurring or
moving like a line in shifting sand. (Amin 2002, 387)

What does it mean!

OfflerCrocGod

YES - God I hate sifting through such garbage for the one or two nuggets of fact contained therein. I think the pompous verbosity of these academic texts is there to hide the essential truth; which is that the ideas expounded in the texts are actually quite easy and their writers are embarrassed about that and therefore try to hide it behind a curtain of grandiloquent waffle

Superman

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

YES - God I hate sifting through such garbage for the one or two nuggets of fact contained therein. I think the pompous verbosity of these academic texts is there to hide the essential truth; which is that the ideas expounded in the texts are actually quite easy and their writers are embarrassed about that and therefore try to hide it behind a curtain of grandiloquent waffle

ha ! that sounds like my texts

Alana

Here here, more monkey simple texts!Or at least ones that get to the point and not show off the writers extensive hyperbole. Superman, I feel your pain been somewhat snowed under myself...just be glad you aint doing something like philosophy or some other subject that uses fancy sentence structured literary yoke-a-ma-bobs

Superman

Alana wrote:

just be glad you aint doing something like philosophy or some other subject that uses fancy sentence structured literary yoke-a-ma-bobs

Yeah I thought that by doing geogers i'd be lookin at hill's and stuff but I am unpleasently suprised by all this social geography and geo-political geography lark.
Ah well I guess at the end of the day It is only 1 part of 4 so I can kinda wing it.

tribble

I've been told that the American college/uni texts are "made for monkeys" as oppose the the overly flowery British texts where the author simply tries to confuse you in order to make himself seem more intelligent.

But those quotes you posted are in American English so I don't know what's going on...

Alana

Superman wrote:

Ah well I guess at the end of the day It is only 1 part of 4 so I can kinda wing it.

Indeed, always the best form of studying.

Yea i'm doing politics...thought it would be all arguing and getting ya ya's out, alas i too was misguided-or just didnt read up on it properly(prefer to think its the first one more so...:) )...loving the political philosophy bit...seriously...ho hum...realy some people just have to much time on their hands, and decided, right im going to make sum poor students life hell with my incestant ramblings...joy to the world...

Superman

Alana wrote:

some people just have to much time on their hands, and decided, right im going to make sum poor students life hell with my incestant ramblings...joy to the world...

Yeah I always have the impression that people who write academic stuff just decide they will make a quick penny by rehashing a well talked about theory, in the hope that it will get published and they can continue to live there life of free wine and cheese receptions.

I also have a theory that they actually pay people with thesaurus's to replace small word with big words!

So far the biggest nonsense job I have came across are Joycean scholars, they literally spend there whole life reading the same books over and over.Then at dinner parties (with other well to do academics) they can make a few Joycean qoutes and be the life of the party!

Anyway, I think thats enough of a rant, I should count my luck stars and be happy i'm not doing commerce. I can imagine it now a room full of oompa-loompa's and people who want to be Ashton Kutcher.uh oh, better stop before i go on another rant!

DadaKopf

Wow, now I wish I took geography when I was doing Arts! I did philosophy and politics, i found loads of texts challenging, but loads were written really plainly and clearly. There's a real trend these days, particularly among American and some poncey Continential writers, to make their sentences like Homer makes compressed bars of spaghetti!

Still, that quote makes perfect sense to me! But I'm a lame Masters student now, so I actually pay attention to this stuff now!

What I realised was the stuff I was reading was really interesting but because there was no incentive to really, really read it properly (even during essay time), it never went in. When I went back to read stuff I'd read in second year about international relations this year, I realised just how baffling it really is and how little attention I paid. Even this year, at the beginning of the course, I made an effort to read but it never went in.

Things changed for me in Third Year though!