Jewels out of jargon

Back to research (and this blog) after weeks of hellish marking and exam boards. Nothing to do but read. Judging by the emptiness of my inbox, my colleagues are all doing the same. Let's make the most of it before the slash and burn of higher education starts in earnest in the autumn.

Osbourne and co may not realise it but reading is hard work, not least because some academics seem to think that writing a book or article full of jargon somehow makes them cleverer. So what if no-one understands it? Only a handful of people are going to read it anyway and they're all peers to whom you need to do a bit of showing off. This is what academic research means, as my colleagues and I are quickly discovering. The only journals which seem to count in research assessments are peer-reviewed journals with a tiny readership, often written in inpenetrable language. Never mind if you're a journalism professor like my colleague Brian Cathcart who has written some scorching exposes on the deaths at Deepcut barracks, which attracted widespread praise and high readership numbers. This is journalism, not research, he was told by our new "Associate Dean for Research and Enterprise". Isn't it a bit enterprising to carry out a major piece of investigative journalism which exposes a giant cover-up? Clearly not.

At least Times Higher Education isn't afraid to point out that much academic writing is, frankly, terrible, driven by the requirements of the RAE, and now the REF. "Much academic writing would never be read for pleasure and decidedly fits into the have-to rather than the want-to category", the paper says today. Too right.

Back to my pile of books on the sociology of the professions. Will I find any answers to my questions about challenges to journalistic professionalism in a digital age? They may be in there somewhere but prising the jewels out of the jargon is another matter.

Fast reading isn't always good reading

A welcome research week before the onslaught of semester 2 begins. It's so long since I had any sustained time to work on my PhD that it takes me a day to remind myself of some of the main themes of my research so far. I start reading through a stack of journal articles only to find that I must have already read them, because they're covered with underlining and my scribbled comments. Worryingly, I have no memory of any of the content of these articles, or even of having read them, so I go through them again and make notes on the main themes and arguments. Not exactly an efficient use of time but as I'm discovering, one of the most difficult aspects of doing a PhD in the gaps between the rest of my job is that the process of research is very disjointed. I read fast because I have limited time, but how useful is this if I can't remember what I've read? There must be a better way...

The first draft...of many

After three months of reading, I'm now going to force myself to write a draft (doubtless the first of many) of my "contextual" chapter, in which I try and make sense of everything I've read and link it to my research. I know it's going to be good for me when I start, like five-a-day, or going for a run before work. And it's not as if I'm not used to deadlines. Maybe what's putting me off is that every time I try to summon up some of the arguments and ideas from what I've read recently, it all slides out of my head. Maybe it's because my journalistic instinct would be to start by going into newsrooms and interviewing people about how their jobs are changing in an online environment, rather than reading what other people say about it. But academics clearly work the other way round - lots of reading, then some drafting, then the fieldwork, where you might start to find out something new. Sometime next year.

I never thought I'd say this but too much reading may not be a good thing. Order will come through writing. Or at least I hope so. Otherwise the next six years are going to be hard going.