Cursed By Language

The other day, I was listening to a podcast where Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar were talking about the literary works of their respective fathers. In response to a question on what learnings from his father have influenced his work, Javed Akhtar quoted something his father the Late Jaan Nisar Akhtar said, that I am going to paraphrase - "Mushkil zubaan mein likhna aasaan hai, lekin asaan zubaan mein likhna, mushkil."

This line reminded me of a particularly prickly pet peeve (the alliteration is unintended) of mine - inaccessible language of academic research papers for research-unintelligent folks like me.

The opportunity in learning from academic papers is either lost to a paywall or to incomprehensible language. I am talking about the latter, though, I also don't understand why quality academic research is not available for free to people who should actually be putting it to use. Do you see the elitism in this endeavour? I strongly feel that research on pedagogy or #FLN, for example, needs to be easily accessible to teachers/facilitators of learning so they are able to critically analyse their own work and possibly even see the scope to innovate from learnings through reading research papers. If all readers of a piece of academic writing are not given the opportunity to understand it, it shouldn't be surprising that there is such disparity in ambition and achievement among educators.

Personally, I've had to often times read segments over and over again, read the referenced pieces of writing and other articles to even say I somewhat understand what the paper is trying to convey. While the abstract is supposed to convey an idea of what the paper is talking about, I've found the abstract, at times, assumes the reader to have a certain level of content-specific language proficiency.

While I am here ranting, I also understand this is unlikely to change anytime soon. I would like to know if there are others like me here who access academic papers only to be put off or be dejected in its incomprehensibility. How have you worked around it?

#accessandequity #makeresearchaccessible