Friday, August 31, 2012

convoluted writing in academic philosophy: an illustration

This is why academic philosophy is so hard to read: writers get lazy / used to writing in unnecessarily convoluted ways. For example:
"terms like 'true' and 'false' are merely linguistic devices whose necessity resides in enabling the performance of certain logically expressive tasks"....
!!!?
"whose necessity resides in enabling the performance of..."
!!!?

Write this instead:
"...mere linguistic devices that we need to perform..."
Seriously!

(This example taken from New Waves in Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 3.)

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