ABSTRACT
The symptoms of the malady afflicting academic writing may seem in themselves benign, and undoubtedly they would be benign if the symptoms were not also the disease. The first and most evident of these symptoms takes the form of stylistic impersonality and uniformity—an effect which lays the ground for a game called “Name-Shuffle.” A second symptom (“Author’s Elbow”?) measures the distance between the technical vocabulary or jargon flourished in academic writing and the English language as it is used non-professionally—as writers aim their words at other persons rather than at an abstracted skill or competence. A third symptom might be named, as after a Pilgrim maiden, “Purity of Context”; it marks the indifference of academic writing to the way what is being written about matters to the historical setting either of the subject written about or of anything else.
