Professors are the ones nobody wanted to dance with in high school.
-- quoted by Patricial Nelson Limerick. "Dancing with Professors:
The Trouble with Academic Prose" New York Times Book Rev. 10/31/93.
In ordinary life, when a listener cannot understand what someone has
said, this is the usual excahnge:
Listener: I cannot understand what you are saying.
Speaker: Let me try to say it more clearly.
But in scholarly writing in the late 20th century, other rules apply.
This is the implicit exchange:
Reader: I cannot understand what you are saying.
Academic Writer: Too bad. The problem is that you are an
unsophisticated and untrained reader. If you were smarter, you
would understand me.
-- Patricial Nelson Limerick. "Dancing with Professors:
The Trouble with Academic Prose" New York Times Book Rev. 10/31/93.