mentally taking a drag of my mental cigarette because I don’t smoke but life has been very smokable lately
your intelligence means fucking nothing if youre devoid of empathy
i genuinely believe that when you fall in love with learning, everything else begins to realign. confidence stops being this elusive concept and becomes the quiet result of knowing yourself. knowing your mind. knowing your worth. i’ve never met a well-read person with low self esteem.
The internet alone will never be able to do what libraries can when it comes to research. Libraries can be used to gain access to research studies that are paywalled or not available online or are like a billion years old. For free. You are not limited to the books and other materials in your local library. Go talk to your local librarian about interlibrary loans and learn what research resources are available to you.
i fucking LOVE citing my sources. i love sending people links to resources for every need they may have or situation that arises. i love whipping out a physical book in the middle of conversation whenever that book is mentioned and referring to it directly. i like my reference lists/bibliographies to be at least as long if not longer than the work itself. formatting sources to fit a style guide and arranging them in the appropriate order makes me feel alive. i love being able to back up claims with evidence and tie media i’ve consumed into every discussion.
So I'm an archivist and a few days ago I got an email from a 15-year-old girl wanting to know if I've got any material on the only still-existing old mill in town (you've got to imagine this mill not like a quaint, stereotypical windmill the likes of which Don Quixote fought against but rather like an industrialisation-era factory).
I wrote back and asked if she needed this for a school project or for something else where there's a deadline looming, for the simple reason that the more time I have, the more in-depth I can go with my research and the more material I'll be able to get for her.
And she answered that no, it's for her personal use because she's interested in abandoned buildings in general.
And, like. What an absolutely excellent hobby for a teenage girl to have. I bet she's the coolest person in her class and I hope that no one ever gives her a hard time about her interests.
Wikipedia / Image from pinterest / Machiavelli / George Santayana / Thucydides / Image from pinterest / Abba - Waterloo / J. M. Barrie - Peter Pan / Fibonacci spiral / Catherynne M. Valente
also i know a lot of people will take this as just me being too stupid to understand it or something but a lot of academic writing really could stand with being clearer and better written. and avoiding the use of jargon except when it really improves flow/conveys meaning better than other terms.
To be fair, jargon very often does convey specific meaning much better than more common terms. I agree with everything else, though.
(Motion to start at least including glossaries of terms at the backs of papers? Should be a doable, low starting bar for at least a lot of social sciences, no?)
When there are best practices documents and research ethics guidelines specifically talking about the importance of making research accessible to the broader public – especially those concerned directly by it – I'd argue open access publishing on its own doesn't exactly fulfil the spec...
Mind you, I've been shocked in the past year by how much half-arsed and confusing academic writing there is in reputable academic journals. (The past year only since I haven't had reason to read academic journals much before.) When plenty of papers don't even fulfil what they set out in the abstract that well, and still pass peer review, idk what level of linguistic and pedagogical quality we can reasonably expect. Academic writing courses for some already-published academics might not be, ah... received well, lol
I let myself rest and now I'm daydreaming about academia and academic research and writing again
