Academic Treacle

The blogger Guido Fawkes seems delighted that he has achieved the respectability of being mentioned in an academic report for the journal 'Parliamentary Affairs'. Sadly, it's a report written in a typical academic style that is probably most closely analogous to the art of wading through a noticeably thick treacle. Lots of long words to hide a limited conclusion. It starts like this -

The 1990s e-democracy paradigm was preoccupied with the creation of deliberative spaces, particularly discussion forums.

And if I mention that that's one of the shorter, snappier sentences, you begin to get a sense of why it's unlikely to be a best-seller, for all its presence on one of the UK internet's most visited blogs. The research done by political academics can often be illuminating and valuable, but why it has to be written in so utterly impenetrable a style I'll never understand, and it does nothing to attract students to studying politics at university. Do we really have to extract the life out of a fascinating study in this way? In the deathless prose of our 'Parliamentary Affairs' authors, it might be an issue of quality, and notoriously -

‘Quality’ as a concept can be too wide and too subjective for empirical study unless a clear definition of the constituents and the exclusions is made.

The Decline of Blogging

Blogging has been light recently, I know, but I haven't yet given up on the unforgiving task. Unlike web fixture Iain Dale, who has finally pulled the curtain down on his blog, while he now concentrates on being a radio host. I've commented here about what this means, if anything, about the direction of the blogosphere; and I've commented here about Tim Montgomerie's call for a new, mainstream conservatism of the right. There was a Conservative Mainstream once - of the left. What goes around, comes around, I guess - and with lines like that, maybe I should give up blogging after all.

Low Level Blogging

This blog was originally intended to direct A-level politics students towards stories of note in the pursuit of their studies. One or two even managed to access it a couple of times. While that is still meant to be its purpose, it has obviously become a therapeutic sounding board for me as well; we're all columnists in the great connected world of the internet! Its school-based nature does, however, mean that the impetus for regular updates tends to die a death in the long, lesson-less summer period. Why mention that? Simply for tidiness - an explanation of why this is so infrequently updated, at least until September brings another opportunity for me to persuade a new tranche of students that these words are worth reading.