rubs forehead
I never know if its because i'm just not as smart as the professor and he/she finds this stuff easy and assumes that i do as well, or if he/she (in his case he) if he finds it equally difficult but assigns it anyway because despite the difficulty the text is the only one that says what it says and we just have to wade through it and put up with the superfluous high ball language, or if he's assigned this because he thinks it makes him look smart because it takes so much longer and uses such (unnecessarily?) complex language.
I realize that i am extremely biased against texts which are difficult to read. I feel that the job of any writer is to make their work accessible, doubly so for an educator who is also writing. I do recognize that sometimes it is difficult to express ideas in simplistic ways simply because the idea is complex and in order to explain it well one must use complex methods. But i really feel that using works like "imbricated" is just pulling out the five dollars words in order to make the author sound smart and the reader feel dumb. If nothing else it makes the text much less accessible to a lay reader who may not have an expansive vocabulary but is more than capable of understanding what you're saying if you'd just say it plainly rather than dressing it up so ridiculously. I'm so busy trying to parse your meaning that i'm not getting what you're trying to explain, doesn't that defeat the point?!
I realize that i am extremely biased against texts which are difficult to read. I feel that the job of any writer is to make their work accessible, doubly so for an educator who is also writing. I do recognize that sometimes it is difficult to express ideas in simplistic ways simply because the idea is complex and in order to explain it well one must use complex methods. But i really feel that using works like "imbricated" is just pulling out the five dollars words in order to make the author sound smart and the reader feel dumb. If nothing else it makes the text much less accessible to a lay reader who may not have an expansive vocabulary but is more than capable of understanding what you're saying if you'd just say it plainly rather than dressing it up so ridiculously. I'm so busy trying to parse your meaning that i'm not getting what you're trying to explain, doesn't that defeat the point?!