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Date: | Fri, 30 Apr 1999 11:54:19 +0100 |
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I agree totally with what Ned Heite has to say. In my opinion, there are
no concepts so difficult that they need to be hidden in technical
jargon. Nor is it necessarily more concise to use technical rather than
everyday language: try reading a paragraph of, say, Shanks & Tilley's
*Re-constructing Archaeology* and you'll find that it can generally be
expressed in a sentence or two of much simpler language.
This is not something that's confined to technical reports in
archaeology. Without wishing to raise the spectre of postmodernism, I
have noticed that many writers in that tradition do use unnecessarily
pompous and portentous language. I suspect that it's all part of the
current academic Zeitgeist: erudition is best displayed through the use
of language (which, after all, is where postmodern philosophy started),
rather than through the transparent communication of difficult concepts.
We only need to look back at the great popularisers of the mid twentieth
century (Wheeler, Childe, Collingwood etc. this side of the Atlantic) to
see why our generation is failing so miserably. Who today is capable of
writing something as lucid but theoretically acute as *What happened in
history*?
Keith Matthews
Chester Archaeology/University of Liverpool
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