WORK IN PROGRESS
One of my main motivations for writing this blog is my unhappiness with my writing style. While writing my texts they always feel nice and make sense, but once I read over them again, everything I thought about them collapses. Worse, when I read old texts, they always feel incomplete and unfinished.
In general I have the feeling that I can’t transform my carefully laid out argumentation arc in my head to text. In the moment of riding this article I am pretty certain this will also happen to this text.
I think one of the main reason is that I tend to squeeze as much content into one sentence as possible. Especially in my scientific writing, sentences tend to become very long, with a lot of subordinate clauses put all over the place. I think this limits my leeway, because arguments must be very tied to fit into one sentence. This leaves to less room to build out the argument. Instead of having one paragraph for an argument, it becomes one very long sentence.
I think this becomes very clear in my bachelor thesis I wrote in 2024. The following shows my first three sentence of the text, which spann about a third of the site with a line spacing of 2:
Die vorliegende Arbeit beginnt mit der Beobachtung, dass die thematische Ausdifferenzierung des Wissenschaftssystems ein Ausmaß erreicht hat, wo schon die Benennung der verschiedenen Forschungsstränge innerhalb der meisten Fächer nur mit einem entsprechend hohen Abstraktionsgrad möglich ist. Dies trifft besonders auf die Soziologie zu (vgl. Schnapp 2017), da der Forschungsgegenstand Gesellschaft mit seinen acht Milliarden denkenden Mitgliedern eine Themenvielfalt bietet, die in vielen anderen Disziplinen nicht zu finden ist. Wenngleich vermutet werden kann, dass eine Disziplin näher an die Wahrheit herankommen kann, wenn es die theoretisch echte Themenverteilung seines Gegenstands im Forschungsbetrieb reflektiert, können sich bei zu starker Ausdifferenzierung wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen auch Probleme ergeben.
The following work starts with the observation, that the topical diversification of the science system has reached a magnitude, where the naming of the different research areas alone, within most categories, is only possible with a high enough abstraction degree. Sociology is especially affected, since it’s research subject society with it’s eight billion thinking members give a topical diversity, which isn’t to be found in many other subjects. Even though one could imagine, that a more diversified discipline has a higher chance to come to it’s core truth, if it’s subject’s complexity get’s reflected within the research, there is also a danger of problems evolving within the science system with a to high degree of diversification.
I tried to translate this section as literal as I could, thus it’s not supposed to sound good. If I’d had to translate the text I would change a few things: I would start with my first sentence, which in my thesis spans over 3.5 lines. I think the first sentence alone is a prime example that my sentences are to convoluted. But while being convoluted this is sentence is also very blunt. It uses a lot of words to describe a simple fact, namely that there is high complexity in the scientific system.
I think the second sentence is ok, maybe it could be laid out more, since I think there is an interesting element build into it.
Against that the third sentence is completely horrible again. It does exactly what I hate about my writing style. The sentence should gotten split into multiple separate sentences. “Even though one could imagine, that a more diversified discipline has a higher chance to come to the truth, if it’s subject’s complexity get’s reentred into the research,” is such a bold statement and I just let it lay in one long sentence in the first paragraph.