this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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I've noticed over time less and less work is focused on the average person learning about a subject and instead its written to impress academic peers and this doesn't just apply to history. There are always going to be times where a subject is just too difficult to grasp for a layman ofc, but most of the time the problem is overly academic language that doesn't add to the subject at all.
Well, that seems blatantly inaccurate. There's an absolute tidal wave of popular history content available for layperson consumption. Forget the books that are published which are aimed at general audiences (of which there are dozens, if not hundreds, every single year), you've also got YouTube videos, hobby blog posts, more podcasts than stars in the sky, and so on. These are of varying quality, but so is the academic stuff. Plenty of really great, insightful research is published. And plenty of useless dreck emblematic of academia's tendency towards chasing one's own tail is published too. With that being said though, if you're reading a journal article, i.e. published by academics for academics, you shouldn't be surprised if the language leans on jargon, even if it isn't "good writing" necessarily.