Reprints and permission:

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we as an academic com-munity tend to write. In my view, there’s a problem worth addressing—the similarity of our writing from one article to the next. I don’t mean simply the boilerplate format (intro-duction, hypotheses, methods, results, etc.). The problem actually runs deeper than that. Much academic writing sounds the same. These similarities reside in and are reflected across the constructions we use (“Taken together, our data reveal”), the hesitation with which we write (“Though not being able to say with certainty, we suggest, nevertheless, that power holders”), the complicated verbiage we use (“The ubiquity of these interstitial phenomena belies the myriad idiosyncratic influences upon”), and the repetition and reit-erations permeating our articles (“To summarize the points raised heretofore”). Perhaps it’s just because I’m still in