How We Write: On Styles of Academic Prose

Abstract

Every era has its own “mainstream scholarly style” — the generally accepted way of writing academic texts in а given era and place. To today’s tastes, many academic texts written a century and more ago seem verbose and impersonal, weighed down with dispensable reflections and ruminations. Soviet academic style was radically different from English-language publications of the time, but these days many Russian academic texts read like translations from English. The Editorial Board of Forum for Anthropology and Culture invited its readers to reflect on what is happening to modern Russian academic prose.