The Inaccessibility of Ambiguous Academic

Lexicon: A Personal Tale

by Jenica Sul

The following piece was written to accompany “The Inaccessibility of the Ambiguous Academic Lexicon,” Jenica Sul’s final essay for BTS-2200 - Reading the Bible as Witness to Liberation. Jenica’s essay can be found on the Wittenberg Door, near South Reception.

I have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD. This affects much of my life, but the thing I struggle with the most is, without a doubt, reading academic writing. As a university student, this particular struggle seems to dominate much of my life during the school year, but there are definitely points at which it is significantly more difficult to get through academic readings than others. Some pieces of academic writing that I have encountered hold my attention perfectly well, but with others I find myself being distracted by other things in my mind for more than half of the time I spend on a reading.

This has nothing to do with my overall ability understand the words on the page in front of me. Before I reached kindergarten, I was reading with surprising competence. My father tells a story sometimes about how by November of my kindergarten school year, I had accurately sounded out and understood the word ‘consequences’. By third grade, I was assessed as having a tenth-grade reading level. In high school, I was the only student in my grade who was excited every year when we reached the poetry unit in our English class, and it was that reason that inspired me to pursue a minor in English at university alongside my Psychology degree. I have always had a deep fascination with language and the multiple, complex potential meanings that can be conveyed by individual words. If anything, the fact that I struggle so immensely with reading academic writing should be a shocking fact, given my personal history with reading and language in general.

I have known for years that I struggle with focusing on academic reading, but I was only able to officially name that difficulty as being connected to a larger disorder that I have as of June of 2022. I had suspected that I may have ADHD since sometime around 2015, and did nothing about it for a while, assuming that it was more likely that my struggles were either an experience that everyone was having behind closed doors or that I would grow out of them in my adulthood. When I did finally bring it up with my doctor, getting an evaluation to determine whether I had ADHD took about two and a half years due to various complications, during which time I was unable to access the medical and educational supports that a diagnosis would have provided me. With these supports finally in place as I entered my fourth year of university, I found reading academic writing to be much easier than it had ever been.

It was when I picked up a course text that made it feel like my medication was no longer helping with my reading all of a sudden that I started to wonder what was really at the root of what was happening here. This text, which the professor for the course openly admitted was probably closer to a graduatelevel reading, had my mind trailing off around three times per sentence. The complexity of the language being used seemed to entirely derail my ability to read. When I was managing to understand what I was reading, it was because I was moving through the text at a speed that one might expect to move at whilst teaching a child to read, except I was both the child who could not process the information and the adult who knew the meanings of all of the words and who knew how to break down the sentences in such a way that the child could start to understand them. It was an experience unlike any I had ever had with reading before, and I find it to be a difficult experience to fully explain. I managed to get through the first page of this book in the same amount of time that it usually takes me to read ten, and, while I had understood what I had read once I slowed the process down, I knew that there was no logistical way that I could read the entirety of this book.

It is not a good feeling to have to admit to a professor that you are incapable of doing something that they have expected to be a reasonable request. I felt lucky that my professor was understanding and accommodating to my needs once I explained what was happening. He even encouraged me to write my final paper for the course on the topic of the difficulties that neurodivergent people (those with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, specific learning disability, and various other neurological conditions) have with reading, and I was happy to take that opportunity. Had I not, by this point, had an ADHD diagnosis under my belt, I am not sure I would have been able to justify bringing it up to the professor at all. The certification that my difficulties with attention are greater than a neurotypical student’s was necessary for me to feel as though I was allowed to voice that difficulty. In my three prior years of university, when I encountered difficulties with concentration, they felt like they were not justifiable since my doctor did not agree with my concerns. Typically, I ended up feeling as though I was simply not trying as hard as my peers, that I just needed a better work ethic, and that I deserved any reduced marks I was receiving as a result of my attention difficulties.

When I started researching the connections that have been found between ADHD and reading difficulties, I was disappointed at how few pieces of research I could find on the topic. As something that is so prevalent to how I function in my day-to-day life, it felt like something that should have been a more pressing issue to psychological and neurological researchers. I kept digging nonetheless, and the research I did manage to find allowed me to finally voice something I had experienced but could not up until that point name.

People with ADHD have difficulties with executive brain functions (Geyer 2021, 24), namely selective attention (choosing what to pay attention to) and inhibitory control (blocking out things that are distracting) (Reisberg 2022, 172). These are things that everyone struggles with sometimes, but these struggles are significantly more intense for people with ADHD. In reading a piece of complex academic writing, my inhibitory control and my selective attention are challenged whenever I encounter a word that could have multiple potential meanings (Holmes et al. 2020, 1456). This is because, as I encounter such a word, I begin to think about these multiple meanings (inhibitory control) and then find it very difficult to return my attention to my reading (selective attention). I am then more likely to continue to be distracted by other pieces of irrelevant information that are somehow connected to the irrelevant word meanings that I could not help but consider.

When I put these pieces of research together in my paper, I felt a genuine release of tension in my body. I not only understood my own difficulties fully for the first time in my life, but I could put it into words that were backed up by empirical data. For years I felt as though I was not capable of being a university student, yet I also knew that I had a high capacity for and interest in learning. Upon writing this paper I realized that, ironically, some of my difficulty with reading was coming from the fact that I had such a deep love for and understanding of the English language and its complexities.

It was cathartic to finally understand the roots of my struggles, but it also made me extremely frustrated. Why, in writing that has the express purpose of educating and of sharing knowledge, was there this wall of complex language being put in front of me? If it is expected that some people who encounter these texts have brains like mine (and that should be an expectation; I can personally name many friends of mine who are current post-secondary students that also have ADHD, and even more that have other neurodivergencies), then the inclusion of excessive amounts of overly-complex language in academic texts becomes, at best, negligent, and at worst, exclusionary. While it impacts those of us who have diagnoses and who have supports around us, it is having an even more widespread impact on people who do not have or can not receive these diagnoses, and the barrier to education for those people becomes even greater.

I know that this is a large, systemic problem that is not in the hands of a single institution, but I believe that it is an important one for the faculty of CMU who are assigning course readings, as well as all students who aspire to one day produce academic writing or to become instructors themselves, to keep in mind. If something you need to communicate can be simplified without losing any important, nuanced meaning, it should be simplified. There is no reason for information to be hidden behind walls that can be dismantled by a single editing session, and to choose to keep building those walls despite knowing the damage they are causing is to contribute to the elitist gatekeeping of knowledge.