Can anyone help me. I am just doing the VERY last edits to a paper and my husband (who has proof read it for typos etc) doesn't think that one of the phrases in the abstract is academic enough. I tend to agree with him but I can't think of an alternative.

The phrase is "comfort zone" and I just can't think of an alternative (the paper is on musuem attendance and cultural capital etc).

Anyone help?

err

feeling of control?

feeling at ease?

familiarity?

that's really difficult!

Hi Jepsonclough, can you post some of the sentence it is attached to? Familiarity does sound like a good replacement for comfort zone, but it's hard to know without having an idea of the context it is used in.

loci of comfort?

Comfort zone might not be particulary academic but it is an extremely effective description. I'd be tempted to stick with it and maybe just define it somewhere the paper.

Hi Jepson, please don't think I'm speaking out of turn, and it is just a suggestion, but actively trying to "sound" academic seems like the wrong way to go about it. By this I mean, you wouldn't want it to sound contrived. Personally I use cliched terms from time to time and I think 'comfort zone' is fine. Sometimes I might use inverted commas or add an opening phrase such as "what are commonly referred to as 'comfort zones', that is, a place or situation where one feels at ease and is reluctant to leave despite the lack of prospects or challenge available...'

Failing that I have another word to throw in the mix: security?

I've edited it a bit to try to maintain anonymity but the sentence is something like

The findings from this small study indicate that exposure to xxxxxxxxx may take them out of their comfort zone, increase their cultural capital and change their xxxxx choices.

I'm tempted to stick with comfort zone (maybe in inverted commas) - I'm sure my head of dept who is goign to read it through beofre submission will pick it apart if he doens't like it (He was the one who told me I had something interesting in my research beyond what I thought I had) This is pre PhD research but he keeps telling me to write it up (probably because I got a trip to Turkey to present the results from the first cohort at a conference and I now have two more years of data and he is under pressure to make sure peopel who get funding for conferences actually write up for publication)

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On second thoughts, and subjective of course, I think it's the "take them" that is reading clonkily. Maybe "lead them from their ..." or "remove them from ..."?

I agree with helen_h. It's far from my area of expertise, but I think 'comfort zone' sounds just fine in that sentence. I know what 'comfort zone' means, as will any other reader, so to me it makes sense.:-)

I would keep it in but put it in inverted commas and define it in your terms; something like: "this exposure may allow them to step outside their cultural "comfort zone" i.e. the environment in which they feel familiar and secure".

"...may challenge prefixed (or encrusted, embedded etc.) behaviour patterns" ?

I think 'comfort zone' is perfectly fine, but (as already suggested) requires inverted commas. I also agree with Helena; it's the 'take them out' that sounds clumsy - almost as if those words should be in inverted commas too. But I think 'remove them from' is far worse. Some possible and semantically varying options:
"... exposure to xxxxxxxx may force/drive/push/pull/encourage them out of their 'comfort zone'..."

I think its the 'them' in particular.

How about individuals/participants/people/visitors/museum attendors (!)

Ouch now I feel really crap.  No-one has ever told me my writing is "clonky" before :-(

Taking the suggestions in turn:

"lead them from their ..." or "remove them from ..."? - not really appropriate as the point is that this change is a by-product of something else and so being lead or removed seems more deliberate than was the case.

"this exposure may allow them to step outside their cultural "comfort zone" i.e. the environment in which they feel familiar and secure" - they aren't stepping out but are being taken out; also I don't want to make references to their usual environment as the study was associated with travel and so it has other connotations (ie people could assume that it was the physical environment not the cultural one and further explanation seems really over worked for the abstract)

"...may challenge prefixed (or encrusted, embedded etc.) behaviour patterns" - that's the next stage to see if their behaviour changed - at the moment this about attitudes

"force/drive/push/pull/encourage them out of their 'comfort zone'" I think again this seems to be more deliberate than the results indicate - push might be Ok (as a push!) but that feels unacademic to me

"How about individuals/participants/people/visitors/museum attendors " - the reason it is "them" is because the previous sentences have referred to who the participants are etc and using a pronoun seems a more sophisticated style than repetition of the participants (and "attendors " is definitely wrong - they would be attendees). They are also not really visitors as these were people who were taken (ie they did not chose to go - they were made to go for other reasons) and their attitude change as a result of that.

My husband thought comfort zone was not academic and I had a slight concern that non-native speakers might not understand but on balance I think I will leave it as it is. And go and sink a bottle of sauv blanc as I feel really crap now.

Aw don't feel crap JC, tbh your original sentence sounded fine to me. You should see my writing! And yes attendors is wrong haha! sounds like a type of bird, maybe an eagle.

I think this happens with anything when you over analyse (or we over analyse).

Don't forget that the simplist way of saying something is probably the best
(up)

Firstly, you shouldn't feel crap; nobody said your writing was "clonky". You posted one sentence (that you said *you* weren't happy with) in this thread, and it was scrutinized accordingly, in an effort to help you. Nobody so much as implied that there is anything wrong with the way you write. We all have awkward sentences to deal with at some point - which I think explains why a) you received quite a few suggestions, and b) nobody else was able to resolve the awkwardness satisfactorily.

The reason I don't like "take them out" is because it seems intentional to me - as though the exposure is doing the action purposely (which, I think, is your reason for not liking "removed them from"?). This may well be a personal preference, and had I not been given the sentence in isolation and encouraged to scrutinize it, I may well not have even noticed it. I agree with you that "removed them from" suffers more severely from this issue. This might seem like a strange thing for me to say given that I suggested seemingly stronger forms (i.e. force/drive), but I think something can force or drive something to something without intention (i.e. I can say "the noise drove me to insanity" or "it forced me to have a long hard look at myself" - in neither case would one immediately infer intent). But this is a matter of connotations and not strict semantic denotations, so perhaps that's just me. And they are, as I said, quite strong words and perhaps not appropriate for your purposes.

Anyhoo, that's just my opinion on the matter, but it's not my work. I think it's safe to say that the sentence has now been thoroughly over-analysed. :p