Why Most Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers
No
one should be surprised if much scholarly writing continues to be mediocre and
confused
By Noah Berlatsky JULY 11, 2016
<http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Most-Academics-Will-Always/237077>
I have some comments to throw into the conversational mix on this topic.
* There's also a question of
assignment of labor between writers and their audience. For many of us — almost
all? — clear writing of anything beyond a couple pages requires at least one
additional draft, sometimes after getting feedback from people other than us, readers
who don't already know just what it is we want to communicate. Some writers
are unwilling and/or unable to put in that extra time, and if editors let you
get away with it, there's reason not to. The folklore, anyway, is that Robert
A. Heinlein advised young writers of pulp fiction, "Never revise unless an
editor makes you," and much of his writing indicates he followed his own
advice — and in economic terms for pulp writers, and for busy academics, such
advice made and still makes sense.
* In the late 20th c., portions of
the academic Left at least claimed to write clotted prose intentionally in
order to slow down readers and to make their writing less
"determinate" (?) — less liable to being pinned down to one meaning.
Given the success of Donald J. Trump's going at indeterminacy from the
simplistic side, the academic Left might come to value clarity, but as George Orwell noted,
writing pretentious prose can be habit forming.
* Academic legend (anyway) told of
an experiment where two versions of the same essay were submitted to journals
that claimed to insist upon clarity. One version was written for clarity, the
other in convoluted jargon. The version light on jargon and strong on clarity
did less well for acceptance. I believed that story since I once got back an
essay with referee comments I couldn't understand. My younger co-author looked
at the comments, said, "I'll stodgy it up," combined sentences and
substituted some Latinate words for colloquial ones — and that version was
published.
On the other hand —
* On the other hand, technical
vocabularies are necessary, and academic writing should be directed toward specific and necessarily limited
discourse communities. Still, jargon, like slang, helps establish and maintain
virtual communities with their own social structures and hierarchies. Street
signs in Boston have been said to be guided by the rule, "If you belonged
here, you'd know," and a similar rule governs a fair amount of academic
language. The social/political purpose of jargon and overly complex writing can
be precisely to render the piece unintelligible to the uninitiated, keeping out
the unworthy.
* Most positively "on the
other hand," if one really does have something new and original to say,
it's likely to be difficult to communicate. On the other other hand here —
bilateral symmetry being so banal — I'd say that that the difficulty of
communicating something original is all the more reason to strive mightily to
be clear and to get help with revising.
Most important, though, is the point of academic politics: A fair number of
academics have been trained in intellectual humility and think if we don't
understand something it's our own faults, and to some extent that's almost
always the case. What is crucial, though, is that division and assignment of labor
and the reinforcement of power relations in requiring readers to do extra work.
It's a sign and exercise of power to force readers into re-reading; and it's a
sign and exercise of status if editors won't require you to rewrite. And it was
a beautiful if annoying irony back in the late 20th c. that a fair number of
academic Leftists analyzed power trips in all sorts of areas but were utterly
blind to the exercise of raw power in the prose of their own convoluted analyses.
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