Academic Politics and the English Language

REFERENCE: Chronicle of Higher Education on line

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.

Spelling Counts (also Punctuation, Word Choice, and Grammar) [6 Oct. 2013]

"I like cooking my family and my pets."

Use commas. Don't be a psycho." (Writing.com)

"NO RAGRETS" — Highly visible tatoo in We're the millers (2013)

             When I first started teaching back in the late 1960s, students would tell me with some regularity, "I don't need to know how to spell and punctuate; my secretary will take care of that." And I would ask, "And what makes you think you won't be the secretary, and happy to have the job?"

            Secretaries nowadays are a dying breed, and most people realize they're going to be typing (etc.) their own papers and presentations and all, but young folk still sometimes resist the idea that spelling, punctuation, word usage, and just idiomatic English — I taught English — are significant.

            In a way, they're not significant. Not when you realize that much of the time when people say, "That's not grammatical," they mean, "That doesn't conform to the rules in the prestige dialect" or "That's unfashionable." Much of the time it's a snob thing. And such trivial errors are obviously trivial when set against real problems in language like Orwellian twisting of words so ethyl alcohol consumed to get zonked isn't a drug and nerve gas is "a weapon of mass destruction" but cluster bombs are not.

            Still, there are readers who will get upset that I used a sentence fragment in the last paragraph but can accept without comment talk about "alcohol and drugs" and can have a beer in hand while demanding putting people in jail forever and ever for using  drugs; there are people who will get upset by my sentence fragment and Syrian civilians getting killed by illegal nerve gas, but not so upset if any foreigners get killed by legal high explosives.

            Sentence fragments can be useful, and I use them when I think they will be effective. However, I need to be conscious of when I'm using them and consider if I annoy more of my target audience with the sentence fragment than the point is worth. If it's a matter of indifference whether or not I use fragments, most of the time I can do it the way my (imagined) audience wants. Especially if I want to, say, move them to support legalizing marijuana or helping get peace in Syria — or wherever — without the US firing missiles at people.

            Anyway, back when I taught, I would tell my resistant students how MAD Magazine once ran a letter to the editor attacking MAD for its lack of intellectual sophistication. "The Usual Gang of Idiots" at MAD simply ran the letter as they received it, with "[sic]" after each misspelled word.

            Now whether or not the letter-writer could spell was irrelevant to his argument about the intelligence level of MAD Magazine. Ditto for punctuation and such. Still, what I recall is the three of four "sic's" and that the letter-writer not only didn't make his point but also looked ignorant, and a fool. That isn't fair; that wasn't fair; but it was an effective ploy on the part of the staff at MAD. (Satirists are not nice people.)

            "Proper" spelling and punctuation is the writing equivalent of actors' learning their lines. If you're an actor, and your friends' compliment you after a performance with, "Uh, well, you certainly remembered all your lines!" … you can be pretty sure your performance sucked. The same rule applies with spelling and punctuation and what we used to call "Basic Conventions": It's no compliment if people point out you got them right; just don't screw them up.
            For a more powerful if less exact analogy, getting the basic conventions right is like remembering to zip up after hitting the head before The Big Speech. Or for a more woman-acknowledging/unisex example, checking to be sure you aren't entering to the speech "trailing clouds of glory," and toilet paper.

            Trust me on this: Odds are that few people will remember your speech, but your friends will remember and remind you of your embarrassment long after they've forgotten the names of their grandchildren.

            E.g., a really great Shakespeare scholar taught the course I took on tragedy and one day delivered what I'm sure was a fine presentation on … well I've forgotten. What I do recall is that the class puritan had a front-row center seat, and that I was one of the teacher's "eye-contact people" but had to keep my head down because the guy next to me was speculating on whether or not the professor wore underwear (he announced that he saw none) and on possible reactions of Miss Cotton Mather in the front row looking at the prof at crotch level — and if I looked the professor in the eye I was going to crack up laughing.

            That's all petty and immature and, well, totally typical. That pettiness, though, is there, and writers must deal with it, and not just writers in English classes.

            My experience is that most English teachers are educated enough as scholars — and hardened enough as readers of student writing — to sweat the small stuff rather less than the somewhat-educated readers out in what is often called "The Real World."

            I now work on the periphery of the semi-real world of the film business, and I have met one producer with an absolute rule that the third or fourth spelling error he comes on in a script — he tosses the script. Yeah, the scriptwriter may be a Hemingway or a Shakespeare, but the odds are strongly against it, and producers get a lot of scripts and are looking for reasons to reject scripts.

            As I occasionally try to explain, readers of scripts understand the economics here. As Robert A. Heinlein is said to have said — it oversimplifies the quote but makes pithier what he actually advised, and more entertaining — «Don't revise unless an editor makes you.» Even as pulp writers of the mid-20^th century had to minimize the labor they put into each manuscript, so with script writers: the economics of the situation mean that you shouldn't revise a script unless you can get it sold, and different readers will give you different "Notes," and different producers will have different demands.

            But little in spelling and punctuation is debatable, and it just looks bush-league and disrespectful if you don't even bother to run the spell check and get the sucker proofread before you send it in. Look, we know it's an early draft — but don't rub our noses in it.

            And quite frequently, "we" do know.

            Initial reading of most scripts isn't done by recent-immigrant studio executives from the early days of the talkies nor by over-schooled but undereducated MBA's that fit the current stereotypes. Initial reading is frequently done by over-worked, underpaid, female recent college graduates who are very good at what they do. Do not piss them off unnecessarily, and it will piss them off when an agent sends them what, on the level of the sentence, looks like an early draft by a high-school junior.

            Or, for the lumpen literati out there who don't have agents — or only small-time agents — the script will be read by someone like me: a friend of an Indie producer, a guy with free time and some education who does the first reading. More, exactly: a friend who does the first reading if the producer reads the first few pages and decides it deserves a reading at all.

            Similarly in other fields: There's a fair chance you'll be read by a twenty-two-year old who can't spell either and is occasionally unclear on the meaning of words s/he's heard a few times but hasn't read often in context because s/he doesn't read often.

            That's possible. It's also possible you'll get a very smart twenty-three year old with a good education who knows not to get hung up with spelling errors, but notices them.

            The semi-literates probably won't downgrade you for spelling right and getting your words to mean things within shouting distance of the dictionary definition. With literate readers, those spelling errors (and such) are trivial — but also like showing up to the interview with your fly open / trailing toilet paper caught in your shoe and panty hose.

            Zip your fly; check your hose and shoes; run the goddamn Spell Check; proofread each draft — and get your final draft proofread by someone competent you can trust.

            Spelling does count, and so do punctuation, word choice, and the other "Basic Conventions."

Everybody Needs an Ediotor

             I am not a big fan of copy-editors.

            On one occasion, relatively early in my career in the Ed Biz, I sent a letter to the "Commentary" section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, a letter coming in just over their 300-word limit. But there was an easy fix: I had the phrase in it "hold in contempt," and I just changed that to "contemn" and saved two words. "Contemn" isn't exactly a common word, but it's only two syllables, and it's not difficult to figure out in a context where it replaces "hold in contempt." Besides, "to dis(s)" hadn't been invented yet, and "to disrespect" hadn't returned to White English (according to The Oxford English Dictionary, "to disrespect" has been in and out of fashion since the 17^th century); given those limitations, "contemn" was as accurate as I could get.

            The copy-editor (of course) changed "contemn" to "condemn."

            I was not pleased. "Condemn" would work in the sentence, but that wasn't what I meant to say; "contemn" was what I meant, and s/he could've just looked it up and see (1) it's a word, and (2) it was the right word.

            A bigger deal was when my co-editor and I were driven up the wall by apparently random changes by the copy-editor of "that" to "which" and "which" to "that" in an anthology of essays we were editing. We called the publishers and asked to talk to the copy-editor and were told they wouldn't put through that call. So we asked for her, or less likely his, name and were told they didn’t release that information.

            As the received wisdom of the time advised, we "got in touch" with our feelings about the copy-editor and guessed quickly why the publisher kept copy-editor names anonymous.
            I was in a department of English and asked around, and one colleague looked at the corrections (?) and said, "Oh — it's an East-Coast affectation."

            I replied with my usual, sophisticated "Huh?"

            And my colleague explained, "Remember the comment in Strunk and White" — Elements of Style (1918 f.) a classic writing guide — "that it wasn't a rule of grammar or anything like that, but it'd be nice if writers used 'that' with necessary, 'restrictive" modifying clauses and '[comma], which' with nonrestrictive clauses ….' As in, "The car hit the bump that jutted up in the street" as opposed to, "The car missed the dangerous bump, which jutted up in the street."

            Ah, yes, I remembered it well, that rule of thumb, since the one question I missed on some State-mandated high school grammar and punctuation test involved "that" and "which" and the misunderstanding by the test-makers that "useful advice" isn't the same as "a rule of grammar."

            Brits especially use "that" and "which" pretty much interchangeably, and the copy-editor had corrected the English of, among others, Brian Aldiss, who may not have had a college degree (perhaps not even a high school diploma) but did live in Oxford, England, and occasionally taught at the university they keep there: a guy who had already or was soon to write some notable fiction and scholarship, work with Stanley Kubrick and then Steven Spielberg on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and get letters after his name like "OBE" and "FRSL" ("Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire" — no shit on the full title — and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature), et bloody cetera.

            So I've had my complaints about copy-editors and had a fantasy or two about throttling them.

            Still, I mourn the passing of copy-editors and proofreaders; we, all of us, need them.

            For example …
.
            For example, I once wrote a letter that I signed with the relevant notice of my editing something or other, and very impressively, I'm sure, typed the job title as "Ediotor." I also once addressed one of my editors as "ediotor." It was a standard Freudian typo with me, for reasons that should be fairly clear from what I wrote above: "editor" + "idiot" —> "ediotor," including when I was doing the editing.

            And my father before me could have used an editor/proof-reader on at least one occasion.

            He learned of it reading an amused note that came with shirts he'd ordered for his credit-clothing store. The note went something like, "Thank you for your order, although we were somewhat surprised you still wanted our product, given the opinion you expressed." Accompanying the goodly number of shirts he'd ordered was his order letter, where he'd omitted the "r" in "shirts."

            Nowadays, of course, we have few proofreaders and copy-editors but depend upon SpellCheck and AutoCorrect. So now our errors can still include "this" instead of "his" or writing "shits" when we mean "shirts" — "shit" is certainly a word I've taught SpellCheck — but also utterly random and/or grotesque mistakes.

            Here I'll leave the reader to fill in examples, since I've repressed the memories of most of them. What I find is that apparently The System decided that my "wrung out" — or the typo I made for that — wasn't acceptable, but "rung out" was fine; or is perfectly willing to refer someone to "seen 122" rather than movie "scene 122."

            More serious, of course, is if you don't check autoCompletion or autoFill of, say, an e-mail address and an important e-post that is supposed to go to one address goes to an address the intended recipient hasn't used for years, or a confidential note for "Mike K." ends up going to "Mike L."

            Well, and so forth.

            I've argued before that "Spelling Counts"; that's still true, but nowadays one pretty much needs to know only how to spell approximately. If you use a computer, tools are available to check your spelling, to suggest spelling, and to define words for you to ensure that what you're correctly spelling is the word you want (e.g., I once wrote that I'd be discrete [ = "individually separate and distinct"] when I meant discreet [= "careful and circumspect"; there's a difference). What we need now is greater care and a good eye.
            And we can't always exercise that care for our own writing, and all of us have our areas of ignorance. If the writing is important, we need to get it checked.


            Now and then, anyway, everybody who writes needs an editor.