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September 9, 2009
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On writing
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mount Holyoke professor Gail Hornstein reflects on the off-putting--and self-defeating--conventions of academic style:
Do you ever read your prose aloud, either quietly to yourself or at a public reading of your work? Too many academics would answer no to that question. We have a kind of reverse aestheticism--if our writing is dense and unwieldy, filled with technical terms and convoluted sentences, we wear its lack of accessibility as a badge of honor.A friend in mainstream trade publishing, who'd like nothing better than to buy books written by smart people on important topics, cringes when she spies an academic heading toward her at a party. For D and her editorial colleagues, "academic" is shorthand for "lifeless prose, cumbersome to read, filled with unnecessary complication, often disdainful and stridently obscure in style and tone." If by chance they do wind up wanting to acquire a manuscript by a faculty member, the first thing they say at the editorial meeting is: "But he doesn't write like an academic!"
I'm fascinated by the fact that we don't take this as an insult. Academics are not embarrassed by writing that's impenetrable. We're taught to feel like doctors castigated for poor penmanship. Producing turgid prose is part of how we define ourselves as professionals.
But why is that? ... Why do academics so often have contempt for writing that appeals to a broader public?
... whether we admit it or not, every writer wants to have someone say about his or her work, "I couldn't stop reading; it was riveting." But producing writing like that first requires being able to imagine really drawing people in, making them feel compelled to think about what we've said.
That would require a very different way of relating to our audience. We'd have to start caring about their interests, learning what they know and what they don't. Popular writing, by definition, invites lots of different kinds of people to invest their time and money in your ideas, and your expression of them.
The contempt that academics have toward that kind of writing is, in essence, contempt for the ordinary reading public. We assume they're unable to grasp the subtlety of our thought. We think that writing for a broad audience requires "dumbing down" our arguments. But that's wrong. Popular audiences are tougher critics than fellow academics are. You have to be saying something of import or interest; otherwise, people will just ignore you and read something else, or play video games, or watch television.
Academic writing derives its authority from certain conventions, some of them bordering on arrogance. When you're a young professor, it can make you feel powerful to sound as if you know so much. And you can get away with that kind of writing because your audience--other academics--will read your work even if it's impenetrable. But eventually, it can get lonely to have so few people to talk to. What you want to say might actually be of interest to an audience wider than those in your specialty.
"Contempt for the reading public" is a subset of a broader, more general contempt for the public--which is a real shame, and which has a great deal to do with academia's often confrontational, defensive stance toward public calls for accountability, transparency, and so on. Once upon a time, American academics understood that their work was only justifiable if it was done in the service of the public good; in the AAUP's founding documents, there is very clear language about how professors' professional autonomy is a privilege granted so that they can make good on academia's public compact. That understanding has been lost--and academia has become cloistered and self-referential, at once unwilling and seemingly unable to address or interact with a broader public.
Figuring out how to undo that isn't easy--because the involuted arrogant thing is an embedded aspect of academic culture. It's part of the rarified air academics breathe--an affect they acquire during the socializing years of grad school, and cultivate through years of jumping through involuted snobbish hoops on their way to tenure. Back in the day, it was drummed into me that if you wrote for the general public above and beyond doing your scholarly writing, that writing would not only not help you get a job or get tenure, but would quite possibly hurt you. Similar things were said about winning teaching awards, for related reasons. At every point, the message was that the scholarship was what mattered, and that it was for only a tiny group of like-minded scholars. Students were secondary, and the public was beyond the pale. You could change your priorities after tenure, of course -- but at that point, for many people, the investment in inaccessibility was too deep, too personal, and too habitual to change.
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Comments:
Turgid writing is probably worst in academia; however, it isn't limited to that sphere. Far too much business writing/speaking today consists of either pseudo-social-science jargon that sounds like it comes from the Late Hippie era, or strings of superannuated buzzwords that someone imagines are still current, or both. (There is actually one analyst, Laura Rittenhouse, who analyzes CEO letters to shareholders for vagueness and jargon and claims to have found a negative correlation between these things and negative future returns.)
So while part of the academic-jargon phenomenon is probably indeed linked to contempt for the public, as you suggest, there may well be other society-wide factors at work, too.
"Back in the day, it was drummed into me that if you wrote for the general public above and beyond doing your scholarly writing, that writing would not only not help you get a job or get tenure, but would quite possibly hurt you. Similar things were said about winning teaching awards, for related reasons. At every point, the message was that the scholarship was what mattered, and that it was for only a tiny group of like-minded scholars. Students were secondary"
As I've said before, parents have no idea that they are spending an arm and a leg for their kids to go to schools where they are treated like annoying afterthoughts.
My work emails tend to be both terse and precise. Terse so the audience will actually read them, precise so that my point will get across. So there's a certain amount of jargon, along with a certain amount of informality, since they're just emails and not formal reports. I sent an email to the production manager once and he emailed back, "You write just like you talk! I can totally hear your voice when I read this!"
"So do I speak technically, or write colloquially?" I asked.
"Both!" he said.
David: You wrote that "Far too much business writing/speaking today consists of either pseudo-social-science. . ." Actually, the problem is that a great deal of social science is pseudo-science, or as jazz critic Albert Murray called it "social science fiction." The social sciences and some of the humanities disciplines went wrong a hundred or more years ago when academics in those fields desired a stature (for whatever reason) similar to that of faculty in the hard sciences, medicine and law.
Gail Hornstein's and Erin's thoughts on the bad writing issue are personified at Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's homepage at Emory University, where it is noted that: "Her translator's introduction to Derrida's Of Grammatology has been variously described as "setting a new standard for self-reflexivity in prefaces" (editor's introduction to The Spivak Reader) and "absolutely unreadable, its only virtue being that it makes Derrida that much more enjoyable."
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Spivak.html
"While she is best known as a postcolonial theorist, Gayatri Spivak describes herself as a "para-disciplinary, ethical philosopher" though her shingle could just as well read: "Applied Deconstruction." Her reputation was first made for her translation and preface to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and she has since applied deconstructive strategies to various theoretical engagements and textual analyses: from Feminism, Marxism, and Literary Criticism to, most recently, Postcolonialism.
"My position is generally a reactive one. I am viewed by Marxists as too codic, by feminists as too male-identified, by indigenous theorists as too committed to Western Theory. I am uneasily pleased about this. (Post-Colonial Critic).
Despite her outsider status -- or partly, perhaps, because of it -- Spivak is widely cited in a range of disciplines. Her work is nearly evenly split between dense theoretical writing peppered with flashes of compelling insight and published interviews in which she wrestles with many of the same issues in a more personable and immediate manner. What Edward Said calls a "contrapuntal" reading strategy is recommended as her ideas are continually evolving and resist, in true deconstructive fashion, a straight textual analysis."
1) Popular writing will not help with academic job promotion not because it is popular but because it is not peer-reviewed.
2) Many popular books rely on the "unreadable" scholarship of academics. I love Ron Rosenbaum's *Shakespeare Wars*, but it's essentially a popularlization of the lifework of many scholars who are ignored by the public.
3) Sure, some academic writing is annoying. But much if it is quite easy to read. My high school juniors use literary scholarship for their term papers, and they can understand it. No, what keeps the public away from most academic scholarship is a lack of interest in the subject matter.
4) So then you say: well, academics should stop writing about arcane matters and focus on the big issues. But all of those "big issue" popular books can only achieve their wide perspectives by synthesizing the work of all the little scholars out there worrying over the minutiae. Seth Lehrer's histories of the English language are great examples.
5) I think there needs to be a balance. Young scholars especially should be encouraged to build up their knowledge of the field from the ground up, working on local, smaller-scale issues. But academics should produce more popularizations of their fields, something like the Cambridge Histories of American Literature for non-academics.
6) And let's not kid ourselves that there's some big market out there for non-fiction that is not memoir-ish. The market share of a *Book Lust* or *How to Read a Book Like a Professor* is still quite tiny compared to the big selling work most publishers want.
Luther, while I agree with you on points #2 and #4 (which are essentially the same point), I think you're wrong on #6. Agents and publishers are eager to read proposals by academics who can write a good biography or tell good stories about, say, history or science in language that absolute beginners can understand. (They just don't find many who can.) Such books are only occasionally blockbusters, but there's a nice, solid audience for them if they're marketed well.
Erin,
Sorry to hijack this thread, but are you planning to comment on the new Bowen - McPherson book and the resulting publicity? I would appreciate a critical assessment, but of course you have plenty on your plate already!
Jeff: Sure, popular history and science have a decent market. But popular sociology? Popular anthropology? Popular folklore studies? Even popular literary studies? Or popular mathematics? Very slight markets with the occasional breakout success. And it's not as if this work is consistently difficult to read. Most historicist scholarship on literature is quite clear -- and as I wrote before, my high school juniors have little trouble with the material they find for their research projects.
