Smart Writing: It’s good to be published, and better to be understood.
Modern academics are not celebrated for the clarity and felicity of their writing. One of the most important lessons a postgraduate student can learn—and if he doesn’t learn it soon, he’s doomed—is that academics generally do not write books and articles for the purpose of expressing their ideas as clearly as possible for the benefit of people who don’t already understand and agree with them. Academics don’t write to be read; they write to be published. Typically, the only people who actually read academic books and articles are other academics, who only read them to know what they need to reference in their own books and articles. And that’s not reading; that’s trawling.
Helen Sword, associate professor at the Centre for Academic Development at the University of Auckland, wants to persuade her colleagues that they can do better. She has written Stylish Academic Writing in order to “give courage to academics who want to write more engagingly but fear the consequences of violating disciplinary norms.” But surely the point is that the vast majority of academics don’t “aspire to write more engagingly and adventurously.”
The reasons for this perversity have been debated in the pages of intellectual magazines (like this one) for decades. Academics in the humanities and the social sciences, it’s sometimes suggested, too often wish to give their fields the legitimacy and public authority of science, and so write in highly technical, jargon-laced prose. Academics in the hard sciences, for their part, are too concerned with factual correctness to worry about making their productions agreeable, even to co-specialists. Then, of course, there is the really uncharitable interpretation: Many academics simply haven’t got anything useful to say, but if they say it in a sufficiently complicated fashion and use all the vogue terms, they’ll get credit for having said something without saying anything worth defending.
The really troublesome thing about all this is that many academic writers, even in the humanities, have legitimate and important insights to convey. Yet they genuinely believe, whether for one of the aforementioned reasons or for some other, that it doesn’t serve their interests to write straightforward English sentences. I have before me a book entitled The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 by Jon Klancher (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). The book is deservedly influential in its field; indeed, I have profited from it myself. But here is a typical sentence, drawn more or less at random:
What will finally distinguish the new middle-class audience of the nineteenth century from its radical antagonists and the mass public’s fascination with commodities is the activated interpretive mind in its power to reincarnate everyday life: to form a “philosophy” of one’s encounter with the street and the city, with fashion, with social class, with intellectual systems and the mind’s own unpredictable acts.