In comments to my response to Geoff Dyer’s critique of academic writing, Bill Coberly suggested that “a lot of the tolerance for lousy writing in academia does come from that (probably unconscious) desire to keep academia sacred and mysterious.” There’s probably something to this.
On a related note, the faslanyc blog responded to both articles by excerpting a portion of a 2001 Harpers article by David Foster Wallace on this topic. Wallace calls the offending style “Academic English”. I’ll repeat the excerpt here:
It probably isn’t the whole explanation, but, as with the voguish hypocrisy of PCE [Politically Correct English], the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” pre-owned,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.
Many critics of my last post seemed to think that the opposite of turgidity is simplicity, maximizing efficiency of reception for a “commonsense” readership. But the similarities between academic and corporate English suggests to me that efficiency is not the opposite of mumblespeak. Rather, it’s something more like earnestness, confidence, deliberateness—all features that tend to define real styles and distinguish them from false ones. There’s plenty of earnest, difficult writing that’s worth reading—and plenty of earnest, buttery writing too. But the many “in many ways” and signposts and all the other chaff that wrankles Dyer, this does seem like the same sort of concealment that corporate shills hawk.
Comments
Karen
“AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear”–I couldn’t agree more. It’s how the boundaries of insider-outsider are maintained. Glad I found this whole discussion here.
Thomas S.
Since these observations are largely inspired by works from humanities, I quickly confirm that they equally apply to natural sciences. Can’t tell you how often I tried to understand technical papers that hide their ‘contributions’ in obscure formula and/or extreme formalism, often for the same reasons mentioned by Wallace and Dyer. Not using words does not save you from being pretentious.
Ian Bogost
Thomas, on that topic, Graham Harman recently argued that there is a difference between obscurantism in the humanities versus the sciences. Basically, he says that terminology in mathematics and the sciences is a way to say more using fewer words, whereas terminology in the humanities is a way to say less using more words. Interesting perspective.
Mark N.
I think there’s something similar in technical writing, but it’s different than jargon. Jargon can have an insider/outsider effect, where it makes fairly simple concepts seem mysterious to anyone who doesn’t know the words, but it does often work towards straightforward writing that is quite clear once you learn the jargon, as Harman points out.
There’s a different kind of technical obscurantism, though, which feels more like a writing-style issue: verbose use of unnecessary technical machinery, applied in a very straightforward way on even the most trivial of points. It’s often intended to bulk something up and make it seem more technically serious. For example, maybe the real goal of your paper is a simple but clever extension to a programming language. But there’s a fear that one clever addition that “just works” is too simple to get a journal article or a master’s thesis or whatever. So, to spice it up, you drench it a whole bunch of noise: “formally, we can define an 3-tuple (alpha,beta,gamma)…”, throw in verbose correctness and completeness proofs that are completely mechanical, some proofs of trivial lemmas, maybe an unnecessary graph or two, etc. It makes for a strange reading experience; reading 100 pages of that sort of thing often gets me about 10 pages of interesting content, excruciatingly doled out amidst the slow grind of unnecessary machinery.
Ian Bogost
I’ve read my share of technical writing, of course, and it does have the properties you and Thomas point out, Mark. In a field like computer science, often the goal amounts to turning a simple observation from an existing system into yet another 8-page ACM format paper. Fluff, to be sure, I’ll grant you both.
dmf
I don’t see the evidence for the armchair analysis of intentional obfuscation/mystification (my experience is that most of them feel like they are saying something very important that everyone should know, and signals that they are in the know,does often serve as a counter to deep social insecurities), what I do see are students being socialized into pretty rigid/narrow departmental systems (at best, cults of personality at worst) such that they adopt a variety of styles including writing styles. Too much time adapting to the same small in-crowds and then carrying these relationships into professional alliances. People really should go out and work a while after their undergrad degrees before they head back into the gradschool bubble but this isn’t really supported by universities.
Ian Bogost
@dmf
I’m not sure DWF is suggesting that the mystification is intentional… in fact, it very well might not be.
As for working, I’d say that really any experience whatsoever outside the academy can only increase one’s success within it. It’s good to see some part of the world beyond the ivory tower. Do you really think that’s not supported by universities?
dmf
Ian, sorry I didn’t mean to say/imply conscious just that this was the not the intention/impulse at hand.
It’s not so much that there isn’t support for it (I don’t think it gets much, if any, direct thought/attention) as there are biases against returning students and rewards for those who go straight thru. Certainly some part of this is the kind of in-group-think that I was raising before, wider/differing perspectives and multiple priorities/interests aren’t really welcomed and rarely rewarded. Also frankly there are often in house, hothouse?, issues with maturity with many lifetime academics, just as there is little to no formal emphasis on teaching there is no emphasis/training on engaging a variety of (roughly speaking) personality-types. I would say that your kind of hybrid success is much the exception, were it only otherwise…
Ian Bogost
@dmf
Yes, I agree about the biases and the rewards… although I suspect those rewards are perhaps false ones, or burdens hidden as rewards.
In any case, it’s clear that academic lifers who never experienced the work world themselves are not in the best position to offer advice or wisdom in this regard. That’s less true in the sciences and in engineering, where it’s not uncommon, at least, to move back and forth, or to have been in industry. But of course, the moment such experience rears its head, many lifers cry “corporatization.”
dmf
indeed, I was trying in my own opaque way to point to some of the ways in which the rewards are often quite limiting/retarding, but as I’m sure you know getting through/advanced is as much (more?) a matter of focus/endurance as talent and so ease of passage,and helping/guiding hands, is key. One only need to attend a few conferences (or sadly seminars) to realize that the action is with schmoozing/kissing-up vs vital Q&A exchanges.
I’m with you on the science/engineering/industry difference except perhaps that the focus there is too much on innovative research and not enough on innovative institutional organization (I was once asked to mediate an “interdisciplinary” meeting that turned out to be a discussion between organic and inorganic chemists, now not an uninteresting conversation but this shows how entrenched disciplines are.)
On the larger pragmatist point of creating public relevance I’m amazed how many academics believe that this is merely a matter of communication/access/PR and not about more fundamentally changing how/what they do.
faslanyc
this article, freshly pressed at the Atlantic, seems timely.
This is a good discussion you are pushing; i greatly appreciate it.
David Rylance
“Rather, it’s something more like earnestness, confidence, deliberatenessâ??all features that tend to define real styles and distinguish them from false ones.”
Hi Ian. I agree with DFW on the second point, though I question how he reads the “opaque abstraction”. It can often be a means to qualify (not nuance) a point out of existence with escape hatches or to otherwise pursue a poeticism that is, conceptually speaking, like a beautiful but half-baked cake, not kind on digestion. Still, the comparison to PC and to corporatisms troubles me, especially because it is not the same: where PC and corporatisms truncate the sayable, with a series of punishments or political manipulations attendant upon a failure to use them or speak in their terms, academic writing tries to expand how much you can say in a sentence through importing mass via qualifications, references, self-positioning in relation to a point and so on. What I can’t quite track here is how the point you’re making seems to be limited, on the one hand – the overdependence on ‘in many ways’, ‘thus, as I will show…’ and so on – and I don’t have any disagreement there, though I don’t quite accept that it’s due to a lack of earnestness or deliberateness: in many ways [sic], it’s kind of a humblespeak, rather than a mumblespeak, a type of toning (which becomes, used heavily enough, a greying) down. But the tricky part of this is that you’re not quite making just that limited point: as when, the other day, you agreed with me that you think this is a symptom of academic groupthink. That’s a highly contentious point and Wallace also runs those two things together in his suggestion that “pleonasm and pretentious diction” is due to this single psychology of “vanity/insecurity” and writing primarily “to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual”.
Think about this for a moment: what Wallace is passing off as commonsense is the idea that when an academic sits down to write, the only thing on their mind really is seeming self-reinforcingly smart. Not only is this a slightly resentful and spiteful reading (if I can’t understand it, it mustn’t make sense: it must be nonsense), which was a streak of (what he thought was) anti-elitism in Wallace I never much cared for), it’s also pure psychologism, ungenerous and uninvestigative in its interpretations, most of all unsurprising in its ‘insights’ because it reiterates two old and obnoxious tropes: (a) the meme that all obscurely abstract intellectuals are actually pseudo-intellectuals; and (b) the notion that academic writing ruins the golden mean of an aesthetic ecology: see Wallace’s ‘rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume”. Imbalance, referential excess, word-heaviness, overparticulation of the prose, modification of sentences by embedding first person pronouns like pickets around the point: these are assaulted for lacking in meaning because of their aesthetics. The old idea this relies on is that “style is inseperable from substance”. To which I say exactly: the discursivity of academic explication introduces a very high quotient of compendiousness that is often difficult to accomodate, or maintain the several threads of, in plain spoken prose. The style as it is relates to the substance. This is why it matters that these criticisms of academic writing are so old. And while it’s very true that many academics can synthesize their points into far bolder and more multi-levelled styles of prose, academics aren’t artists (at least intrinsically) and nor should they be. The conventions of academic prose are really there to be able to formulate a template for those for whom thinking and writing don’t necessarily track in terms of that idiosyncratic sign of writing talent – a “voice” – and so they confer a voice on the writer. This makes the style tralatitious, even orthodox, but it doesn’t translate out to meaninglessness, or extraneousness, or mere murk. It can but I don’t think it’s inherent such that if academics tomorrow no longer used ‘in many ways’, the discipline would lose a lot of baggage: instead, I think you’d have a whole lot of academics – fine academics, excellent thinkers and researchers – who couldn’t function because they lack the gift for a style that won’t collapse beneath its own faults and pretentions if it is forced to become more artistic. An implication of all this is the tacit notion that such academics probably shouldn’t be in the profession – and it echoes in this regard the ‘bad teacher’ rhetoric piled on to teaching at the grade school level.
I think the generic academic style is okay: it could definitely be transformed, it needs a new paradigm to be thought through – I see the artistic affinity as a massive problem, not technicist enough for what we do at all: but literature is kind of the touch stone for the humanities. Still, what we have is fine enough as a medium of communication, even with its chaff, which is, to me, the academic version of such conversational filler as ‘How’s the family?’ and ‘You look well’. Despite all the claims that it makes no sense, it’s obscure, inflated to the point of contentlessness and so on, we seem to manage to understand each other enough and find enough points of genuinely interesting controversy or profundity to write – and to want to write – more about what each other are saying, you know? Academic writing needs more friends: it’s too easy, and too culturally safe, to be one more of its enemies.
Tim Morton
“pleonasm and pretentious diction” might itself be an example of both…
Ian Bogost
David, I think you’re giving academics so much more credit than they deserve, it’s almost sublime the level to which you’ve gone to apologize for what amounts to bad habits. I’m not sure what else to say, other than to reiterate my disagreement.
Ian Bogost
@dmf
On the larger pragmatist point of creating public relevance I’m amazed how many academics believe that this is merely a matter of communication/access/PR and not about more fundamentally changing how/what they do.
Yes, right. And of course, PR is often viewed just as selling out.
@faslanyc
Great link, thanks for it.
Jose Zagal
“Basically, he says that terminology in mathematics and the sciences is a way to say more using fewer words, whereas terminology in the humanities is a way to say less using more words. Interesting perspective.”
@Ian – I’ve always enjoyed the perversity of math/theory books that blatantly inform you they won’t tell you something and that you should figure it out yourself. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.
David Rylance
Ian. I think our disagreement stems from what you said to Nathan on the other thread: that the academic style is “really, really often” affectation “playing dress-up as the challenging matter you seem to think is the norm rather than the exception.” I do think it’s the norm, rather than the exception. I also don’t equate affectation with an absence of significance. I certainly don’t mean to present myself as anything other than averagely intelligent, but I have notebooks full of questions/extrapolations – “figuring it out for myself”, to use Zagal’s phrase – that suggests to me that the lack of clarity is not simply what Wallace says: concealment or obfuscation or professional self-reinforcement of the conceit of one’s own intelligence. I do come across that – and not at all uncommonly – so to speak of the ‘bourgeois professionalization of capitalist academic culture’ is something I can utterly agree with. But I would have thought you may have been more sympathetic to the position that such a culture cannot be reduced to the handmaiden of – or a reaction-formation to – “neoliberalism”, which is essentially my point.
I suppose my apologies could be positioned as a defence of the status quo, but I’m really not saying that academic writing could be transformed fundamentally and in a way that would help academics feel less burdened by the need to correct and recorrect : hence, my remarks about industrial design and the problem or conceit in academic writing of aspiring to artistry. And again, to the extent that you’re making an observation strictly about bad habits, or that there’s a chronic overtendency to grey down the prose, I agree. I mean, that’s also the difference, in conversation, between the use of conventions and the use of cliches. And those cliches can be filler. Perhaps I see academic writing as a kind of authentic subcultural speech, while you don’t. At any rate, thanks for this, because it’s a topic of particlar interest to me, and you’ve driven me to think more about the odd overformalization of manner we do have with one another. Perhaps the weirdest thing about academia to me is how the writing tends to be, more often than not, not conceited or mere waffle, but so reserved or introverted, as if most academics did not feel they were among friends, even when they wrote a book, and the question of friends hardly applied. Almost like they really didn’t much like themselves, and felt constantly at need to justify their writing’s existence in the eyes of that antipathy. In fact, I find that to be the overriding pathology of academic culture. The lack of rapport with one another and intra-personally. The guardedness.
Ian Bogost
@David
Perhaps I see academic writing as a kind of authentic subcultural speech, while you don’t.
Yes, maybe that’s it. Nice summary. And I do agree about the introversion and reservation… academic writing is often impersonal and stand-offish, in a way that undermines its claims to address aspects of life and culture.
dmf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbs4MjHWh8A&feature=related
Christian
This was a useful discussion to read as I edit the final draft of my thesis, if rich with irony. My writing has transformed significantly in the years of writing; though my problems with academic English are neither DFW’s or Ian’s. If I seek to pursue “earnestness, confidence, deliberateness”, I also reflect on the changes in my ideas after being forced to write properly. Without the safety net of qualifications, I’m free to graze again and produce argumentative work – the kind of work I want to produce.
It takes a while to realise that you don’t have to write like the people you enjoy reading. That the responsibility of being a writer is not to be this way or that, but to completely own your practice on your terms.