My question was this: is schooling making our writing bad?
I asked a professional book editor to analyze some of the worst pieces of academic writing that I could find. Together, we unwittingly diagnosed the problem with education.
A lot of academic writing is like this: words are arranged so as to be almost unintelligible, in ways that are hard to grasp. Some commentators explain how this results from professional narcissism in academia: why not write using obscure language that is not just incomprehensible, but also makes you seem brilliant? If your clueless peers don’t get it that’s not your problem! Another facet is that writing isn’t done towards an external end of communication but in a perverted form of demonstration.
At school we tell pupils to write essays, but that’s the first and last time they’ll do it. Instead they learn to write essays for a teacher packed with arbitrary word counts and where the emphasis is on writing things down rather than communicating. This has the important pedagogic aim of making it harder to plagiarize, but the unintended effect is that pupils end up not learning how to write good arguments clearly, coherently and convincingly: that is, to communicate.
What’s more, academics suffer from the curse of knowledge. They can’t communicate, because they already know. If you know why Shakespeare is great, it’s hard for you to imagine that anyone would have to think hard about it, because you can articulate everything right away.
The problem is so well-known that one academic journal, the Journal of Philosophy and Literature (founded by Richard Miller from the University of Arizona at Tucson), maintains an ‘annual Bad Writing Contest’.
I asked Rachel Jepsen, a writing coach and editor, about academic writing. ‘Yes, it obviously has to take some account of critical thinking. But there’s often a desire to cover every base, when what you really need to do is make a very simple argument and move on.’
But she was frank that good communication shouldn’t be sacrificed at the altar of simplicity. To communicate complex ideas requires tales, scientific writers such as Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould have shown; they take a complexity and narrative and make a story that increases everyone’s potential to understand.
And ultimately that’s what good writing is about: trying to get into your readers’ heads. For academics, it means trying to think like our readers when we write, rather than when we research. It means avoiding obscurity on the grounds that it contributes to the ‘clarity and engagement’ that writing is usually meant to achieve.
For those seeking writing instruction, revisit the interview with Rachel Jepsen, and the lecture on good writing. And remember, as always: writing is hard, but doable. It just takes practice and care.
Why Academics Stink at Writing by Steven Pinker: https://www.chronicle.com/article/why…
The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing: https://www.theatlantic.com/education…
The Bad Writing Competition: http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writin…