Editor's note: This article was judged best column in the 1997 Educational Press Association competition and won a gold medal in the 1997 Washington EdPress competition.
HOW TO WRITE GOOD:
Incomprehensible academese doesn't have to be a terminal disease.
By Bill Kirtz
A random sample of Northeastern professorial prose: "Probably the
single most influential articulation of a poststructural anti-universalism
in the area of postcolonial studies remains Gayatry [sic] Spivak's 'Can
the Subaltern Speak?' in which the author has famously declared that 'the
colonized subaltern subject is irrevocably heterogeneous.' "
Why do some academics write so badly, and what can be done about it? Two
Northeastern professors known for presenting complex thoughts in lucid
packages have some answers. Unlike some of their peers, these academics
are trying to communicate rather than impress. They recognize that if you
can't express a thought clearly, you might not have one.
Knowledge may be expanding in this Information Age, but it's coming in
increasingly abstruse forms. Much academic writing is beyond parody, as
a recent hoax revealed. This devastating imitation of jargon-ridden cultural
studies was published in the highly regarded journal Social Text. The editors
didn't get the joke. They deemed fit to print gibberish arguing that "physical
'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic
construct."
Earlier, the respected literary quarterly Raritan knowingly published a
parody alongside a serious scholarly essay. One discussed an "ideologeme
of the map; it cannot be thematized as a symbol." The other called
the "resistance to Charlus's conclusive subsumption . . . too crucially
productive at the enabling nexes of incoherence in the text to be allowed
to be fully sublimated." Which is real? Which is Memorex? Who cares?
Neither is comprehensible.
Of course, academics aren't the only people who wrap themselves in cocoons
of confusion. Is an English translation available for the following financial
offering? "Any statement contained in a document incorporated or deemed
to be incorporated by reference herein shall be deemed to be modified or
superseded for purposes of this Prospectus to the extent that a statement
contained herein or in any other subsequently filed document which also
is or is deemed to be incorporated by reference herein modifies or supersedes
such statement." Or for a business leader's belief that "expansive
communication is fundamental to successful resolution of these intrinsic
conflicts and to the optimization of resource allocation for the emerging
department in an increasingly competitive environment"?
In the perhaps radical belief that professors are supposed to connect with
their audiences out of as well as inside the classroom, Northeastern's
Alan Cromer, a theoretical nuclear physicist, and Jill Crisman, a computer
engineer, present complex thoughts in ways a nonp;rocket scientist
can comprehend.
Cromer, whose fifth book, Connected Knowledge, will be published early
next year, developed his skill for expository writing by cranking out textbooks.
His first effort taught him what not to do. He says his coauthor "wanted
the respect of a few mathematicians, while I wanted students' respect.
We did what too many academics do: write for friends in the cafeteria."
Now, he struggles to avoid what he calls the common academic tendency to
overcomplicate. "I try for clearer sentences." Cromer hates "wheel-spinning.
If you have too many words not doing anything, you're eventually going
to contradict yourself by the end of the sentence."
He hammers writers of science texts who use murky grammar and fail to define
their terms. To avoid their mistakes, he has a tough nonexpert-his brother-critique
his prose. He says the retired corporate communications executive "helped
me loosen my style, make it more user-friendly. He told me to get rid of
all 'dictionary' words, to substitute 'can't' for 'cannot' for a more friendly
tone. He was my Everyman. If he couldn't understand something, he made
me rephrase it for more clarity." That nit-picking sibling "kept
banging on meaning. I'd say, 'This is the only way I can say it,' and he'd
reply, 'Yes, but people won't understand it.' "
Cromer and Crisman feel that university realities may encourage obscure
writing. "Lots of science writing is narrowly focused because people
are trying to come up with something original for tenure," Cromer
says. "Their real audience is the senior professors who may grant
it." Having already obtained tenure, "I don't have to do research
into minutiae. I have the privilege and the obligation to speak more broadly."
His new book, for example, tackles the philosophy of science and its relation
to education.
Crisman, whose work on "gopher" robots earned her tenure last
spring, says, "The difficulty of academic writing is that to get tenure
you have to hit 'the count': how many papers, how many pages a minute."
With quantity, not quality, the academic standard, papers are bound to
be overlong and underedited.
Crisman has the stylist's basic attribute: dissatisfaction with her work.
"I never think of myself as a good writer. I struggle with it. I have
to practice it. It's hard. I'm still learning. It's a lifelong endeavor."
She uses a common professional device to invigorate her prose. She imagines
she's giving a talk, telling a story. "Even technical papers tell
a story. If there's no overview to start every paragraph, I rewrite."
She doesn't buy the expert's standard cop-out: if you knew my field, you'd
understand my writing. "Any well-educated person should be able to
read any introduction to even a highly technical piece and get a feel for
what it's about and how important is it. I picture my mother, who's intelligent
but who doesn't know all the scientific jargon. Could she read my article?"
Her recent eight-page progress report on her gopher robot illustrates her
point. Written over a weekend, it begins with her hope that the device
"could be commanded to navigate to a destination, retrieve objects,
and return to a human operator." It concludes with her goal of having
"the first results in reaching and grasping by the fall of next year."
But Crisman has found that clarity isn't always its own reward. "I've
had papers rejected because people think that if they can understand them,
they're too easy, too simple. It's frustrating at times. I wonder, if I
make things more obtuse, people would think it's more important."
One prominent historian, however, has found that the more simply he writes,
the better his reception. Harvard's Mark A. Kishlansky, author of widely
used text and trade books, told a meeting on "the craft of scholarly
writing" that when he first started immersing himself in the seventeenth-century
English revolutionary period, "I discovered that everything was incredibly
complicated and very deep and therefore could be explained only by incredibly
complicated and very deep writing with many clauses containing extremely
long words that I took from lists I kept of extremely long words whose
meaning I occasionally looked up."
Now, he uses his computer's spell-checker to identify jargon words and
his thesaurus to "find the words I would have chosen if I had thought
more precisely or had a better vocabulary." He reads his work out
loud to hear rhythms, and to achieve a casual tone. "Then I shorten
everything. This is an absolutely vital discipline to my writing. When
I shorten this, I am sure I would want to take 'absolutely' out, since
'vital' is probably vital enough. Then I would want to take 'probably'
out, since 'vital is vital enough' has a kick to it and 'probably' is what
I call a weasel word."
Now that's what I call a writer: searching for the precision and economy
of expression usually associated with journalism. Although we're often
charged with teaching the newsroom basics of arrogance, intrusiveness,
and oversimplification, journalism teachers are rarely accused of the reader
abuse so often practiced by our ivory tower brethren.
Sometimes, though, we can be observed wallowing in what Cromer would call
wheel-spinning. It took six journalism and communications profs, each from
a different university, to pen a just-published report on new media that
"highlights diverse opinions and perceptions that indicate a need
for equally wide-ranging educational approaches in order to successfully
prepare students in this rapidly changing world. In general, this study
seeks to increase our understanding of concerns that may shape not only
journalists' own decisions to adopt these innovations, but also the way
communications about evolving technologies is structured . . . "
Say what? Maybe we deadline-challenged scribblers shouldn't mock this N.U.
tip for "Materializing an Effective Teaching Style": "The
educators [sic] job is never to simply transmit facts and concepts to passive
recipients, but rather to direct the learning process so that students
act on both a physical and a mental level. Therefore, the teacher ought
to use active methods that are intentionally planned to promote an active
discovery of reality and through [sic] reflection."
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the classroom, ProfessorSpeak
lives on!
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism. His
opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the Gown."
