[In “Bad Writing, Part 4,” I’m presenting a statement by Philosophy and Literature editor Denis Dutton, the originator of the Bad Writing Contest, from the Wall Street Journal and two groups of readers’ letters to the editor of the New York Times in response to “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” by Dinitia Smith (see Part 3).
[Since all of these pieces refer to articles I‘ve posted in earlier sections of this series, I strongly recommend reading Parts 1, 2, and 3, published on 19, 22, and 25 May, before reading the new installment.
[One comment concerning the reposting below of the Times letters: you will see that there are two dates accompanying the transcriptions. The first one, in the introductions to each letter, is the date of its publication in the newspaper. The second date is the date embedded in the published letter, presumably the date it was written, postmarked, or received. (“Bad Writing, Part 5” will contain more Times letters; they will be similarly annotated.)]
“LANGUAGE CRIMES”
by Denis Dutton
[“Language
Crimes,” Denis Dutton’s account of the evolution of the Bad Writing
Contest, ran in the Wall Street
Journal of 5 February 1999, in Section W (“Weekend Journal”), page 11. The publication came two months before the published
announcement in Philosophy and Literature (April 1999) of the winners of
the 1998 competition, but two months after the release of the contest results
in December 1998.]
A lesson in how not to write, courtesy of the professoriate.
Pick up an academic book, and there’s no reason to expect the writing to be graceful or elegant. Many factors attract people to the scholarly life, but an appealing prose style was never a requirement for the job.
Having spent the past 23 years editing a scholarly journal, Philosophy and Literature, I have come to know many lucid and lively academic writers. But for every superb stylist there are a hundred whose writing is no better than adequate—or just plain awful.
While everyone moans (rightly) about the decline in student literacy, not enough attention has been given to deplorable writing among the professoriate. Things came to a head, for me, a few years ago when I opened a new book aptly called “The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism” [University of Minnesota Press, 1993; by William V. Spanos (1924-2017)]. It began:
“This book was instigated by the Harvard Core Curriculum Report in 1978 and was intended to respond to what I took to be an ominous educational reform initiative that, without naming it, would delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure of the complicity of liberal American institutions of higher learning with the state’s brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam (U.S. troops present: 1955-75] and the consequent call for opening the university to meet the demands by hitherto marginalized constituencies of American society for enfranchisement.”
[The “Harvard Core Curriculum Report” of 1978 (Henry Rosovsky [1927-2022; Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences], “Report on the Core Curriculum,” Harvard University [Cambridge, MA], 15 February 1978) was a significant document that outlined a revised curriculum for Harvard College, focusing on a more structured and coherent general education experience. It emerged during a time of shifting educational priorities, where vocational training was gaining prominence over general education and called for a renewed emphasis on core curricula, highlighting the importance of general education in shaping students’ intellectual growth.
[The report sparked extensive discussions within Harvard and influenced curriculum reform efforts at other colleges and universities. It emphasized areas like communication skills, literature, history, and the sciences and led to a revitalization of core requirements and a common educational experience.]
This was written by a professor of English. He’s supposed to teach students how to write.
Fed up, I resolved to find out just how low the state of academic writing had sunk. I could use the Internet to solicit the most egregious examples of awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose from all over the English-speaking world. And so the annual Bad Writing Contest was born.
The rules were simple: Entries should be a sentence or two from an actual published scholarly book or journal article. No translations into English allowed, and the entries had to be nonironic: We could hardly admit parodies in a field where unintentional self-parody was so rampant.
Each year for four years now the contest has attracted around 70 entries. My co-editors at Philosophy and Literature and I are the judges, and the winner is announced in the journal.
No one denies the need for a specialized vocabulary in biochemistry or physics or in technical areas of the humanities like linguistics. But among literature professors who do what they now call “theory” — mostly inept philosophy applied to literature and culture—jargon has become the emperor’s clothing of choice.
Thus in “A Defense of Poetry[: Essays on the Occasion of Writing” (Stanford University Press, 1996)], English Prof. Paul Fry [b. 1944] writes: “It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness—rather than the will to power—of its fall into conceptuality.” If readers are baffled by a phrase like “disclosing the absentation of actuality,” they will imagine it’s due to their own ignorance. Much of what passes for theory in English departments depends on this kind of natural humility on the part of readers. The writing is intended to look as though Mr. Fry is a physicist struggling to make clear the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Of course, he’s just an English professor showing off.
The vatic tone and phony technicality can also serve to elevate a trivial subject. Many English departments these days find it hard to fill classes where students are assigned Milton or Melville, and they are transforming themselves into departments of so-called cultural studies, where the students are offered the analysis of movies, television programs, and popular music. Thus, in a laughably convoluted book on the Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding affair, we read in a typical sentence that “this melodrama parsed the transgressive hybridity of un-narratived representative bodies back into recognizable heterovisual modes.”
[On 6 January 1994, while practicing for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan (b. 1969) was attacked by a man named John Stant [b. 1971?] in Detroit, Michigan. The attack was intended to injure Kerrigan, preventing her from competing. The attack was planned by Jeff Gillooly [b. 1969?] and Shawn Eckardt [b. 1967], both of whom were connected to skater Tonya Harding (b. 1970), Kerrigan’s main rival. Stant and his uncle, Derrick Smith [b. 1964/65?], were hired to carry out the attack.
[Kerrigan suffered a severe bruise on her lower right thigh and quadriceps tendon, resulting in swelling and a cut, which required her to walk with a limp, but no fracture. She missed the 1994 U.S. Championship, but recovered from her injury and competed in the 1994 Olympics, winning the silver medal. Harding received three years’ probation and was banned for life from amateur skating competition.]
The pretentiousness of the worst academic writing betrays it as a kind of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself “profound” or “moving” not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing these values from elsewhere. Just as a cigar box is elevated by a Rembrandt painting, or a living room is dignified by sets of finely bound but unread books, so these kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight. Here is this year’s winning sentence, by Berkeley Prof. Judith Butler [b. 1956; see Parts 1, 2, and 3], from an article in the journal Diacritics:
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory [of or pertaining to Louis Althusser (1918-90; French Marxist philosopher; see Part 2)] that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” [Citation is in Part 1]
To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.
As a lifelong student of [Immanuel] Kant [1724-1804; German philosopher], I know that philosophy is not always well-written. But when Kant or Aristotle [384-322 BCE; Ancient Greek philosopher] or [Ludwig] Wittgenstein [1889-1951; Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language] are most obscure, it’s because they are honestly grappling with the most complex and difficult problems the human mind can encounter. How different from the desperate incantations of the Bad Writing Contest winners, who hope to persuade their readers not by argument but by obscurity that they too are the great minds of the age.
[Mr. Dutton teaches the philosophy
of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Winners of the Bad Writing Contest can be
found at www.cybereditions.com/aldaily. (This link apparently no longer works; try web.archive.org/web/19990508111036/http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/bwc.htm.)]
* *
* *
“ACADEMIC JARGON
IS A COVER”
by Paul Hollander
[Below are a selection of letter to the editors of the New York Times from two issues that followed the publication on 27 February 1999 of Dinitia Smith’s column “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” (Part 3). As you’ll read, the responses vary from pro to con.
[The first group are from the issue of 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.” Some of the letter-writers, from all over the country, are other academics, some are not.]
To the Editor:
Re “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): An obvious explanation for the current popularity of obscure, pretentious jargon in academic writing is the pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Those who specialize in fields whose importance is dubious and who wish to improve their self-image or professional reputations often fall back on esoteric, ponderous, pompous language that is inaccessible to ordinary human beings. Flaunting such a style is a way of hinting at hidden profundities and the insider’s arcane knowledge.
Two contemporary circumstances stimulate this unfortunate phenomenon. First is the overproduction of academics in fields like English, in which the search for being original or trendy can become desperate. Second is that convoluted language is helpful in hiding the meager or unoriginal content it seems to convey.
Amherst, Mass., Feb. 28, 1999
[The writer is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.]
* *
* *
“UGLY MAY BE
BETTER”
by Timothy J. Clark
[New York Times 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Academic Jargon Is a Cover.”]
To the Editor:
Regarding attacks on the “ponderous and obscure” prose style of academics like Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): Bad writing – in the academy or elsewhere – comes in all shapes and sizes. Limpid sententiousness is often more poisonous than ordinary turgidity. Nice turns of phrase paraded self-consciously – look at me, writing like Henry James! – can make one pine for a few ugly, flailing but genuinely exploratory neologisms. Readers wishing to compile a “sottisier” of academic loftiness, House-manager moralisms and banalities trotted out as difficult truths should start by browsing the works of Ms. Butler’s critics.
[A sottisier is a borrowed French word for a compilation of silly or foolish things, like a collection of stupid sayings or writings. In the context of literature, it might refer to a compilation of banal or objectionable snippets of text from various authors. The word derives from sottise, which is French for ‘stupidity,’ ‘folly,’ ‘foolishness,’ ‘silliness,’ or ‘ineptitude.’ In turn, sottise comes from sot, which means ‘silly,’ ‘foolish,’ or ‘stupid’ as an adjective, and ‘fool’ or ‘imbecile’ as a noun.]
Berkeley, Calif., Feb. 28, 1999
[The writer is a professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley.]
* *
* *
“NOT
ANTI-INTELLECTUAL”
by Leslie Peters
[From the New York Times of 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Academic Jargon Is a Cover.”]
To the Editor:
Re “When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing” (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): Confused academic writing is the product of confused academic thinking.
Perhaps that's why Joan Scott [b. 1941; see Parts 1 or 3], a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, argues that the attack on academic writing is “a kind of anti-intellectualism that is everywhere in the culture.”
It's a huge leap in logic to interpret criticism of academic gibberish as a rejection of new, challenging ideas. On the contrary, there is evidence everywhere in the culture of interest in new ideas, but before they can be embraced, they must be understood. If ideas cannot or will not be understood, what does it matter whether they exist?
Gaithersburg, Md., Feb. 27, 1999
[The writer is a family law attorney, specializing in estate planning and probate.]
* *
* *
“FISH WRAP
LANGUAGE”
by Brian Brennan
[Published in the New York Times on 3 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Academic Jargon Is a Cover.”]
To the Editor:
The debate about bad writing in the academy misses the point (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27). Is it a surprise that academics are drawn to writing as confusing and amazing as William Faulkner’s “my mother is a fish” or Judith Butler’s “insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony” when our popular discourse contains gems like “I did not have sex with that woman” or “Read my lips: no new taxes”?
[The Faulkner (1897-1962) quotation “my mother is a fish” is from his 1930 novel As I Lay Dying. The Butler quotation is from her first place-winning sentence in the 1998 Bad Writing Contest; the full, 59-word sentence appears in all three foregoing parts of this Rick On Theater series, plus Dutton’s Wall Street Journal column above.
[The line “I did not have sex with that woman” is infamous for being used by Bill Clinton (b. 1946; 42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001) during a televised address on 26 January 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal (January 1998-February 1999). While Clinton later admitted to “having sexual relations” with White House intern Lewinsky (b. 1973), the initial denial was a major part of the controversy and led to Clinton’s impeachment on 19 December 1998 (at which he was acquitted).
[“Read my lips: no new taxes” is a phrase spoken by American presidential candidate George H. W. Bush (1924-2018; 41st President of the United States: 1989-93) at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans as he accepted the nomination on 18 August. The pledge not to tax the American people further had been a consistent part of Bush’s 1988 election platform, but later hurt Bush politically. As president, Bush compromised with congressional Democrats to increase existing taxes. In the 1992 presidential election, Democrat Clinton cited the “no new taxes” pledge and questioned Bush’s trustworthiness. When Bush lost the election, observers suggested his failure to keep his 1988 promise the was the principal reason.]
Academics struggle to imbue language with meaning when it no longer has any; part of that meaning comes from its seeming complexity.
Rather than give in to the culture of the sound bite, most serious writers seek to rehabilitate a language that, though crystal-clear, has become valuable only as fish wrap.
Pittsburgh, Feb. 27, 1999
* *
* *
“WRITING WELL IS
HARD”
by Ellen Willis
[This letter ran in the New York Times of 6 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.”]
To the Editor:
None of your March 3 [see above] letter writers on obscure academic prose acknowledged what is most obvious to me as a writer, a teacher of journalism and a former editor: expressing complex ideas in clear and accessible prose is a difficult task that few people can do well.
The assumption that academics write badly on purpose stems from the widespread cultural myth that anybody with something to say can be a writer. Like Joe DiMaggio [1914-99; Major League Baseball center fielder known as “Joltin’ Joe” and “the Yankee Clipper” who played his entire 13-year career with the New York Yankees; set the still-standing record for the longest hitting streak; considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time] catching a fly ball, good writers make their craft look easy; but that brilliant paragraph of social analysis that sounds as if it flowed directly from the writer's spontaneous perception to the page has likely taken hours, if not days, of hard work.
New York, March 3, 1999
[The writer is director of cultural reporting and criticism at New York University.]
* *
* *
“WRITING WELL IS
HARD”
by Matthew R. Kerr
[From the New York Times of 6 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.”]
To the Editor:
As a doctoral student in history, I welcomed a Feb. 27 Arts & Ideas pages article documenting the rise of incomprehensible academic writing. Many academics do indeed risk making themselves irrelevant unless they learn to write in a way that is understandable to educated society. This does not mean, as Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton says, that professors should pretend to be journalists, but it does mean that they should obey the principles of clear writing.
Academics lament Americans’ lack of appreciation for subjects like history, politics and economics, but then write needlessly difficult monographs that do very little to encourage an average educated reader’s interest.
Athens, Ohio, March 2, 1999
* * * *
“WRITING WELL IS
HARD”
by Harold Gotthelf
[Published in the New York Times on 6 March 1999, Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters.”]
To the Editor:
Re “When Ideas Get Lost in Writing” (Arts & Ideas pages, Feb. 27): Roy Bhaskar [1944-2014; English philosopher of science; see Part 3], a professor who won first prize in the 1996 Bad Writing Contest, wrote “of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm.” In Voltaire’s “Candide,” Mr. Bhaskar’s fictional ancestor, Dr. Pangloss (meaning “all-tongue”), is cited as a teacher of “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology.”
[The quoted phrase above is part of a single sentence from Roy Bhaskar’s Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (Verso, 1994). The entire sentence, which has a word-count of 152 words, was the winning entry in the 1996 Bad Writing Contest.
[I couldn’t interpret Gotthelf’s comment about a connection between Dr. Pangloss and Bhaskar; I assume the writer meant a metaphorical “fictional ancestor.” Voltaire (1694-1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher, satirist, and historian; Candide (1759) is his best-known work, a novella that comments on, criticizes, and ridicules many events, thinkers, and philosophies of his time.]
After two centuries it seems as if some people still don't understand the difference between pretentious nonsense and effective academic writing.
Jersey City, Feb. 27, 1999
[The writer is a professor of English at New Jersey City University in Jersey City.
[The “pretentious nonsense” Gotthelf quotes above goes back at least another 160 years, to Polonius’s list of types of plays in Act 2, scene 2 of Hamlet: “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.”]
* *
* *
[In “Bad Writing, Part 1,” I made some remarks in my afterword about what I feel are some writing truths, and I quoted writing teacher William Zinsser (1922-2015) on one of his writing principles, “humanity.” It’s the writer revealing who she or he really is in the prose—because, Zinsser admonishes us, “Writing is an intimate transaction between two people on paper” (On Writing Well).
[When I read Butler’s New York Times column in Part 1, I felt that even there she was speaking through a mask, playing a role she’d devised for herself years ago. I felt that again reading Steve Fuller’s response to the Bad Writing Contest (Part 2).
[Martha Nussbaum’s essay in Part 2 was largely a different experience. Even though she, too, was writing about philosophy, a difficult subject on which to write simply, I didn’t feel so much that she was falling into that William F. Buckley Syndrome I described in the Part 1 afterword. She didn’t succumb at every turn to the temptation of using jargon and choosing the $50 word over the $5 one. She let her humanity come through—a person talking to me.
[When I was in college, I’d characterize my prose style, when I thought about it later, as “pedantic.” My writing always sounded pompous and pretentious—because that’s what I’d been led to believe college writing was supposed to be. Most students thought that way.
[My first encounter with writing that meant something to me was my master’s thesis. I’d been out of school for seven years by then, and I knew I wanted to write more conversationally—even though I was getting an MFA in acting, not a particularly literary field. (The written thesis wasn’t the important part of the thesis work—the performance of the thesis role itself was.) After all, the thesis would be put in the university library for posterity. I’d be “on record” for anyone to read!
[I had no idea how to accomplish this, however. I managed to find a way to get it done, though, and I sounded like a civilian rather than an actor talking shop to directors and other actors. After that, I did little writing until I decided, after about another seven years, to go back to school—the Department of Performance Studies at New York University.
[It turned out that one of the main emphases at DPS when I was there was a clear, readable writing style. All the faculty specifically stressed it in their classes. All our written work was expected to be of publishable quality whether or not we intended to submit it to a journal. My principal instructors all were editors or former editors of The Drama Review, one of the premier academic theater journals in the country, which was published out of the department.
[The constant emphasis on our writing by the faculty couldn’t help but make us conscious of our prose. Every course had a term paper and three or four smaller papers during the semester. I’d never done so much writing in my life to that point (not counting the army, with multiple reports daily—but all formulaic and codified).
[I never received written comments on my papers concerning my writing, but I saw it clearly criticized on classmates' work from time to time. One fellow student was dismissed from the program because his writing wasn’t up to departmental standards.
[Another student left the department because he wanted to be a playwright, and DPS isn’t a fine arts program—it was co-located with departments of the Tisch School of the Arts, but it was actually part of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at that time (though I believe it’s now in TSOA). It’s academic methodology was modeled after the social sciences and it demanded writing to meet that scholarly standard.
[At the same time that I started at Performance Studies, I also began teaching writing to undergrads in the Expository Writing Program, teaching two sections of the twice-weekly Writing Workshop. Having the responsibility to guide and train students in a field in which I never before considered myself even a practitioner, much less an expert, made me examine and question my own writing even more critically.
[Teachers like Richard Schechner (b. 1934) insisted on our avoiding Latin- and Greek-based words when an Anglo-Saxon one is available. Why write utilize when there’s use? Zinsser’s On Writing Well (1976) was the writing text for the required course Resources and Methods for the Study of Performance, which was partly a writing class for DPS grad students.
[As several respondents to the Bad Writing Contest results pointed out that some subjects, philosophy prominently among them, are difficult to write about. They require, therefore, difficult language. There’s probably some truth in that, but it becomes an excuse for not trying to speak to the non-philosopher—like me.
[I took a philosophy class in high school, and I remember that I really loved that course. I felt as if I were learning not so much how to think, by why we think the ways we do. Years later, when I was at the end of my college years, I took a course in basic psychology. (I also took a college philosophy course.) I decided that while psych explained how our brains worked, philosophy endeavored to explain how our minds worked.
[I do, though, only remember the fundamental stuff about philosophy—the basics. If you’re going to throw a lot of inflated language at me, I’ll be lost—and you’ll lose me. What’s the good of that?
[To those who say that writers who make a difficult subject accessible to the non-specialist demean and diminish it, I invoke the late Carl Sagan (1934-96; astronomer, planetary scientist, and science communicator), who was chastised by some of his colleagues because his books and articles, and especially his well-received TV series Cosmos (1980-81), popularized science for the layman. Far from opprobrium, I say that’s cause for praise and gratitude.
[At bottom, all writing is basically the same: an attempt to communicate something to someone. The only practical differences between one type of writing and another are the purposes (the “something” to be communicated) and the audience (the “someone” for whom it’s intended). But provocative writing goes beyond this preliminary task. I used to explain to my students that writing is a kind of conversation in print. One writer says something and another picks up the idea, or a part of it, and says something else, and so on. That’s how new knowledge is created, I told them.
[But here’s the most important reason for writing clearly and accessibly:
Writing well is the same as thinking well. Writing clearly is the same as thinking logically.
[Q.E.D.]