Punctuation

 

[This is a post about writing.   I taught writing for several years at several schools in the 1980s and ’90s and I also did some writing for publication, mostly about theater, many of which pieces have ended up revived here on Rick On Theater. 

[I’m firmly and unshakably convinced that the ability to write simply and clearly anything from an office memo to a Ph.D. dissertation to the latest journalistic exposé is still an absolute necessity in our world. 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will know, writing is a focus of mine.  I’ve taught it and blogged on it frequently.  While I was still teaching the subject, I collected articles from many sources on the subject of writing and teaching writing; a list of posts is included in my afterward to this post.]

 

“IN FINE PRINT,
PUNCTUATION TO PUNCTURE PEDANTS WITH”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Both of the articles compiled in this post are by the same author, Sarah Boxer.  The first one up is actually the second published.  It ran in the New York Times on 4 September 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”). 

[I call this post “Punctuation” because two of the subjects of the two articles are questions marks, below, and semicolons, in the second piece.  Boxer, however, also covers a couple of other elements of written documents in this article: the footnote and what she calls marginalia.]

If footnotes, quotations and marginalia, beloved by pedants and bores, were suddenly to vanish from the planet, you might say: “Yippee! Good riddance to all that received wisdom and tiny typeface. Farewell to the dutiful handmaidens of authority.” But not so fast.

Three scholars from three different fields have independently given these tools of scholarly oppression a revolutionary edge. Quotation marks, footnotes and marginalia aren’t just the voice of authority: they are actually the apparatus of subversion, sarcasm, irony and nastiness.

Consider the quotation mark. In the current issue of the journal “Critical Inquiry,” Marjorie Garber [b. 1944], the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and the director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, has an article called “ “ (Quotation Marks).

[Garber’s Critical Inquiry article (Vol. 25, No. 4 [Summer, 1999]: 653-679) is a little difficult to interpret by its title as it’s reproduced above.  On the title page of Critical Inquiry, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the university’s Department of English Language and Literature, it’s printed as:

“  ”
                        (Quotation Marks)

[In the running head, above the published text, the essay’s title is simply indicated as “  “.  (Ordinarily, the title of a published article or essay, when cited in another document, is written within quotation marks, as in “In Fine Print, Punctuation To Puncture Pedants With.”  The Times didn’t do this above—for obvious reasons, I think, because it would come out as: ““  ””.  (Also, conventionally, the period, which isn’t part of the title, but part of my sentence in this comment, would go inside the end quotation mark.  In this instance, that would just make this situation more confusing and absurd.  I think.)  

[In the bibliography on her résumé, Garber lists this essay as: “ ‘ ’ (Quotation Marks),” but I’d find that even more confusing because she (correctly) shifts the double QM’s of her title to single ones when they’re enclosed in the double QM’s of a cited title.  I’d imagine that if someone went to find her essay from that citation, say in a database or index, they’d look for something called ‘  ‘ (Quotation Marks) . . . and never find it!  Is a puzzlement!]

One of the “curious properties of these typographical signifiers,” she writes, is that “they may indicate either authenticity or doubt.” Sometimes quotations are meant to lend authority, Ms. Garber suggests, but the most general thing you can say is that they are reminders that words are borrowed things.

“In some ways quotation is a kind of cultural ventriloquism, a throwing of the voice,” she writes. Because “every quotation is a quotation out of context,” it can be a true copy and a false representation at the same time. It is “inevitably both a duplication and a duplicity.” A quotation mark can mean either “ ‘This is exactly what was said,’ or ‘Can you imagine saying or believing this?’”

Think of the sarcastic use of the phrase “quote-unquote”: “‘The mayor’s quote-unquote dedication to duty’ means the speaker doesn’t think the mayor is very dedicated,” Ms. Garber writes. Or think of its gestural equivalent, the “air quote,” or, in Ms. Garber’s words, the “Happy Talk finger-dance.” These gestures often suggest “a certain attitude – often of wry skepticism – about the authority of both the quotation and the quotee,” she writes. Some users call them “scare quotes,” she says, suggesting Jacques Derrida’s [1930-2004; French-Algerian philosopher who developed the philosophy of deconstruction] idea that the words quoted are “under erasure” or somehow deficient.

It sounds very post-modern, doesn’t it? But irony was lurking in the quotation mark long before Mr. Derrida was in diapers. Ms. Garber quotes R. B. McKerrow’s [1872-1940; one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century] 1927 book “An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students,” (with respect, not sarcasm): “Inverted commas [the British term for quotation marks] were, until late in the 17th century, frequently used at the beginnings of lines to call attention to sententious remarks.” Early quotations were not even part of the main text, Ms. Garber writes. They were left “in the margins, as glosses or evidence of what was being claimed; sometimes they looked more like modern footnotes than like quotations.”

So quotations have their roots firmly planted in the soil of doubt. And that means they can take their place next to footnotes, which recently have come to be seen as tools of subversion, too. In “The Footnote: A Curious History” (Harvard University Press, 1997), Anthony Grafton [b. 1950; historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University], Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, calls footnotes “anthills, swarming with constructive and combative activity.” Sure, he concedes, they are generally regarded as marks of authority, like “the shabby podium, carafe of water, and rambling, inaccurate introduction which assert that a particular person deserves to be listened to.” But still, Mr. Grafton insists, footnotes are where all the fun is.

Edward Gibbon [1737-94; English essayist, historian, and politician] used one of his 383 footnotes in [The History of] [T]he Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776-89] to make fun of the too-literal theologian who castrated himself after reading the injunction to “disarm the tempter.”

And the footnotes in Pierre Bayle’s [1647-1706; French philosopher, author, and lexicographer] 1696 sleeper, the “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” Mr. Grafton writes, are filled with pornographic biblical interpretations and salacious stories, including “Caspar Scioppius’s [Caspar Schoppe (1576-1649); German catholic controversialist, philosopher and scholar] description of the sparrow he watched, from his student lodgings at Ingolstadt, having intercourse 20 times and then dying” – as well as Scioppius’s reflection: ‘O unfair lot. Is this to be granted to sparrows and denied to men?’”

To this day, Mr. Grafton suggests, footnotes are the “toilets and sewers” of historical writing, where all the rich waste materials are dumped. They don’t just back up the narrative, they also argue with it, destroying the idea that there is one true story. They “buttress and undermine at one and the same time.” So, you might conclude, footnotes are the height of subversion. Wrong again. Long before footnotes had their vogue in the 18th century, medieval artists invented a far more radical kind of marginalia.

In “Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art” (Harvard University Press, 1992) Michael Camille [1958-2002; British art historian, academic, and influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages], an art historian at the University of Chicago, tells the story of the “lascivious apes, autophagic dragons, pot-bellied heads, harp-playing asses” and copulating animals, populating the edges of illuminated manuscripts.

In the Middle Ages, the illuminator would do his work after the scribe was finished, Mr. Camille writes, and “that gave him a chance of undermining . . . the written word.” For example, in the Rutland Psalter of 1260, the illuminator colored the manuscript so that “the letter ‘p’ of the Latin word conspectu (meaning to see or penetrate visually)” turns into an arrow that flies into the posterior of a prostrate fish-man, Mr. Camille writes.

“The medieval image-word was, like medieval life itself, rigidly structured and hierarchical,” Mr. Camille writes. “For this reason, resisting, ridiculing, overturning and inverting it was not only possible, it was limitless.” The margins of illuminated manuscripts were a playground. By the close of the 13th century “no text was spared the irreverent explosion of marginal mayhem.”

From the look of the illuminated manuscripts, with their monkey-suckling nuns and bird-headed Jesuses, you can guess where footnotes and quotations get their subversive edge. The margins, Mr. Camille writes, were the place “not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition – what the scholastics called disputatio” and what we might call talking back.

There’s a lesson here: the marginal has always been marginal.

[Sarah Boxer is a writer of non-fiction and graphic fiction, and a former critic and reporter for the New York Times (1989-2006), where she covered various topics including photography, psychoanalysis, and art.  She has published three books: In the Floyd Archives (Pantheon, 2001), a cartoon novel based on Freud’s case histories, its post-Freudian sequel Mother May I? (Ipbooks, 2019) and the anthology Ultimate Blogs (OverDrive [e-book], 2008).  Boxer has also been a contributing writer at The Atlantic and has written articles, essays, and reviews for the New York Review of Books, the Comics Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Photograph, Slate, and Artforum.

[A propos of this article by Sarah Boxer, another piece, somewhat lighter of heart, appeared in the Times on 9 January 1994.  It wasn’t really an “article,” but a multi-footnoted comic strip, a put-on making fun of the proliferation and expansion of footnotes in academic—and non-academic—writing.

[The piece, entitled “The Annotated Calvin and Hobbes” by Eric P. Nash, who was a researcher for the New York Times for 25 years, where he wrote more than 100 articles.  It appeared in the Times in “Education Life” (Sec. A) at the end of the magazine as a section entitled “End Paper.”

[Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson [b. 1958] that was syndicated from 18 November 1985 to 31 December 1995.  At its height, it was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide and appeared in more than 50 countries.

[The strip follows six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, a tiger named Hobbes.  While seemingly simple, the comic often describes abstract topics.  Even the names of the titular characters draw upon philosophy; Calvin is named after the Swiss Protestant Reformer, John Calvin (1509-64; French theologian), and Hobbes is named after the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679; English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan).  References to philosophy continue throughout the comic.

[Unhappily, I can’t replicate it on the blog because it not only includes the strip itself, which Blogger makes hard to insert into posts (which is why I don’t do it often), but the typography comprises both fonts and symbols Blogger doesn’t have.  You see, “Annotated”’s footnotes have their own footnotes, each level of which gets smaller and the footnote markers become more and more idiosyncratic and eccentric.

[I can’t append Nash’s column to “Punctuation,” but the Times posts it on its website, but the digital version doesn’t reproduce the comic strip and only goes as far as the sixth note of the first level of annotation.  There are nine notes in the first level and four more levels below that, each one decreasing in font size (and increasing in silliness).  (Linked to the digital text is a PDF of the printed column and the page of the paper, but it’s hard to read and may only be available to Times subscribers.  New York Times articles are also available on databases like Proquest, which is accessible through most libraries and by subscription.]

*  *  *  *
“THINK TANK:
IF NOT STRONG, AT LEAST TRICKY:
THE MIDDLEWEIGHT OF PUCTUATION POLITICS”
by Sarah Boxer 

[Boxer’s second article I’m reprinting on my blog was published in the New York Times on 6 March 1999 (Sec. B [“The Metro Section”], “Arts & Ideas”).]

These days the semicolon, one of the least loved, least understood punctuation marks, barely ekes out a living between the period and the comma. It was not always that way.

Geoff Nunberg [1945-2020; lexical semantician and author], a researcher at Xerox, an adjunct professor at Stanford University and a consultant on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, has spent a lot of time thinking about the semicolon and its changing place in the world.

To understand the semicolon, said Mr. Nunberg in a recent lecture, you must first ponder written language in general. Is it merely a way to transcribe spoken language or does it have its own character? For Mr. Nunberg, the answer is clear.

Written language captures things that spoken language never could. Does anyone know, for example, what a semicolon sounds like?

Consider the sentence “Order your furniture on Monday, take it home on Tuesday.” With a comma, it means that if you order your furniture on Monday, you can take it home on Tuesday. “Order your furniture on Monday; take it home on Tuesday” is different, however; it is a double command. But sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the two sentences simply by hearing them read aloud. You need to see their punctuation to detect the difference.

If you look carefully, Mr. Nunberg said, the world of punctuation has its own rules of power politics. Commas are the weakest, semicolons are middleweight powers and colons are superpowers. Look more carefully and there is even a ranking among semicolons.

There are the weak ones (replaceable by “and,” “or” or “but”) and the strong ones (replaceable by words like “since” or “because” or even by a colon or a period.) But there is a strict law governing all of them. If there is more than one semicolon in a sentence, one cannot dominate. They must all be the weak type. There is parity.

This law of nondominance also governs the weakest type of semicolon, which Mr. Nunberg calls a “promotion” semicolon, a semicolon that would have been a comma if there were not already too many commas in the sentence. Here is an example: “He has written books on Tinker, the shortstop; Evans, the second baseman; and Chance, the first baseman.” In this sentence all semicolons are created equal, and they are all more equal than the commas.

There was not always such a restrictive, democratic order governing semicolons. Mr. Nunberg discovered that in the 19th century and early 20th century, semicolons were as loose and carefree as commas are now.

T. S. Eliot [1888-1965; American-born poet, essayist, and playwright who became a British citizen in 1927] used what is known as the appositional semicolon: “The essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world; a world which the author’s mind has subjected to a process of simplification.”

Jane Austen [1775-1817; English novelist] used semicolons to introduce subordinate clauses. In “Persuasion,” she wrote: “His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own.”

Mr. Nunberg even found writers who let their semicolons dominate other semicolons in the same sentence. In “Middlemarch,” George Eliot [pseud. Mary Ann Evans (1819-80); English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator] wrote: “But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself.” In that sentence, the second semicolon, working like a colon or period, dominates the first semicolon, which acts like a comma. How could she let that happen?

Did 19th- and early 20th-century writers sprinkle semicolons without any sense of propriety or limits? Or were there rules for semicolons that are obscure to us now? After looking at passages from T. S. Eliot, Henry James [1843-1916; American-British author], George Eliot and Jane Austen, Mr. Nunberg at last discovered the old law of the semicolon: A semicolon that wants to dominate another semicolon in the same sentence must wait for the end of the sentence; and then it can act like a colon, trumping the rest; the last semicolon gets the last laugh.

*  *  *  *

[On 24 March 1996, Sarah Boxer published “Teachers, Teach Thyselves” in the New York Times (Section 4 [“Week in Review”], “Ideas & Trends”) which reported:

This month (4 March 1996) the National Council of Teachers of English released “Standards for the English Language Arts,” which outlined, in mind-numbing terms, what students from kindergarten to 12th grade should learn.  Tucked in it was a glossary that defined obscure words, such as “listening” and “spelling.”

[Boxer excerpted some passages—definitions of terms used in English and writing classes.  (Readers of Rick On Theater will know that I have taught writing and also a little English [high school].)  I’m going to excerpt Boxer’s excerpts, and republish a few pertinent definitions.]

audience  The collection of intended readers, listeners or viewers for a particular work or performance.

grammar  The means by which the different components of language can be put together in groups of sounds and written or visual symbols so that ideas, feelings and images can be communicated; what one knows about the structure and use of one's own language that leads to its creative and communicative use.

punctuation  An orthographic system that separates linguistic units, clarifies meaning and can be used by writers and readers to give speech characteristics to written materials.

spelling  The process of representing language by means of a writing system or orthography.

writing  1. The use of a writing system or orthography by people in the conduct of their daily lives to communicate over time and space. 2. The process or result of recording language graphically by hand or other means, as by the use of computers or braillers.

[The posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing are: Bad Writing (19, 22, 25, 28, and 31 May 2025), “Two Passings: Peter Elbow and Athol Fugard” (17 March 2025), “Peter Elbow and Freewriting” (12 March 2025), “How I Write” (25 February 2022). “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In” (28 July 2015), “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), and “On Reviewing” (22 March 2009).]

 

Bad Writing, Part 5

[This is the last installment of my “Bad Writing” series on Rick On Theater.  It contains two more groups of letters to the New York Times editor, these spawned by Judith Butler’s self-defense in “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back” (Part 1), and two additional pieces, including an interview with Bad Writing Contest originator Denis Dutton and an opinion column from the Irish Times of Dublin. 

[As I have consistently, I recommend returning to Part 1 (19 May) and reading the first four installments before diving into Part 5.  Many questions raised below are, if not answered, at least explained in earlier segments.]

“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS NO DEFENSE”
by Stanley N. Kurtz 

[Stanley Kurtz’s letter ran in the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]

To the Editor:

Re “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back” (Op-Ed, March 20): Judith Butler’s work reveals to the cognoscenti an intelligence of great power. But that’s the problem. You’ve got to be on the inside to make sense of what she says.

Ms. Butler argues that her unconventional prose helps to change society by undermining its common sense. It would be more accurate to say that her difficult prose helps to forge an academic subculture whose own common sense is impervious to change by outsiders.

I’ve found that Butler aficionados generally refuse to assign their students contemporary thinkers from the cultural center (much less the right). For scholars like these, obscure prose serves more to protect their own comfortable assumptions from challenge than as a tool of social change.

Chicago, March 20, 1999

[The writer is a fellow in human development at the University of Chicago.]

*  *  *  *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS NO DEFENSE”
by Edmund Blair Bolles 

[This letter appeared in the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]

To the Editor:

Judith Butler’s point that radicalism requires challenging, if not obscure, language cannot stand (Op-Ed, March 20). There are too many counterexamples. Thomas Paine’s [1736-1809; English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, inventor, and political philosopher] “Common Sense” [1776], [Thomas] Jefferson’s [1743-1826; American Founding Father and the 3rd President of the United States: 1801-09] introduction to the Declaration of Independence [June 1776], [Abraham] Lincoln’s [1809-1865; 16th President of the United States: 1861-65] Gettysburg Address [November 1863], the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s [1929-1968] sermons and Betty Friedan’s [1921-2006; feminist writer and activist] “Feminine Mystique” [February 1963] were all clearly written radical documents.

Ms. Butler defends the language of people whose radicalism is aimed at an elite vanguard, not at the masses. A slogan like Theodor W. Adorno’s [1903-69; German philosopher; Parts 1 and 3] “Man is the ideology of dehumanization,” which Ms. Butler cites [from The Jargon of Authenticity (Northwestern University Press, 1973)], is the verbal equivalent of a secret handshake. It seems disingenuous for Ms. Butler to complain that her political enemies point to her secret signs to tell people that she is not like them and does not want to be part of them.

New York, March 20, 1999 

*  *  *  *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS NO DEFENSE”
by David Sundelson 

[From the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]

To the Editor:

Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) suggests that only difficult language “can help point the way to a more socially just world” and offers the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno to support her case.

However, the fact that one philosopher used difficult language to promote progressive and difficult ideas hardly implies that such language is necessary or even useful. Bad writing is just as likely to camouflage a reactionary agenda, “the defense of the indefensible,” as George Orwell [1903-50; English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic] put it in 1946 in “Politics and the English Language.”

Ms. Butler claims that Adorno’s sentences “made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world.” Some readers, perhaps. Others, less patient, are no more likely to pause over such sentences than they are to reflect on the fine print on their credit card statements.

Berkeley, Calif., March 21, 1999

[The writer is an appellate lawyer.]

*  *  *  *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS NO DEFENSE”
by Alan Sokal 

[Published on the New York Times on 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]

To the Editor:

Judith Butler’s defense of “bad writing” (Op-Ed, March 20) twists the issues. No one seriously insists that all academic prose be immediately understandable to someone in the street or even to the professor down the hall.

What some of us do believe, however, is that writers should strive to be as clear as possible and that jargon should be used to summarize complex concepts in a few words, not the other way around.

Ms. Butler’s implication that challenging hegemonic (yes!) notions of sexuality, race and capitalism requires – or is even aided by – inscrutable prose is refuted daily by the dozens of “scholars on the left” who combine intellectual rigor with a lucid expository style.

New York, March 20, 1999

[The writer is a professor of physics at New York University. He is the perpetrator of the so-called “Sokal Hoax,” referenced in Part 3.]

*  *  *  *
“‘BAD WRITING’ HAS NO DEFENSE”
by Julius Novick 

[From the New York Times of 24 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]

To the Editor:

Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) takes a sample sentence by the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that she admits is “hardly transparent in its meaning” and goes on to make its meaning quite clear in ordinary language, casting doubt on her subsequent quotation from Herbert Marcuse [1898-1979; German-American philosopher; see Part 1] that if what a radical intellectual says “could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place.”

Ms. Butler then writes: “Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, ‘presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it.’” In other words, you can’t understand it unless you already agree with it. Thus, any attack against intellectuals of this school is ipso facto invalid. How convenient!

New York, March 20, 1999

[The writer is a professor of literature and drama studies at Purchase College, SUNY (now emeritus), and a former theater critic for New York City’s Village Voice for three decades.]

*  *  *  *
“CLEAR WRITING CAN CHALLENGE STATUS QUO”
by Robert E. Clark

[From the New York Times of 27 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”).]

To the Editor:

Judith Butler (“A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back,” Op-Ed, March 20) argues that “difficult and demanding” scholarly writing stems from questioning “common sense,” which she says must sometimes be done with specialized vocabulary, and that such language is necessary in order to question the status quo.

But graceful, clear writing and left-of-center polemic from writers like John Dewey [1859-1952; American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer], Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas [b. 1929; German philosopher and social theorist] has been published in general-interest periodicals and has effectively battled perceived wisdom.

The trouble comes when scholars rely on vocabulary and ideas understood mainly by other professors and insist that colleagues and students couch their thoughts in those terms, creating a self-perpetuating and insular game.

The problem isn’t that some academic thinking is too radical for lucid statement and argument but that at times even professors who frequently write well get caught up speaking only to and for their colleagues.

New York, March 21, 1999 

*  *  *  *
“FOOD FOR THOUGHT”
by Matthew Gartner

[From the New York Times of 27 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Clear Writing Can Challenge Status Quo”).]

To the Editor:

Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) argues that “difficult and demanding” language is necessary to bring about social change.

But the time-honored way inventive writers have made revolutionary concepts available to readers is through metaphorical and figurative language. Indeed, the most deeply original writers, like Shakespeare [1564-1616] and [John] Milton [1608-74; English poet], have always found ways to dress up their insights in sensuous natural images that readers can see, hear and feel, thereby making them accessible. That is how one makes a difference with words.

Remote and rigid jargon will never have any real impact because it does nothing for the imagination.

New York, March 21, 1999

[The writer is a literary scholar and writer.]

*  *  *  *
“WHOSE COMMON SENSE?”
by David Orr

[This letter ran in the New York Times on 27 March 1999 (Sec. A: “Editorials/Letters”: “Clear Writing Can Challenge Status Quo”).]

To the Editor:

Judith Butler (Op-Ed, March 20) believes language that is “difficult and demanding” may be necessary to undermine injustices perpetuated by “common sense.” But “common” to whom?

The essay for which Ms. Butler won an award for bad writing appeared in an academic periodical in which prolixity (and radical politics) are the rule, not the exception. Is it only the “common sense” of “common people” that needs questioning?

New Haven, March 21, 1999

[The writer is a journalist, attorney, and poet who is noted for his reviews and essays on poetry.]

*  *  *  *
“PROFESSOR DENIS DUTTON ON
PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE’S BAD WRITING CONTEST”
Brooke Gladstone, Host

[Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Denis Dutton aired on Weekend All Things Considered on NPR (National Public Radio) on 6 March 1999.  (I have corrected some of the mistranscriptions in the online version of this text.)]

BROOKE GLADSTONE, host: And you’re listening to WEEKEND EDITION.

Did you ever have a professor in college who talked and talked and never made any sense? Some of the most respected scholars in American academia can be even more unintelligible in writing. Bad academic writing is becoming so common that the journal Philosophy and Literature have [sic] a Bad Writing Contest. Professor Denis Dutton founded the contest four years ago, and he’s on the phone with us from his home in New Zealand.

Hello, Professor Dutton.

PROFESSOR DENIS DUTTON (FOUNDER, Bad Writing Contest): Greetings from a very hot and sunny New Zealand.

GLADSTONE: Now this isn’t just any old bad writing you’re talking about. You don’t allow poems, fiction or office memos, and you don’t allow irony either. You’ve said that ‘deliberate [parody] cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-[parody] is so widespread.’

PROF. DUTTON: Yeah. Actually, the whole situation is the point now where the most pretentious, swaggering gibberish is what counts as scholarship, and we’d like to see that exposed. We’d like to cut through it and have people understand that it is possible for scholars to express themselves in ways that are intelligible and clear and lucid, and let’s bring back some lucidity and grace and prose.

GLADSTONE: Now writers can’t enter themselves in your contest, right?

PROF. DUTTON: No. Other people enter passages that they find in recent scholarly books and journal articles.

GLADSTONE: Could you please read from the winning entry?

PROF. DUTTON: Well, this year the winning entry, from a journal called Diacritics goes as follows: ‘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 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.’

GLADSTONE: This is by Judith Butler. She’s a famous feminist scholar, but she has been criticized for writing like this before. Can you explain, why do academics write this way?

PROF. DUTTON: A lot of academics are striving for originality. They’d like actually to convince the world that they have lots of new ideas, and by actually redressing everything up in this pretentious jargon, people imagine that they’re making new discoveries. So it’s a sort of a sense of wanting to present scholarship and research as new when there may be much less to it than that.

GLADSTONE: Well, thank you very much, Professor Dutton.

PROF. DUTTON: Thank you very much for having me on.

GLADSTONE: Denis Dutton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury [Christchurch, New Zealand] and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.

And you’re listening to WEEKEND EDITION.

[Brooke Gladstone joined National Public Radio in 1987, first as editor of Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, and later she became senior editor of All Things Considered.  In 1991, she received a Knight Fellowship to study Russian language and history, and a year later, she was reporting from Moscow for NPR.  In 1995, Gladstone returned to the United States and was hired as NPR’s first “media reporter,” based in New York City.] 

*  *  *  *
“BAD BLOOD OVER BAD WRITING”
by Richard Kelly

[Richard Kelly’s column ran in the “Features” section of the Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland) on 8 April 1999.]

Critics say US academic language has become so convoluted that it is largely incomprehensible – to the point where argument is becoming impossible.

It isn’t easy winning the Journal of Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest [nb: the title of the journal is just Philosophy and Literature]. “It’s tougher than winning the Oscars,” says Sanford Pinsker [b. 1941; professor of English, see Part 3], editor of Academic Questions, the journal of the US’s National Association of Scholars. “There are so many worthy contributions out there.”

Dense, obscure, often incomprehensible writing has long been a part of higher learning in the US, but a new war is being waged against academia’s most ponderous. Open season was officially declared after the “Sokal Hoax” in the spring of 1996 [see letter above, and Part 3]. Distressed by what he saw as increasingly lightweight ideas wrapped up in indecipherable prose, New York University physics professor Alan Sokal wrote a parody piece to “reveal that the emperor wore no clothes”. The paper eventually published in a respected journal, Social Text [May 1996 (Spring/Summer issue, no. 46/47)], was thoroughly researched and footnoted, but was essentially nonsense.

The premise of the piece — called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” — was that the laws of physics are rife with political implications and do not apply to everyone in the same way. Sokal believed either editors would be so bamboozled by the mind-numbing rhetoric, or the editing would be so lacking in academic rigour that the piece’s absurd thesis would go unchallenged. He was right.

As Sokal later wrote in the journal Lingua Franca [“A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,” vol. 6, no. 4 (May/June 1996)]: “Fair enough: anyone who believes the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment (I live on the 21st floor)”.

The story was front-page news across the US, made the newspapers in other countries, and focused attention on the chronic question which has nagged the work of humanities professors for years: is it deep or just impossible to understand?

“If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime super-state need to be decoded as the `now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast de-industrialising Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially hetero-glossic wilds and others of the inner city” — Prof Rob Wilson from a collection entitled: “The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism and the Public Sphere” (Bad Writing Contest, Second Prize 1997).

[The book referenced above is edited by Richard Burt and published by the University of Minnesota Press (1994). Wilson’s essay is “Cyborg America: Policing the Social Sublime in Robocop and Robocop 2,” Chapter 11 in The Administration of Aesthetics.]

Hitting back in a New York Times opinion piece last month, Judith Butler — winner of 1998 Bad Writing award — claimed the journal’s award targeted left-wing scholars “whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism”.

In fact Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, admits most of the contest-winners have been from the left, but claims that is merely a reflection of the times: the left, he claims, is now home to academia’s most turgid writers. “We receive nominations from all over the world and judge them without fear or favour,” says Dutton, professor of art philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. “At this time bad writing is the stronghold of the post-structuralist left. We wish we could find more right-wingers who wrote as badly.”

Butler has been hit from all sides this year. A University of California professor and influential feminist theorist, she was excoriated in a recent article in the New Republic for “ponderous and obscure” writing. She has been called one of the 10 most intelligent people on the planet by one academic, but the New Republic piece argued Butler’s writings were virtually unintelligible. As such, said University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum, Butler’s work was of little value to feminism or women in the real world [see Part 2].

Difficult prose does have its defenders: many feel the passages Dutton lampoons appear incomprehensible because they have been taken out of context. Further, they say, it is easy and irresponsible to humiliate professors for their jargon-filled prose which, though difficult, is widely understood by its target readership.

“It’s interesting that we expect scientists to have a technical vocabulary, but when it comes to the most complex system we know of — namely, human social existence — we somehow think we don’t need a technical vocabulary to describe it,” says Larry Grossberg [b. 1947], communications professor at the University of North Carolina [Chapel Hill].

Nonsense, says Dutton. “In the sciences jargon is helpful because it uses simple terms to stand for complicated phenomena whereas in the humanities it’s the opposite: people use complicated terms to express simple things.”

Case in point: 1996 third-place winner Paul Fry [b. 1944; Part 4] of Yale University, who said something displayed an “absentation of actuality” to describe that it no longer existed.

Says Dutton: “That may look like the work of a physics professor, but it’s actually an English professor, showing off.”

So how did academic prose become so obscure? According to Sanford Pinsker, many academics have simply become the bad writers they set out to be. Without the jargon and ponderous content, he says, students quickly find themselves on the fast track to academic oblivion. “They learn to talk the talk,” he says.

Prof Michael Berube [b. 1961; teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies] of the University of Illinois, who has written extensively for the mainstream press, agrees that clear writing can spell trouble in academic circles. “I have been called ‘under-theorized’,” he says.

[I feel called upon to reiterate here something I wrote in my afterword to Part 4: Carl Sagan, the astronomer and science communicator, was chastised by some of his fellow scientists because his books and articles, and especially his well-received 1980’s TV series Cosmos, popularized science for the layman.]

Berube asserts a major factor in tolerance of bad writing has been a lack of hard-nosed editing by academic journals. “There is no sense that these journals want to make writing any clearer.”

At its heart, the criticism reflects a belief that all too often impenetrable prose hides dubious scholarship. It raises question: does the language serve as a smoke-screen through which no argument — not even one as patently absurd as Sokal’s hoax — can be seen?

“You can’t disagree with something unless both sides know what they are talking about,” Pinsker says.

[This concludes my series for ROT on “Bad Writing.”  As I said in the introduction to this collection, I’ve blogged on writing a number of times.  I wasn’t pointing specifically at academic writing, but since I had spent so much time and effort doing just that, and that kind of work was what made me think about writing—my writing, I mean—that’s what informed my writing about writing.

[(If you look into these posts, you’ll learn that I not only taught college writing—as well as a year of high school English—but that I also took an ed-school class in teaching writing.)

[The posts on Rick On Theater that are about writing, in addition to the two I mentioned in that introduction in Part 1, are: “How I Write” (25 February 2022). “William Zinsser on Writing: Harnessing the World We Live In” (28 July 2015), “Why Write?” (4 March 2013), “Writing” (9 April 2010), and “On Reviewing” (22 March 2009).

[In all these posts, at the bottom, there’s a list of “Labels.”  Among them are “writing” and “writers.”  If you click on either of those, you get all the posts on ROT on those topics—some are other posts by me, some by guest bloggers, and some reposts from other outlets.  Some are serious comments, but some are just silly (intentionally) and some are intended to be lighthearted.  Check them out.]

Bad Writing, Part 4

 

[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. (I couldn't identify the source of the quotation.)]

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 in Christchurch, 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 letters 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 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.

[(By the way, Voltaire’s label for Pangloss’s métier is meant to be silly and belittling. It might be interesting to note, therefore, that ‘nigology’ is derived from the French word nigaud, which means ‘fool’ or ‘boob.’  ‘Nigology,’ then, would be the study of foolishness or stupidity!)]

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, though, 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'?  Or 'absentation of actuality' when it's simpler and clearer just to write 'absence.'  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.]