Or to put it both simply and complexly at the same time:
Eschew obfuscation
Write concisely?
Oh, that brings up my favorite thing I’ve actually seen at the various writing workshops I’ve attended: Avoid nominalizations.
I’m not a master of the English language (no, seriously), but isn’t “nominalization” a nominalization?
Slowly put the Poe books down and step away while keeping your hands where we can see them for if the grammarians who patrol these fora happen to come across any writings that mimic those of the beloved Tomahawk Man’s style, they’ll surely begin to question what happened to your punctuating skills and make excessively long posts that attempt to point out the usefulness and advantages to using more than one period per paragraph**.**
Dickens had an excuse for his writing: he was paid by the word.
I think academics do it because they:
[ul]
[li]Have shitty ideas that have to be concealed by almost-meaningless complexity in the hope that no one notices the non-substance of their writing.[/li][li]Cannot communicate well.[/li][li]Fall into the trap of thinking that because it sounds impressive their writing actually is impressive.[/li][/ul]
If you want an exercise in frustration, I agree with either the Marxist writing or an Anthropology text. While Lebra had some good ideas and cogent insights into Japanese culture that have proven useful in dealing with real-life Japanese, her writing in Japanese Patterns of Behavior was torture. It wasn’t overtly difficult but I often found myself having to read things three or four times in order to understand what the hell she was trying to say.
As an academic, and as someone who appreciates a clear style, I’ve read a lot of my colleagues’ gibberish. My conclusion? Most of them are writing for each other, trying to show off that they’re “members of the club” of obscurantists, and so should be taken seriously by other members of the club.
At least that’s how it works for younger academics–they start out trying to parrot the denser academics they read, usually pretty ineptly at first, and develop a lot of terrible habits that no one tries very hard to stamp out. The result is unreadable prose that makes other academics go, “Yup, he/she is one of us” but makes general readers go crazy.
Ironically enough, the very best works of acaddemia or elsewhere kick this habit to the curb. They often have very simple ideas (the best ideas are always the simple ones), which just happen to be very powerful. And commmunicated simply, the ideas expressed most definitively.
I noticed this also during my graduate school days. For one class we had to read “Best of JAMA” or some such title. Basically it was a collection of the most significant articles that had been pubished in The Journal of the American Marketing Association.
Having read plenty of academic writing by then I was surprised by how readable the articles were. It does seem that those with truly great ideas don’t need to clutter their writing with pompous fluff.
You will be happy then that my Poe book is so heavily annotated that I cannot actually read any of the stories. One column of story and a second column in much smaller print showing where he ripped off this plot device and a guess at the meaning of that word Poe apparently made up.
On reflection, I have done Mr Keegan a disservice by attempting to read him when I am nearly asleep. He is far from the worst writer I have read and is usually downright readable. Last night I tried putting down his description of the Battle of the Somme when I started to go crosseyed and picked up a book on database design. I suffered some initial annoyance that I could understand what the writer meant, which gets me thinking and prevents sleep, I turned to the part about relational calculus and slept like a baby the rest of the night with no dreams about masses of men being machine gunned.
Interestingly enough, Keegan’s Face of Battle is considered a seminal, groundbreaking work of military history, in part because it is far more approachable than the standard military history works that came before it.
I actually like John Keegan’s style. I think it sounds very crisp and precise. (I’m thinking of The Face of Battle here, but any of them would do…)
Y’know, I’ve often thought this problem is most prevelant in philosophy, psychology, and literary departments. Do people agree with my assessment?
I think that lower grade departments, and undergrad and grad students in general often believe that is the way a “good academic” writes. I think at better institutions, you are trained very quickly to drop the convoluted bullshit and write clearly. At least they try to train you, whether you have the capability is a different question.
I struggled, and struggle, with this problem. It’s not my institution’s fault, however. They made it very clear that good writing is good writing, no matter what the application. It is clear and concise. It has strong verbs, and those verbes are typically close to the subject and not buried in a sea of tangential text.
I find it hard to accomplish sometimes, but they did their best to teach me.
Like I said, I was unfair to Keegan. He is FAR more readable than your typical writer on philosophy, psychology, or literary topics. He’d better be, too, since I have or have on order (looking at list) a shitload of his books (Face of Battle, WWI, WWII, History of War, Intelligence in War, The Book of War, Mask of Command, Six Armies in Normandy, Fields of Battle, Price of Admiralty–you can get stuff REALLY cheap through Amazon and with of those I pay far more for teh postage than the book!). It’s like a college course taught by a really good teacher. (counting the books) Make that SEVERAL courses. Of course, all of it is from one man’s perspective but I’ve read an awful lot of crap and he’s far better than the arid statistics and nobility namedropping that fill the prose of most British historians.
I actually read an author who had far too few commas (though the convoluted sentences remained): Geoffery Treasure. It was his fairly recent Louis XIV, which had all sorts of clauses mashed together with no indication where one ended and the other began.
Oh, that’s hilarious. I opened this thread intending to post about our dear Mr. Jameson, except that I couldn’t remember his name. I read a single chapter of a single book by him once, and I nearly threw it across the room several times.
Though I’d forgotten his name, I remember one of his clauses, committed it to memory to use as an example in discussions like this. He spoke of a postmodern building “whose putative volume was ocularly quite undecidable.”
I read that about four times before I figured out what he was saying: You couldn’t figure out the building’s shape just by looking at it.
Now, I know my paraphrase changes the meaning slightly (there’s a difference between “volume” and “shape,” for example), but here’s the thing: my paraphrase is more accurate than his original statement. The rest of the description of the building emphasized in equally stupid language that the building was constructed in a way that its shape seemed to change depending on the angle from which you looked at it.
He had some pretty cool ideas, and I learned some nifty stuff about postmodern architecture from that chapter, but lord have mercy that boy couldn’t write.
Daniel