This little gem of a sentence (That’s right, it’s one sentence. Check for yourself) won the 1998 Bad Writing Award of the publication “Philosophy and Literature”. It was written by a well-known Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. For more information look here. I for one, can’t understand how people can actually write something this mind-boggling. That sentence is impossible to parse (probably even for a CompLit or Philosophy major). Does anyone else have any good examples of really bad academic writing? Even better if you yourself are the perpetrator. I will be looking through some of the stuff I have had published (in obscure Chemical journals) to see if I am guilty of this.
Sorry, no examples of my own prose to add – they ran me out of academia when they realized I had the ability to express complex ideas clearly and in actual English, not just layers of jargon.
My all-time favorite is a favorite because it’s a legacy example. My father, who graduated from college in 1937, once recited a line from a textbook, and it’s always stayed with me:
Malversation and peculation were rife.
Doesn’t that just sing?
That sentence actually seems fairly cogent to me, Mycroft. I come across worse every week – and I dont even work in the scientific world any more. At least the sentence is punctuated, with clauses separated by commas, making it easy to see what is being said, even if you don’t understand it. Far worse are those that just run on with no punctuation branching off at tangents and doubling back like a forgetful housewife who has just remembered she left the gas on the oven having been inherited from her aunt who died of consumption a few years back until you have no idea which part of the sentence modifies which and you run screaming to the library for a nice easy read like James Joyce perhaps his Dublin-based epic Ulysses the centenary of which passed not long ago – they really get my goat.
Twickster, I think you must have had the same research supervisor as me … I, too, made the mistake of being interested in my subject, and letting it show in my writing. Just one of the many valid reasons I’m not in academia any more.
I think that quote in the OP could be clarified quite a bit … a few more commas, perhaps, to mark off some parenthetical comments? Come to think of it, some of those explicatory bits seem to be begging for actual parentheses. I reckon a half-way decent copy editor could turn that sentence into coherent English. (I assume it’s written for a specialist audience who’ll know what “Althusserian theory” and the like mean.)
That was good…Made me gag on my coffee… 
I’m neither, but it wasn’t impossible … just required storing bits of the sentence in parts until they were ready to be used. Anyone who’s extensively read Catullus (I think that’s how that’s spelled) could probably do just fine with it. Here’s a lightly edited version for the discriminating doper who actually wants to read this sentence but prefers a bit more punctuation to give it more structure:
Bolded parts are the essential bits, I think, though a case could certainly be made for the inclusion of the bit on Althussian theory, and some light editing would clean up the last bolded part; “in which” replaced by “containing” would probably do just fine.
Half the bloody thing is padding - unnecessary to someone in the field who probably (hopefully?) already knows what a structuralist account is, and irrelevant to the layman (me) who doesn’t know what any of it is and isn’t made more educated by the side definitions or explanations. Perhaps accessibility of writing isn’t as important to some as it is to others.
Is academic writing supposed to be structured like a Quentin Tarantino movie?
No shit. That sentence needed it’s own soundtrack.
I had no trouble parsing the sentence, although I have no idea what it’s trying to say, because it uses a lot of specialist terms I’m not familiar with, but the structure, while labored, was relatively easy to understand.
The scary thing is, I wasn’t trying to be ironic in my last post.
Count me as another one who can parse but not understand it, and I’m supposed to be a grad student in literature.
If my dissertation ends up looking anything like that, I shall burn it.
Ever heard of the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest The goal is to write the very first sentence of a novel (and not necessarily the rest of the novel), and to write that sentence as badly as possible. If you’re reading through any of the submissions, I recommend putting on a British accent.
Surely you’re joking. Compared to any postmodernist writing I’ve seen, the quote you provided was a vision of clarity. [url=www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/baudweb.html]Baudrillard[/ur] is a pretty clear example of unclear writing. Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a good example of terribly cryptic writing when the author actually has something to say that is otherwise worth reading. Sokal & Bricmont’s Fasionable Nonsense will give you more examples than you could possibly care to read. IIRC, if you search for Alan Sokal’s homepage, he has his a postmodernist essay generator on his site.
Marxism is another good source of bad writing. In The Liar’s Tale it is remarked that an Italian marxist had to obfuscate his message is terrible writing to get it past the prison censors (sp?), and that style stuck for some reason. I cannot verify this, but every Marxist piece I’ve read has made me cringe.
Sorry that I don’t have much to link to…er…sorry that I don’t have much to which I can link?
Straight Dope Bored Guy Strikes Again
My avademic writing has always been clear, but I always have a hard time figuring out how to start my introduction. When my research was in history I had a very, very awful habit of starting everything like a bad old filmstrip: “Since the dawn of time…” "Throughout the fourteenth century, it was necessary to… " “Ever since trade economies began to move goods over long distances…”
It was like The Living Desert or Man Discovers Fire or The Story of Pottery (or that library preservation classic, Slow Fires) every time I wrote something. I never really noticed what an ugly trend it was until I went through all my old files last spring. Eeeewwww. Can’t believe nobody ever called me on that.
That is great - I’d heard of this award but never seen the winners. The runner-up is my favourite:
Oh, rats. I thought this was going to be a thread about L. Ron Hubbard.
I liked this, actually. It reminds me of something, some writer’s style, but I can’t remember whose. Douglas Adams, maybe? I don’t know.
"But if postdialectic discourse holds, we have to choose between expressionism and the subcapitalist paradigm of context. A number of appropriations concerning postdialectic discourse exist. "
Maybe the author created the sentence here?.