PROSElytizing

It has been quite a while since I read anything that made me guffaw this loudly.

Robert Weir's article Plain Talk for Plain Speech for Inside Higher Ed is a clever send-up of the stilted Lingua Academia that results in obscure, unreadable postmodern, post-colonial (pomo-poco) jargon.

He has formed the Society for Intellectual Clarity (SIC) and intends to launch a new journal, SIC PUPPY (Professors United in Plain Prose Yearnings).  I've asked to be included on the editorial board.

People have been ranting against pomo-poco obfuscations since mo times (the pre-post-modern era.)  My favorite rant on pompous, abstruse prose was written by George Orwell in 1945.  His essay, Politics and the English Language is an essential manifesto for clear, eloquent writing and based on the following 6 rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The examples Orwell uses to illustrate his points are delightful.  Take this translation of a biblical passage for example:

In "modern" verse:

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

The original:

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

One of my pet peeves is that some of my coaching clients have to jargonize their writing and publish via academic presses, rather than popular, lay presses, in order to impress tenure committees.  Why are academic authors penalized for being widely read?

Comments

[The Unknown Professor]

My take is that the use of jargon often hides a lack of comprehension on the writer's part. The best teachers (and writers) are always finding simpler ways to say things. Unfortunately, you can't say (or write) something more simply unless you understand it more deeply.

When I was writing my dissertation, some of the best advice I received from advisors was to write a five-sentence explanation of it that a smart undergraduate could understand. Then they told me to write a slightly longer one that my grandmother could understand.

One final thought - have you seen the bumper sticker that says "eschew obfuscation"?

[academic coach]

Eschew Obfuscation!
I love it! and will add it to my list of mantras.

[dr. m(mmm)]

Orwell's rules are of the good Strunk & White variety, and I agree that writing with clarity should be one of the cardinal rules of academic writing. Nevertheless, with this mantra survives the early modernist legacy of ecumenism. Modern philosophical and scientific language, for instance, is rooted in an attempt to control the world (and the people and things in it) by controlling language. As a result, a lot of modernist language that we now use to describe people and things carries with it (political or ideological) implications from that attempt to make the world stable and controllable. Unfortunatley, this legacy benefits some people at the expense of others while missing a lot of the instability of the real human relations. The problem of jargon arises when new words (or new uses of old words) are used to try to hasten change in the ecumenical legacy of modernist language. It is difficult to unsettle a language (technically, a discourse) based in stability and control.

But, the disaster of jargon arises when writers fail to remember the rhetorical force of the unsettling neologisms, opting instead for style-for-style's-sake. The challenge, then, is to perform instability with clarity. This is certainly no easy task. Yet, it is a good warning, as the discussion at lucyrain's goes, about the dangers of placing too much emphasis on graduate student publishing.

Do the pressures of the academic job market encourage obfuscatory writing?

[Articulate Dad]

One of the problems here is that graduate (and undergraduate) students are often led to believe that the most worthy writers are the ones most difficult to read, that there is some correlation between valuable ideas and incomprehensibility.

I think of a small philosopher's book that I have on my shelf which was entirely dedicated to exposing the ineffability of the matter under discussion. I mean, really, what's the point of penning 150 pages to say in essence, "the matter under discussion here is complete inaccessible to everyone, and what's more words are incapable of clarifying it to any degree"? With nothing interesting to say in some paragraphs, the author resorted to random Latin phrases to jazz it up a bit.

It's often the most revered figures (Derrida, Nattiez, Chomsky) who seem to gain their reputations not so much for what they say, but for how difficult it is for anyone to actually grasp what they mean. Where is the value in that?

[Maggie May]

I'm sort of on the fence here. On the one hand, I agree that clarity in thinking and writing is undervalued, and people do wrongly assume sometimes that "confusing" necessarily means "deep."

On the other hand, I think that the critcisms of academics using "jargon" or being "incomprehensible" are too often used to dismiss an author's ideas, or give people (everyone from undergrads to grad students to some professors) an excuse to not do the work necessary to understand the text. To some extent, advanced texts in a specific field shouldn't always be "accessible" to nonspecialists: they're not meant to be.

[dr. m(mmm)]

Right, Maggie Mae. No one thinks that theoretical physicists doing superstring theory, or computer science people talking about stigmergy and fuzzy ant algorithms, are masking their lack of understanding with obtuse terminology. On the contrary, people ASSUME that the scientists know exactly what they are talking about. But actual human relations are complex in the same ways, and develop terminology for talking about the complexity that ordinary language itself masks. Why is the assumption always that humanities theorists are just making it up?

I would like to know how many people who cite Derrida as a problematic writer have actual read him in earnest and understand his relation to phenomenology and the philosophically conservative tenor of most of his work. Plus, they likely are reading translations of his poetically-inflected French constructions.

[camicao]

Dr. m(mmm) is really cracking me up with his or her spiels. Right on!

I am or better said "was" a pomo poco person, and I reached my limit a few years ago. 90% of the theory-inflected scholarship produced now will be forgotten in 10 years. I went back and looked at my "cutting edge" packet of readings on postmodernity from a graduate seminar I took in 1993 and the readings were so pathetic and useless, so entangled in debates that have been superseded, so full of self-importance that time has definitively defeated... it was funny and sad and profound. And I was cheated by my grad program-- they did not teach me how to teach what I've had to teach, and they did not teach me to write for publication either; most journals and presses will not stand for bullcrap.

The humanities should strive to be relevant, to engage non-academic communities, to teach. Jargon-ism actively undermines these "values." Essentialism? Yes, and proud of it.

[academic coach]

Kudos to humanities professors who "strive to be relevant, to engage non-academic communities, to teach."