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A Guide to Writing Good Academic Prose Focus THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION A Guide to Writing Good Academic Prose As a Chronicle of Higher Education individual subscriber, you receive premium, unrestricted access to the entire Chronicle Focus collection. Curated by our newsroom, these booklets compile the most popular and relevant higher-education news to provide you with in-depth looks at topics affecting campuses today. The Chronicle Focus collection explores student alcohol abuse, racial tension on campuses, and other emerging trends that have a significant impact on higher education. ©2016 by The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, forwarded (even for internal use), hosted online, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For bulk orders or special requests, contact The Chronicle at [email protected] ©2016 THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION INC. TABLE OF CONTENTS o one wants their writing to be the subject of ridicule and disdain, but that’s the lot of many academics, whose turgid, clumsy, lumpy prose is deemed unapproachable by readers outside the Nhalls of academe. What’s the harm in writing for the few? Many good ideas that might be of public benefit are clois- tered away. The articles in this collection describe what’s wrong with academic prose and how it could be improved. Why Academics Stink at Writing 4 Scholars aren’t penalized for convoluted prose. But the problem runs deeper. 10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly 11 A lot of very talented people fail because they couldn’t, or just didn’t, write. Why Most Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers 13 No one should be surprised if much scholarly writing continues to be mediocre and confused. Professor, Your Writing Could Use Some Help 16 More colleges should offer night courses in creative-nonfiction writing especially for faculty members. Coming Down From the Clouds: On Academic Writing 18 By mainly writing for each other, scholars come up with ideas worth saying to everyone else. The Art and Science of Finding Your Voice 21 Six techniques and exercises will help the beginning academic writer develop a distinctive voice. Shame in Academic Writing 23 Is it normal to feel stupid after getting an edited manuscript back? Scholars Talk Writing: Steven Pinker 25 “Good prose requires dedication to the craft of writing, and our profession simply doesn’t reward it.” Scholars Talk Writing: Camille Paglia 28 “Good Lord, I certainly learned nothing about writing from grad school!” The Secret to Hitting Your Writing Goals: Peer Pressure 30 Self-organized writing groups provide accountability for time-starved tenure-track professors. Cover illustration by Linda Helton for The Chronicle 22 CAMPUS VIOLENCE THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION / OCTOBER 2016 ©2016 THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION INC. OPINION Why Academics Stink at Writing By STEVEN PINKER ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE BRODNER FOR THE CHRONICLE 4 WRITING GOOD ACADEMIC PROSE THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION / NOVEMBER 2016 ogether with wearing earth tones, stood by amateurs. driving Priuses, and having a foreign But the insider-shorthand theory, too, doesn’t policy, the most conspicuous trait of fit my experience. I suffer the daily experience of the American professoriate may be the being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, prose style called academese. An edi- even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section Ttorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded aca- of an experimental paper explains, “Participants demic at his desk offering the following explana- read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed tion of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time or denied by the subsequent presentation of an low: “Incomplete implementation of strategized assessment word.” After some detective work, I programmatics designated to maximize acquisi- determined that it meant, “Participants read sen- tion of awareness and utilization of communica- tences, each followed by the word true or false.” tions skills pursuant to standardized review and The original academese was not as concise, accu- assessment of languaginal development.” In a sim- rate, or scientific as the plain English translation. ilar vein, Bill Watterson has the 6-year-old Calvin So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up titling his homework assignment “The Dynamics the polysyllables? of Inter being and Monological Imperatives in Dick A third explanation shifts the blame to en- and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gen- trenched authority. People often tell me that aca- der Modes,” and exclaiming to Hobbes, his tiger demics have no choice but to write badly because companion, “Academia, here I come!” the gatekeepers of journals and university presses No honest professor can deny that there’s some- insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s se- thing to the stereotype. When the late Denis Dut- riousness. This has not been my experience, and it ton (founder of the Chronicle-owned Arts & Let- turns out to be a myth. In Stylish Academic Writ- ters Daily) ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to ing (Harvard University Press, 2012), Helen Sword celebrate “the most stylistically lamentable masochistically analyzed the literary style in a passages found in scholarly books and articles,” he sample of 500 scholarly articles and found that a had no shortage of nominations, and he awarded healthy minority in every field were written with the prizes to some of academe’s leading lights. grace and verve. But the familiarity of bad academic writing Instead of moralistic finger-pointing or evasive raises a puzzle. Why should a profession that blame-shifting, perhaps we should try to under- trades in words and dedicates itself to the trans- stand academese by engaging in what academics mission of knowledge so often turn out prose that do best: analysis and explanation. An insight from is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, literary analysis and an insight from cognitive sci- unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand? ence go a long way toward explaining why people The most popular answer outside the academy is who devote their lives to the world of ideas are so the cynical one: Bad writing is a deliberate choice. inept at conveying them. Scholars in the softer fields spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They n a brilliant little book called Clear and dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings Simple as the Truth, the literary scholars Fran- of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle Icis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner argue that their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. every style of writing can be understood as a mod- Though no doubt the bamboozlement theory el of the communication scenario that an author applies to some academics some of the time, in simulates in lieu of the real-time give-and-take of my experience it does not ring true. I know many a conversation. They distinguish, in particular, ro- scholars who have nothing to hide and no need to mantic, oracular, prophetic, practical, and plain impress. They do groundbreaking work on import- styles, each defined by how the writer imagines ant subjects, reason well about clear ideas, and are himself to be related to the reader, and what the honest, down-to-earth people. Still, their writing writer is trying to accomplish. (To avoid the awk- stinks. wardness of strings of he or she, I borrow a conven- The most popular answer inside the academy tion from linguistics and will refer to a male ge- is the self-serving one: Difficult writing is un- neric writer and a female generic reader.) Among avoidable because of the abstractness and com- those styles is one they single out as an aspiration plexity of our subject matter. Every human pas- for writers of expository prose. They call it classic time — music, cooking, sports, art — develops an style, and they credit its invention to 17th-century argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to use French essayists such as Descartes and La Roche- a long-winded description every time they refer foucauld. to a familiar concept in one another’s company. The guiding metaphor of classic style is see- It would be tedious for a biologist to spell out the ing the world. The writer can see something that meaning of the term transcription factor every the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the time she used it, and so we should not expect the reader so she can see for herself. The purpose of tête-à-tête among professionals to be easily under- writing is presentation, and its motive is disinter- NOVEMBER 2016 / THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION WRITING GOOD ACADEMIC PROSE 5 ested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language and signposts. In reality, meta discourse is there to with truth, the proof of success being clarity and help the writer, not the reader, since she has to put simplicity. The truth can be known and is not more work into understanding the signposts than the same as the language that reveals it; prose is she saves in seeing what they point to, like direc- a window onto the world. The writer knows the tions for a shortcut that take longer to figure out truth before putting it into words; he is not using than the time the shortcut would save. the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. The art of classic prose is to use signposts spar- The writer and the reader are equals: The reader ingly, as we do in conversation, and with a mini- can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as mum of metadiscourse.
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