Writing is hard, it’s hard to learn and it’s hard to teach, but lots of people use writing to express their ideas. (Maybe at some point we’ll shift to papers being delivered as Youtube mini-lectures, but we’re not there yet.) I mean that if you do research scholarship, you want to convey this to others, and writing is the most direct way to do this. I don’t mean this cynically, in a “publish or perish” sort of way.
It’s difficult to write clearly, it takes effort and it takes practice, and, on top of all that, many people don’t see the path from bad writing to good writing.īut many people have to write, as part of their job. In short, I think most academic writing is bad for the same reason that most writing is bad: because writing is hard. Why is academic writing so bad, and why is this such a surprise to Pinker? If it were clear, we’d all have learned to write well, back in high school.Īlso there’s the problem with feedback, as discussed above. Partly because the path to writing well is not so clear. The above seems completely consistent with the notion that it’s difficult to write well, that academics, just like other people, would like to write well but they don’t really know how. In Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012), Helen Sword masochistically analyzed the literary style in a sample of 500 scholarly articles and found that a healthy minority in every field were written with grace and verve. This has not been my experience, and it turns out to be a myth. People often tell me that academics have no choice but to write badly because the gatekeepers of journals and university presses insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s seriousness. Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?Ī third explanation shifts the blame to entrenched authority. To put it in the context of Pinker’s article: Why do academics stink at writing? Why does almost everybody stink at writing? Writing is hard.īut the familiarity of bad academic writing raises a puzzle. OK, so you all know about Sturgeon’s law (see above image).
STEVEN SIMPLE WRITER HOW TO
Academics, like most other people, don’t get a lot of direct or indirect comments on their writing style, so they don’t learn well what has worked and what has not worked or how to do better. That’s part of what makes writing non-algorithmic: even when we know what we want to say, it can take lots of iterations to get there.Īnd I agree with Pinker that the lack of good feedback is a problem. Just about every sentence I write, I need to reconfigure for the purpose of increasing clarity.Īnd, yes, I realize that the previous sentence is ugly that’s actually part of my point, that when we put in the effort to make our sentences clearer, they can get ugly, and the sentences’ ugliness then gets in the way of understanding. The naïve realism and breezy conversation in classic style are deceptive, an artifice constructed through effort and skill. I’ll return at the end to the bit about “having a foreign policy”-this is the sort of laugh line that I think works better in a live speech than in a written article-but first I will discuss the ways in which I agree with Pinker’s claim that academic writing is difficult, and how I disagree with his explanations.įog comes easily to writers it’s the clarity that requires practice. Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand? But the familiarity of bad academic writing raises a puzzle. No honest professor can deny that there’s something to the stereotype. Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. Unlike Pinker, I have not done research on linguistics, but I’ll do my best to comment based on my own experiences. Linguist and public intellectual Steven Pinker recently published an article, “Why Academics Stink at Writing.” That’s a topic that interests me! Like Pinker, I’ve done a lot of writing, both for technical and general audiences.
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