I don’t know why academic writing is so bad. It could be that the skills that make you into a decent scholar have little correlation to the skills you need to communicate effectively in writing. Or maybe people try to shield themselves from criticism by being intentionally ambiguous. When I was studying German philosophy, I came to the conclusion that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was the worst writer in the history of the world. At first, I thought it was the complexity of his system of philosophy that was confounding me, but then I read Arthur Schopenhauer and he wrote clear as a bell. I came to the conclusion that, in addition to being a bad writer, Hegel was also immensely insecure, and so he wrote in such a way that he could evade criticism. And then there was Nietzsche, who could write beautifully but not rigorously.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Hegel was also immensely insecure, and so he wrote in such a way that he could evade criticism.
So kind of a German Faulkner? I could see that….
Academic writing is graded by academic writers and peer-reviewed by academic writers. And journals have very patient editors because of the different in status between a professor and a journal editor.
Academic writing, then, is bad because the models and monitors are bad of forced into complacency.
From my experience writing technical manuals from engineers’ notes, technical and academic writing is bad because the writers forget one simple rule (at least for English): one thought per sentence.
Hegel and his imitators try to qualify their one thought per sentence completely within that sentence. A qualification can be a separate thought.
I’m not sure that insecurity correlates with writing well or poorly.
The worst writing of all are the “on the one hand, on the other hand” writers who document all the qualifications but never have a thought.
So…you don’t want Chuck Hagel as Sec. of Defense? Whadda you? Some kinda Republican!!!???
Because he can’t write? (We’ll ignore the translation problem unless you read him in the original German.)
Oh.
Hegel!!!
Nevermind…
Yore freind,
Emily Litella
I’ve heard a story that when Hegel was quite young, in the 1790s, writing about religion, he had a clear style, and got criticized for not sounding like a professional (this was the age of Kant). No idea whether it’s true, but Tarheel is certainly right about academic peers enforcing bad writing. I know for a fact that in American semiotics people used to sneer at Umberto Eco for writing things laypeople could read (this was before The Name of the Rose–I don’t know if they’re still sneering now that he’s rich). But I think one should always suspect (especially with Hegel and the vile Heidegger) that really bad writing is a veil over really bad thinking and we don’t necessarily have to care what they thought.
“Or maybe people try to shield themselves from criticism by being intentionally ambiguous.”
Bingo.
As a software developer, Hegel’s writing looks a lot to me like computer code. He defines his terms in a precise and particular way, much like a programmer names variables and functions. In code, as in Hegel, the way that familiar words are used bears a relationship to their everyday meaning, but this relationship can sometimes be more misleading than helpful.
Perhaps where the relationship breaks down is that in software, complexity for complexity’s sake is discouraged and clarity is prized above concision, whereas Hegel seems to take professorial glee in making work for his readers. Is the way that Hegel chains clause upon dependent clause any more easier to unpack in the original German?
That could be. Never read Hegel in German and barely remember the language now, 21 years after I moved out of Germany. However German is a very logical language with far fewer ambiguities (i.e. Eats Shoots and Leaves) than English has. Culturally there is value placed on using the precise word even if you already used it many times in the same sentense, versus English where we are encouraged to use synonyms to add variety. And there isn’t the English language tendency to use euphemisms to soften the reality – in German a hospital is literally a “sick house” and life insurance is literally “death insurance”, which of course is more accurate.
As someone whose written and supported a fair amount of complex software in my day, I could easily see someone writing in German with the precision of a computer program. I just can’t say whether Hegel did.
From the preface of Phenomenology of Spirit:
It’s not the translation.
“Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was the worst writer in the history of the world.”
Quite possibly. And what’s worse, he had lots of imitators.
I believe the problem goes back to the quarrel in ancient Greece between philosophy and rhetoric. The rhetoricians argued that entertaining or otherwise moving the audience was the most important aim of the speaker; precision of evidence and argument was unnecessary. The philosophers argued that, style be damned, a truly intelligent person would respond to purely rational argument. Style was an unnecessary concession, and a pandering to the vulgar. The rhetoricians were no better than crowd-pleasers and rabble-rousers.
Cicero proved that the two goals could and should be combined, with elegance and clarity of style (oral delivery as well as written) making effective argument still more effective and more memorable. Since the renaissance, many of the great thinkers have also been great writers, which also makes them great teachers. But it’s a balancing act, and not everybody can pull it off or even wants to. There is little encouragement or training for good writing in the technical fields today. A hundred years ago, most engineers, for example, could write, and write well. Today there’s a strong tendency to regard numbers and graphs as sufficient.
That’s why I have a lingering suspicion of the recent emphhasis on “data”, as exemplified in the recent success of Nate Silver. Of course data is important, but we need to be on guard, as Silver also taught us, against cherry-picked statistics that can be just as deceptive as eloquent fallacies.
Taking the short trip from academic philosophy to academic epistemology, there’s a notorious sort of love my wife and I have for “Word and Object”, Quine’s “most famous book” according to Wikipedia. The book’s essential premise, “how do objects and concepts become identified in language?”, is very interesting. But the writing, Oh My God. A random example:
“The proposed concept of structual synonomy, limited as it is to canonical notation, covers too special a subclass of the eternal sentences. Now insofar as this objection is aimed e.g. at the absence of singular terms, it is minor. Mechanical transformations are at hand in (Chapter 39, Definition and the Double Life) for eliminating and restoring singular terms, and we can read these operations into our definition of structural synonomy, if we like, on a par with the logical transformations and the substitutions under stimulus synonomy. But as an objection to limiting oneself to the canonical notation in other respects, it is serious; for the conversions to canonical notation are in general no more mechanical than foreign translation.”
This excerpt comprises less than half of its paragraph.
It is slightly unfair to quote from the middle of the book; the conceptual phrases have probably been given some specific definitions earlier in the writing. But come on, even with that concession, it undermines the search for common knowledge to write with an absurd density that excludes 99.99..% of the public from that search.
I wrote a major paper in college (one of those 30-page jobs) on the idea that Schopenhauer was feeling around in the dark for (something like) the Theory of Evolution, or more precisely, The Selfish Gene. My basic idea was that Art was possibly the smartest fucker who ever lived but that he was born in the wrong time. He was working in the straightjacket of Kant and especially Hegel’s artificial systems, so that was hogtying his freedom of thought. And he was just a decade or so too old to have benefited from Darwin’s insights, which I think would have set him free to figure a shit-ton of stuff out for all of us.
In any case, what Schopenhauer demonstrated is that Hegel’s ideas are comprehensible as long as Hegel isn’t the one explaining them. What Nietzsche showed was that Hegel was bullshit.
As is so often the case, Calvin And Hobbes provides the definitive analysis on this matter.
I think the linked-to author has the best and simplest answer: most people are poor writers, and academics are no exception. Their work, unfortunately, requires them to generate vast spews of words anyway.
When I worked for a technical publication I was stunned by the gross incompetence of the engineers who made up most of its contributors and writers. It wasn’t only jargon, though. Continuity and coherence were much bigger problems. I decided they figured their colleagues would figure it out, they resented having to explain what they were doing, and they knew somebody else would have to straighten it all out.
The reason there are so few great science writers is that it takes rare talent and patience to turn extremely complex ideas and processes into something non-pros can read.
As for academics standing out, go to any blog at random and be prepared to be appalled — especially if you land on a tech fan site or something ideological.
I don’t know that the charges against the classic philosophers is fair. Hegel was an average writer trying to communicate essentially incomprehensible systems. Marx could be wonderfully readable. Same with guys like Locke, Sartre, the writers/translators of the Bible, and many more. Santayana was amazing. But none of these guys was trying to explain the nature of things to the depth that Hegel, Kant, and the rest of the difficult guys were.
As the dart throwing chimp guy says, good writing takes talent and practice. And caring about it. Simple as that.
It’s the neologisms.
That’s been my theory for years. Because every part of speech can be changed into any other part of speech (“ideation,” “temporially”), academic writers don’t face the structural challenges faced by those of us who work in the vulgate.
We have to struggle with sentences, aborting them and starting them over when painted into a corner. Academics can always invent an adverbial form or a subjunctive mode of whatever concept they’re expressing. The result is a lot of extremely tortuous sentences, mostly in the passive voice (“A new angle is revealed” etc.)
Without the syntactical freedom provided by academic language (a vast superset of spoken language), academic writers would be forced to construct lucid sentences.
The engineers I worked with were constantly nounifying verbs and practicing verbification.
And we soon were telling them that passive voice should only be used as a means of hiding the guilty subject.
A+ for vulgate. The reason academics cannot write is that they write for each other but mostly for themselves. The right wing is not the only group that lives in their own media bubble.
Good point, but this kind of academic writing doesn’t represent “syntactical freedom”, rather the reverse. It is characterized by syntactical monotony, stereotyped sentence structure, but morphological/lexical freedom. However, this morphological freedom also follows monotonous and ambiguous patterns, as witnessed by the barrage of -ations, -izations,-dangling participles, etc.
I know whereof I speak. I have copy-edited a fair amount of academic writing for publication. (Most copy-editors do the minimum; to me, transforming these things into readable prose was an interesting challenge.) Most of these problems can be fixed by restructuring sentences and, when necessary, querying the author to find out just which substantive the -ing or -ly was intended to modify.
The following essay is both entertaining and insightful:
http://www.soc.umn.edu/~samaha/cases/limerick_dancing_with_professors.html
This is not about the Oscars either: Obama has listed a state-by-state breakdown of the sequester’s effects:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/white-house-releases-state-by-state-breakdown-of-sequesters-e
ffects/2013/02/24/caeb71a0-7ec0-11e2-a350-49866afab584_story.html?wpisrc=al_comboPNE
People seldom write to be clear. They have designs on their fellow men. Pure prose is as rare as pure virtue, and for the same reasons.
–Richard A. Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook
Love Richard Lanham. I’ve used a few of his books in my own courses on style and voice.
All fun and hijinks, but I think we need to start taking Sen. Cruz seriously. He seems to be the reincarnation of Tailgunner Joe.
Schopenhauer shared your low opinion of Hegel’s writing but also took the muddy writing as symptomatic of muddy thought.
So did Bertrand Russell, by the way.