I had a conversation today with a colleague about why it is that the professoriat seems so irrelevant to the national conversation. Why are all our public intellectuals either think-tankers or journalists? One reason Camille Paglia is so captivating is that whether or not you think she's a loon, she's at least attempting to communicate big ideas to the wider public. My colleague and I agreed that academics spend so much time talking only to each other, in that specialty jargon that any clerisy uses to talk shop, that they have forgotten how to speak of important things to ordinary people. Which is a shame, because it does neither academics nor the public much good for neither side to be able to talk to each other.
My conversation brought to mind a close friend from undergraduate days. I went to work straightaway in journalism, and he went on to work on advanced degrees in comparative literature and German. He came back home to visit once from his master's program, and I wrangled an assignment for him to review a new production of a German play. I thought he would enjoy using his expertise to write a review for a daily newspaper. Well, he saw the play ... and couldn't write about it. He sat in front of a computer terminal at the newspaper for hours before finally giving up. This man was, and is, brilliant, but he could not find a way to make his interpretation of the play comprehensible for a general audience. It was strange to me to see that -- my friend, an eloquent conversationalist, reduced by his academic training to churning out lit-crit jargon -- but since those days, I've come across it time and time again in my professional work.
Steve Hutchens of Touchstone talks about the phenomenon here. I think some academics like to think that they're taking a stand against dumbing things down. Well, maybe, but more often than not, I'd say they're trying to hide their inability to write clearly and persuasively behind what they like to think of as high principle. What think ye?
Thinking is not the same thing as writing
Monday April 23, 2007
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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That said, it surprises me to hear people say that universities actively discourage their profs from writing for general audiences. It might not advance scholarship as understood within the faculty, but it certainly enhances a U's profile and reputation. Doesn't fame count? And is it really true? I would not say actively discourage. I would say that it is more passive. For most people in the sciences, if they tried to write for a general audience, their research would suffer, and there would be consequences (dealing with raises and promotion primarily). As such, even if they had the inclination, they generally do not try. I also think it is fair to say the most of those academics who have attempted to write accessible science articles are well-established in their careers.
That said, it surprises me to hear people say that universities actively discourage their profs from writing for general audiences. It might not advance scholarship as understood within the faculty, but it certainly enhances a U's profile and reputation. Doesn't fame count? And is it really true? I would not say actively discourage. I would say that it is more passive. For most people in the sciences, if they tried to write for a general audience, their research would suffer, and there would be consequences (dealing with raises and promotion primarily). As such, even if they had the inclination, they generally do not try. I also think it is fair to say the most of those academics who have attempted to write accessible science articles are well-established in their careers.
Erin, I always appreciate corrections from others. I also type very fast, and I find spellcheckers to be a net deficit. I also make deliberate misuse of language* in pursuit of puns; precision when I'm not punning is all the more important to me. :) * (c) 2007 The Mad One. No spell checkers were injured in the creation of these shenanigans. All rites reversed. Copy cats must leave their skins at the door, one way or another.
I was shocked to discover that many academics, especially in the area of literary criticism, not only don't write clearly, but feel obliged to resist the temptation to write clearly (there's an issue of Lingua Franca magazine talking about Orwell's Politics and the English Language in which several writers take this position.) This sounds to my perhaps unsophisticated ears no better than deliberately dyeing one's hair puce. But then, I've been teaching English composition and practicing law for years--both professions in which clarity is crucial, and both utterly unpopular professions. No coincidence. BTW, something nobody here has mentioned is that writing can be clear, or it can be brief, but not both at the same time. New Jersey and several other states have what they call Plain English statutes, which require some kinds of consumer documents to be written at 8th-grade level. A lot of insurance policies are written to comply with such statutes. And yes, they are clear, but they're also roughly 50% longer than the lawyer versions. A lot of the more complex words and phrases we call "legalese" are shorthand for something that would otherwise take a couple of paragraphs to explain to a layperson. So one can't always blame professionals for using the argot of the trade when communicating among themselves--it saves a whole lot of time.
I blame a lot of it on school generally. People are raised writing to impress -- to impress teacher, and then later (if they go on) to impress other smartkids. And since difficult looks smart, and smart is impressive, the writing gets worse. And eventually bad-writing-as-a-way-to-impress-colleagues takes over an entire field. BTW, not to be dismissed the academic type generally. Exceptions allowed for, lordy are they devoted to showing off how smart they are. Drop it, please. Anyway, I've worked in and around the NYC publishing world for a looooong time, and one thing I run into frequently is this: young people, full of English-lit nonsense, who aren't just useless but worse than that. It often takes kids starting out in writing and publishing about five years (sometimes longer) to become useful. And what that usually means is that it takes them that long to shake off their stupid overpriced educations. Only then -- only when they wake up to the fact that nearly everything they were taught was wrong, and every skill they were trained in has no use outside the university -- do they start functioning in any positive way.
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