We All Need Words' thesis on academic writing

Step into the dusty corridors of academia and funny things start happening. Straightforward words become clever-clever ones. Ideas becomes frameworks. Words spawn 'isms' and 'isations' and turn into new labels like 'spawnismisation'. Sentences are longer and more convoluted than the Dewey system. Colons and semicolons go wild. And essays end up with titles like this:

'A study into the phenomena of academisation in the sphere of linguistics and the understood cultural and societal impact upon comprehendability.'

Before we send any School of Life academics into a spin, we're not knocking academia. We're all for looking into a subject with depth and rigour. And we'd love to have a Dr in front or our names. Seriously, we really admire the time it takes to get a PhD and to know a subject inside out. What we don't get is why so much of the language is highfaluting. Actually, that's not completely true. Hands up, if you were a student, you probably went through a pretentious phase and started adding segues like 'therefore' at the start of your paragraphs too. You might have swapped normal words like 'get' for formal ones like 'obtain'. And, yes, we know the normal one's Germanic and the formal one's Latin, we just don't need to wear our intellect on our sleeves. Which is what we suspect a lot of this writing puffery is all about. It's a linguistic way to strut your stuff and show how many clever words you know (and how many clever books you've read).

A couple of years ago we did some work for a big art gallery and we met one of their curators to talk about the blurbs next to their pieces of art. Her first words were 'We're not Strictly Come Dancing'. Which was her way of saying that she didn't want to 'dumb down' their writing and that they use 'art speak' for a reason. A more cynical reading of that might be that art speak adds status so that only academic arty people who are in the club 'get' it. We think you can get more people thinking (academics and everyone else besides) without long words and conceptual fudges. You'd get better responses too.

So what's the defence for writing this way? It usually goes something like this:
'I don't want to dumb down.'
But clear writing doesn't automatically mean 'Strictly Come Dancing'. An idea actually sounds cleverer without the tortured prose.

'The English language is so rich, why should I use simpler, plainer words?'
It depends what you want to do. If you want to show off, take your pick from the dictionary. If you want to explain your idea, simple words do the job better. And academic words aren't as romantic as people think. Words like dialectic and exigencies don't exactly add poetry to the page.

'I'm writing for a specialist audience.'
Yes, you might use words that only your peers know and you might assume some knowledge about your topic. But that's still not an excuse for stodgy writing.

Unless of course you don't want a non-specialist reader to be able to make head or tail of it, which we think is a large part of the problem. In the end, the defences of this style are actually just excuses for bad writing. And woolly thinking. It's really easy to hide half-baked concepts in between semicolons and clauses-in-clauses like Russian dolls. An idea only becomes fully-fledged when you can explain it - without any isms, colons, or therefores to hide behind.

Rob and Molly run We All Need Words. They also run our Words for Life class, which is coming back at the end of the year. Academics welcome.

Comments

[Joseph]

While some Jargon is unnecessary, a lot of it comes from the fact that the technical language captures an aspect of meaning that "ordinary" language isn't sensitive to, and changing the word changes the meaning of the sentence. For example, a framework is not the same thing as an idea - to call something a framework is to call particular emphasis to the fact that its presence sorts and structures other ideas. "Let's go on a Caribbean vacation" is an idea, but it is not a framework. Sometimes these differences matter.

Of course, sometimes they don't - and the jargon and technical language gets misused - to continue the example, some people will call "let's go on a Caribbean vacation" a framework to inflate their writing and often end up misusing the word. But to echo some of eugenie's thoughts here, sometimes complex ideas require complex writing - and that's why people "don't want to dumb down", and why they "write for a specialist audience." Specialists have been trained to understand this stuff, and that training is not simply an initiation into a long series of otherwise useless conventions designed to keep the rabble out - all (or really, most) of the learning they are doing is done for a reason. Jargon and technical language are there to make some of this stuff accessible - but it only becomes accessible to those who those determined enough to pick up and master the tools that make the field accessible in the first place.

All of that said, it is still really important to try and make some of this information available for those who have neither the time nor inclination to devote to it. And there are those who work explicitly to try to bridge that gap and translate the content of the academic disciplines for non-specialists. But this is very, very difficult, and usually only the best and brightest in the field are capable of it, and only some of those are interested in doing it. But the failure to bridge that gap and do the "translation" isn't laziness or vanity, it is often because doing that operates at the edge of a specialist's competence or beyond.

[eugenie]

If "therefore" and "obtain" constitute specialist words that the "regular folks" can't understand, then perhaps it's not academia that has the problem? However, I agree that some academics use convoluted language... but that's bad writing more than anything else- many academics, however brilliant they may be, simply lack the skill to write with clarity. I don't think we should shun nuanced, precise and interesting language anymore than we should be verbose or convoluted for the sake of it. Yet complex ideas often require complex writing. And if academics don't use ridiculous words then who the hell will?

[Drew Byrne]

Keep it simple - stupid! After all, one wouldn't want to go all "supercalifradulistiexpiallidocious" on us, one might not know how to spiel it.

[Kirkistan]

Thank you for that! My favorite writers take me deep places without forcing me to learn their specialized language. Three cheers for clarity!