On How We Write: An Attack and a Defense

A month ago the Atlantic published an article “The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing” that discussed efforts to urge academics to write in a clearer, more accessible manner. The article featured tweets, such as the one seen above, from academics who were asked to describe their research using emojis to see to what extent they could simplify and distill their work. #emojiresearch

The Atlantic article was not the first to charge academics with writing turgid prose. Last year psychology professor Steve Pinker wrote his famous “Why Academics Stink at Writing” in which he accused academics for writing in a self-conscious, apologetic and anxiety-ridden style that culminated in obfuscating unintelligible prose. Prior to that Nicholas Kristof penned “Professors, We Need You!” in which he said academics were to blame for their own marginalization. He wrote:

Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates. The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

Kristof was arguing that academics had made themselves irrelevant by failing to communicate their work widely.

Law professor Cass Sunstein responded specifically to Kristof’s charges in an article for Bloomberg View saying that much social science research becomes relevant later in time, but that jargon is necessary for research to evolve and develop. In Perspectives on History professor Gordon Wood came to the defense of academic history writing saying that academic historians’ do not strive to tell stories like popular historians:

…academic historians usually select their topics by surveying what previous academic historians have said. They then find errors, openings, or niches in the historiography that they can correct, fill in, or build upon. Their studies, however narrow they may seem, are not insignificant. It is through their specialized studies that they contribute to the collective effort of the profession to expand our knowledge of the past.

Professor of Film Studies Amanda Ann Klein defended academic writing on her blog and made the case that in the current age where everything has to be bite-sized, people don’t make the time to read and value academic writing for what is:

The problem then, with academic writing, is that its core — the creation of careful, accurate ideas about the world — are born of research and revision and, most important of all, time. Time is needed. But our world is increasingly regulated by the ethic of the instant. We are losing our patience. We need content that comes quickly and often, content that can be read during a short morning commute or a long dump (sorry for the vulagrity, Ma), content that can be tweeted and retweeted and Tumblred and bit-lyed. And that content is great. It’s filled with interesting and dynamic ideas. But this content cannot replace the deep structures of thought that come from research and revision and time.

Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker saw the problem from a different perspective. As someone who is now outside academia he argued that the academic system has increasingly forced scholars to write for narrower and smaller audiences. In “Why is Academic Writing so Academic?” he concludes:

Increasingly, to build a successful academic career you must serially impress very small groups of people (departmental colleagues, journal and book editors, tenure committees). Often, an academic writer is trying to fill a niche. Now, the niches are getting smaller. Academics may write for large audiences on their blogs or as journalists. But when it comes to their academic writing, and to the research that underpins it — to the main activities, in other words, of academic life — they have no choice but to aim for very small targets. Writing a first book, you may have in mind particular professors on a tenure committee; miss that mark and you may not have a job. Academics know which audiences — and, sometimes, which audience members — matter….If academic writing is to become expansive again, academia will probably have to expand first [emphasis mine].