Breaking the Cycle of Bad Academic Writing

In her Chronicle essay, "Bad Writing and Bad Thinking," Rachel Toor discusses the importance of shedding pretentious academic writing styles that obfuscate the thinking behind the writing to make it seem more brilliant and original than it really is. It's an excellent "Emperor's New Clothes" argument for plain and clear academic writing.  Toor says:

I've heard [the same] song from graduate students in every discipline, and from faculty members, junior and senior, at universities across the country. The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that's how you show you're smart. If you're too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won't take you seriously.

. . . 

Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to fit in. And it's a result of lazy thinking. 

Toor discusses George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which connects bad writing with bad thinking and provides these simple rules for clear writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 

Toor concludes that "Orwell's proscriptions of pretentious diction are as hopeless as Oprah's quest for skinniness. His preference for sturdy Anglo-Saxon words over Greek and Latinate constructions is, I'm afraid, doomed in academe." But, borrowing from the words of Atticus Finch*, my response to Toor is "[s]imply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try" to encourage better academic writing. Both Toor's essay and Orwell's essay are worth reading for those of us who want to become better writers.


*Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird 87 (First Perennial Classics ed. 2002).