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).

Safire's Rules of Writing

Do not put statements in the negative form.

And don't start sentences with a conjunction.

If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.

De-accession euphemisms.

If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

~William Safire, "Great Rules of Writing"

Writers on Writer's Block

"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say" ~Sholem Asch

"The only cure for writer's block is insomnia." ~Merit Antares

"Writing is a struggle against silence." Carlos Fuentes

"All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If I'm trying to sleep, the ideas won't stop. If I'm trying to write, there appears a barren nothingness." ~Carrie Latet

"What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings.  But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach." ~Logan Pearsall Smith

That last one is my favorite, but I don't think Logan Pearsall Smith really had writer's block--do you?  So, what do you do to get past writer's block?

Hemingway's Message: Stop Procrastinating!

For all of you out there who are putting off writing your magnum opus (or doing anything else you've always dreamed of), consider the dying thoughts of the narrator of Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro:  "Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now."


[H/T Lyrissa Lidsky at PrawfsBlawg for the great quote!]

Some VERY Good Advice for Writers

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." ~Mark Twain

This reminds me of a conversation during an Intercultural Workshop I attended in Germany on the topic of Americans' overuse of superlatives.  I was the only American in the room to defend us all, and I wasn't an effective defender because I'm very damn fond of using superlatives.