I’ve probably mentioned that I’ve spent the bulk of my career as a professional writer and have a few books and miles of articles under my belt. My published work is of the practical how-to variety in a field of applied business. I’ve been very successful. But that wasn’t always what I thought I’d do with my life. Way back when, I wanted to be an English professor. As I read our pal Gerald Graff this week, Chapter 6 (“Unlearning to Write”) in particular, I recalled the precise and painful moment when I decided that I had no future in academe.           

     I was a student in the elite and very competitive two-year honors English program at Rutgers College and during the spring of 1979, my senior year, I was working on my undergraduate thesis. I was interpreting the use and importance of etiquette in a couple of Henry James’ novels, contrasting European and American etiquette of the time and how James used those conventions to create tension. I worked with a very highly-regarded English professor and James scholar as my advisor for the project. He was extremely happy throughout our time together with the quality of my interpretations, my insights, my research into etiquette guides from James’ time, my ability to do magnificent close readings, and overall, the work I was doing on this project. We had many happy discussions in his office. The writing, though, troubled him. I gave him portions of my paper as I wrote them and he agreed that I had captured precisely the gist (as Graff calls it) of our discussions. But he said that my writing was too simple and easy to understand; my ideas were sensational, but my mode of expressing them – though forceful, entertaining, and grammatical — was not academic. My writing was too transparent, he said. He showed me examples of more scholarly-sounding papers. I read them but thought that that kind of writing was bad writing. It wasn’t clear. It obscured meaning by using very long and convoluted sentences, ten-dollar words most people wouldn’t know, and a high-fallutin snooty tone. We locked horns on this issue more than once. In the end, in my youthful willfulness, I wrote my thesis my way, in the straightforward, accessible, punchy language I knew in my heart was better.

            Four things grew out of this experience:

            1. My thesis was assessed as With Honors. That was the lowest of three possible distinctions. (With High Honors and With Highest Honors were the two higher designators.) The remarks of the committee were the same as those of my advisor. My ideas were wonderful, the committee said, but my language was too-straightforward; my paper was well-written but didn’t sound academic.

            2.  I was crushed. I decided that I had no place in academe and no talent or appreciation for writing in academic style.

            3. I was at this same time chosen as the one and only Rutgers’ University Danforth Foundation nominee. Had I won the fellowship, I would have had a free ride to any graduate school. I turned down the nomination and told the committee to give it to another student who was more suited to academic life.

            4. I graduated and in short time embarked on a writing career in the popular mode and became very successful.

            I look back at all of this, stir it together with what Graff said about academic writing, and I can’t help but hurt. I let a few people convince me that there was only one way to write in academe and that I had no future in the academy stating great ideas simply enough so that everyone could easily understand them. What a bunch of hooey.

            There’s a P.S. to my story. The professor/advisor of my thesis is still at Rutgers. I read recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education that he is now a high-level dean.