Tag Archives: academic writing

Pedagogic Treatise or Academic Discourse, or Teacher Talk:

“Not knowing to any degree of certainty, I decline to elucidate lest I should prevaricate.” This was one of my grandfather’s favorite expressions and one that I use on my composition students when we talk about word choice and voice. Do you know what it means without using a dictionary or thesaurus? When I my students what I just said, they usually answer, “I don’t know.” I tell them they are correct. Then they are really confused.

Do academics talk the way they write? I don’t think so. Several years ago my father went on a weekend trip with a group of men from the church we attend. Among the men was the pastor of the church. My father came home amazed at the sense of humor, down-home attitude, and genuine earthiness of the pastor. He was surprised that a man with his education and devotion to God would tell jokes in the ice cream store at midnight. I think academics are the same. When they are with a group of people they are not trying to impress with their erudite dialogue (I did not look up either of those words), they probably use slang and begin their sentences with coordinate conjunctions. They may even split their infinitives and mix their metaphors. It is only when they try to impress an audience (or scare them) that they resort to multi-syllabic words from the academic-speak side of the chart. They probably speak from the other side of the chart. This is not to say that a few words won’t eventually cross over from academic-speak to Realspeak, but most will remain enshrined on the academic side.

This type of vocabulary building and use engenders inert knowledge. Think back to the vide we watched on our first night of class. Inert knowledge is that information we posses but do not use. This is the same as dividing our words, or encouraging our students to, into separate lists, some to be used regularly and others to be saved for special occasions. This is not to belittle the use of a thesaurus or dictionary. A good vocabulary is a wonderful thing. But it only serves its function when it enhances communication, not when it obfuscates it. (Do you like that word? It is on my academic-speak list. I know it but don’t use it. Is it better than obscures? No. neither is it worse because both are clear.) While building a good vocabulary is to be admired, the goal should be to communicate, to share ides, to be inclusive. Otherwise we are writing without an audience.

To change metaphorical horses in mid-stream, I want to tell you about my literature class this morning. The students are each leading the class discussion one time over the course of the semester. The instructions state that the student does not have to come to class with answers, or explanations, or an analysis of the reading. They simply need to have done several careful readings of the text. The presentation this morning was about “Harlem” by Langston Hughes. As the student was finishing, he referred to a criticism he had read that alleged that the jagged form of the right had side of the poem on the paper was a symbol for the violence in the African-American community. The jagged edge represented broken class or the points of a knife while the smooth lines of the ending stanza represented a razor blade. The class was amazed when I disagreed with this interpretation. They seemed to be of the opinion that if it is published it must be true.

The people who are creating these long-winded, dense, bewildering articles are doing a disservice to students and young scholars. While I don’t think we want the simplified language if elementary students, and while I strive to achieve and use a good vocabulary, the words must be used to enhance the ideas, not to obscure them.

Here is a P.S. for you. Each time I compose any writing to be submitted as part of a class, I check the Flesch-Kincaid reading level. If it is less than 12, I am mortified and revise until it reaches at least 12. (Does anybody know how high this thing goes? I read a 15 a few days ago.) Can you guess what this writing earned? Do you care? Did it make sense? Do you care?

And the award for “least sexy description of sex” goes to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick…

Ok, ok. So this post title has little to do with the actual contents of my post. That being said, I had to point out the passage (p.143, paragraph 2) because in terms of unnecessarily obfuscated academic writing, Sedgwick really gives Frederic “The dialectic of desire is thus…something like a negation of a negation” Jameson a run for his money. Just reading the excerpts from Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet brought me back to some of the denser texts I “read” during the course of my undergraduate education.

I think at some point, most high achieving students have tried to mimic this “style,” and to varying degrees of success. They do it for several overlapping reasons: they think they have to, teachers expect it, and they want to sound “smart.” As I admitted last week, I have certainly turned in my fair share of papers steeped in words like “problematize,” “orientate,” and perhaps most embarassingly, “phenomenological.” It took me most of my college education to figure out that throwing around such words does not in fact make you sound “smart.” It just makes you sound like a show-off, and a boring one at that.

Graff’s assessment of the inaccessibility of academic writing is spot-on. He does a superb job of articulating the “so what” portion of his main thesis. The first several chapters of Clueless in Academe demonstrate in varied ways how disconnection within academia and needlessly arcane texts work to both alienate students and further confine academics to their ivory tower. My issue with Graff’s assessment is not in his articulation of the problem. As with with most academic writing, troubles crop up during the “now what?” portion of the work.

To be fair, I’ve only read half of this book. Perhaps his practical solutions to these problems appear in chapters 8 through 14. I’m only working with what I’ve read so far; but frankly, nothing I’ve read so far has even remotely convinced me that a grand restructuring of academia is either a good idea, or even possible. In fact, the very idea of “the gist business” (138) appalls me. That isn’t to say that academics shouldn’t do a better job of communicating their ideas to their students and non-scholars. Of course they should. But reducing academic discourse to reductive summarization seems to me a step backwards, rather than a step forward.

The other issue I take with Graff’s proposed solutions to “curricular disconnection” relates to his call for a more comparative curriculum. In Graff’s ideal world, scholars would still argue, but respectfully. Teacher swapping would help students form links between competing ideologies and create synergistic “learning communities” (79-80). Having attended a university where certain members of the same department could barely contain their mutual detest for one other (never mind their ambivalence towards students), I just don’t see how this Graff’s dream-world would have any chance of becoming a reality—at least not without a massive restructuring in the tenure system in most large universities.

I hate to be a cynic, and I hate to even describe universities as “businesses,” but let’s not kid ourselves. If universities are in the “business” of anything, it’s luring academic superstars, securing research grants, funding sports programs, squeezing their students dry, and pumping wealthy alumni for cash–and not necessarily in that order. Graff’s suggestions are certainly uplifting, but they assume that professors have the time, power, and incentive to redefine the structure of the academic world.

Ouch! Geral Graff Opened a 30-Year-Old Wound

       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.