Academic writing

terminalpolitics:

When you read articles and books and (God help us) philosophy directed at an academic audience, you might notice it’s often hard to know quite what the author is trying to say.

Usually, we declare this “bad writing” and move on, but “bad writing” serves a purpose. When an author makes their writing dense and hard to understand we shouldn’t assume it was just an accident. Most “bad” academic writing is intentionally inscrutable.

What purpose does bad writing serve in academic contexts?

1. If you make your writing hard to understand and pepper it with big words and flourishes, some readers will assume that they are struggling with the text because they aren’t “smart enough to get it.”
2. Making writing needlessly esoteric is a form of gatekeeping.
3. If the reader can’t be 100% sure of what you are saying, it makes it harder for them to rebut your argument.

If an idea could be presented in a clearer and more direct form, then when it is presented in a hazy and convoluted way we need to assume it is intentional – and we need to ask how does adding noise to the piece benefit the author?

Time and again, you will see torturous or opaque writing celebrated, but if you stripped it down to its basic message the content would be laughably banal.

Let us remember that “jargon” exists so that specificity and nuance can be increased between correspondents familiar with the terms involved. Jargon is meant to allow more precise communication. Too often, it is used to exclude people from dialogue or it is used to obscure meaning – as when an author coins a neologism that only he is allowed to define.

So next time you have a hard time with a text, ask “could this have been presented more clearly?”
If the answer is “yes” then follow-up by asking what purpose was served by muddying the writing? Was the author hiding a bad argument? A week idea? Was he trying to increase his cultural capital by looking “deep” – or was he trying to push people out of the discourse?

It isn’t enough to recognize that a lot of academic writing is bad writing, we need to recognize that a lot of bad writing is intentional and serves a hidden purpose.