Dancing with Professors:
The Trouble with Academic Prose
Patricia Nelson Limerick
Professor of History, University of Colorado
In
ordinary life, when a listener cannot understand what someone has said, this is
the usual exchange:
Listener:
I cannot understand what you are saying.
Speaker:
Let me try to say it more clearly.
But
in scholarly writing in the late 20th century, other rules apply. This is the
implicit exchange:
Reader:
I cannot understand what you are saying.
Academic
Writer: Too bad. The problem is that you are an unsophisticated and untrained
reader. If you were smarter, you would understand me.
The
exchange remains implicit, because no one wants to say, "This doesn't make
any sense," for fear that the response, "It would, if you were
smarter," might actually be true.
While
we waste our time fighting over ideological conformity in the scholarly world,
horrible writing remains a far more important problem. For all their
differences, most right_wing scholars and most left_wing scholars share a
common allegiance to a cult of obscurity. Left, right and center all hide
behind the idea that unintelligible prose indicates a sophisticated mind. The
politically correct and the politically incorrect come together in the violence
they commit against the English language.
University
presses have certainly filled their quota every year, in dreary monographs,
tangled paragraphs and impenetrable sentences. But trade publishers have also
violated the trust of innocent and hopeful readers. As a prime example of
unprovoked assaults on innocent words, consider the verbal behavior of Allan
Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind," published by a large
mainstream press. Here is a sample:
"If
openness means to go with the flow,' it is necessarily an accommodation to the
present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the
progress of its principles that unqualified openness to it would mean
forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware
of what is doubtful in it."
Is
there a reader so full of blind courage as to claim to know what this sentence
means? Remember, the book in which this remark appeared was a lamentation over
the failings of today's students, a call to arms to return to tradition and
standards in education. And yet, in 20 years of paper grading, I do not recall
many sentences that asked, so pathetically, to be put out of their misery.
Jump
to the opposite side of the political spectrum from Allan Bloom, and literary grace
makes no noticeable gains. Contemplate this breathless, indefatigable sentence
from the geographer, Allan Pred, and Mr. Pred and Bloom seem, if only in
literary style, to be soul mates.
"If
what is at stake is an understanding of geographical and historical variations
in the sexual division of productive and reproductive labor, of contemporary
local and regional variations in female wage labor and women's work outside the
formal economy, of on_the_ground variations in the everyday content of women's
lives, inside and outside of their families, then it must be recognized that,
at some nontrivial level, none of the corporal practices associated with these
variations can be severed from spatially and temporally specific linguistic
practices, from language that not only enable the conveyance of instructions,
commands, role depictions and operating rules, but that also regulate and
control, that normalize and spell out the limits of the permissible through the
conveyance of disapproval, ridicule and reproach."
In
this example, 124 words, along with many ideas, find themselves crammed into
one sentence. In their company, one starts to get panicky. "Throw open the
windows; bring in the oxygen tanks!" one wants to shout. "These words
and ideas are nearly suffocated. Get them air!" And yet the condition of
this desperately packed and crowded sentence is a perfectly familiar one to
readers of academic writing, readers who have simply learned to suppress the
panic.
Everyone
knows that today's college students cannot write, but few seem willing to admit
that the professors who denounce them are not doing much better. The problem is
so blatant that there are signs that the students are catching on. In my
American history survey course last semester, I presented a few writing rules
that I intended to enforce inflexibly. The students looked more and more
peevish; they looked as if they were about to run down the hall, find a
telephone, place an urgent call and demand that someone from the A.C.L.U. rush
up to campus to sue me for interfering with their First Amendment rights to
compose unintelligible, misshapen sentences.
Finally
one aggrieved student raised her hand and said, "You are telling us not to
write long, dull sentences, but most of our reading is full of long, dull
sentences."
As
this student was beginning to recognize, when professors undertake to appraise
and improve student writing, the blind are leading the blind. It is, in truth,
difficult to persuade students to write well when they find so few good examples
in their assigned reading.
The
current social and judicial context for higher education makes this whole issue
pressing. In Colorado, as in most states, the legislators re convinced that the
university is neglecting students and wasting state resources on pointless
research. Under those circumstances, the miserable writing habits of professors
pose a direct and concrete danger to higher education. Rather than going to the
state legislature, proudly presenting stacks of the faculty's compelling and engaging
publications, you end up hoping that the lawmakers stay out of the library and
stay away, especially, from the periodical room, with its piles of academic
journals. The habits of academic writers lend powerful support to the
impression that research is a waste of the writers' time and of the public's
money.
Why
do so many professors write bad prose?
Ten
years ago, I heard a classics professor say the single most important thing_in
my opinion_that anyone has said about professors. "We must remember,"
he declared, "that professors are the ones nobody wanted to dance with in
high school."
This
is an insight that lights up the universe_or at least the university. It is a
proposition that every entering freshman should be told, and it is certainly a
proposition that helps to explain the problem of academic writing. What one
sees in professors, repeatedly, is exactly the manner that anyone would adopt
after a couple of sad evenings sidelined under the crepe_paper streamers in the
gym, sitting on a folding chair while everyone else danced. Dignity, for
professors, perches precariously on how well they can convey this message,
"I am immersed in some very important thoughts, which unsophisticated
people could not even begin to understand. Thus, I would not want to dance,
even if one of you unsophisticated people were to ask me."
Think
of this, then, the next time you look at an unintelligible academic text.
"I would not want the attention of a wide reading audience, even if a wide
audience were to ask for me." Isn't that exactly what the pompous and
pedantic tone of the classically academic writer conveys?
Professors
are often shy, timid and fearful people, and under those circumstances, dull,
difficult prose can function as a kind of protective camouflage. When you write
typical academic prose, it is nearly impossible to make a strong, clear
statement. The benefit here is that no one can attack your position, say you
are wrong or even raise questions about the accuracy of what you have said, if
they cannot tell what you have said. In those terms, awful, indecipherable
prose is its own form of armor, protecting the fragile, sensitive thoughts of
timid souls.
The
best texts for helping us understand the academic world are, of course, Lewis
Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Just
as devotees of Carroll would expect, he has provided us with the best analogy
for understanding the origin and function of bad academic writing. Tweedledee
and Tweedledum have quite a heated argument over a rattle. They become so angry
that they decide to fight. But before they fight, they go off to gather various
devices of padding and protection: "bolsters, blankets, hearthrugs,
tablecloths, dish covers and coal scuttles." Then, with Alice's help in
tying and fastening, they transform these household items into armor. Alice is
not impressed: " Really, they'll be more like bundles of old clothes than
anything else, by the time they're ready!' she said to herself, as she arranged
a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, to keep his head from being cut off,'
as he said, Why this precaution?" Because, Tweedledee explains, "it's
one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle_to
get one's head cut off."
Here,
in the brothers' anxieties and fears, we have an exact analogy for the problems
of academic writing. The next time you look at a classically professorial
sentence_long, tangled, obscure, jargonized, polysyllabic_think of Tweedledum
and Tweedledee dressed for battle, and see if those timid little thoughts,
concealed under layers of clauses and phrases, do not remind you of those
agitated but cautious brothers, arrayed in their bolsters, blankets, dish
covers and coal scuttles. The motive, too, is similar. Tweedledum and
Tweedledee were in terror of being hurt, and so they padded themselves so
thoroughly that they could not be hurt; nor, for that matter, could they move.
A properly dreary, inert sentence has exactly the same benefit; it protects its
writer from sharp disagreement, while it also protects him from movement.
Why
choose camouflage and insulation over clarity and directness? Tweedledee, of
course, spoke for everyone, academic or not, when he confessed his fear. It is
indeed, as he said, "one of the most serious things that can possibly
happen to one in a battle_to get one's head cut off." Under those
circumstances, logic says: tie the bolster around the neck, and add a
protective hearthrug or two. Pack in another qualifying clause or two. Hide
behind the passive_voice verb. Preface any assertion with a phrase like
"it could be argued" or "a case could be made." Protecting
one's neck does seem to be the way to keep one's head from being cut off.
Graduate
school implants in many people the belief that there are terrible penalties to
be paid for writing clearly, especially writing clearly in ways that challenge
established thinking in the field. And yet, in academic warfare (and I speak as
a veteran) your head and your neck are rarely in serious danger. You can remove
the bolster and the hearthrug. Your opponents will try to whack at you, but
they will seldom, if ever, land a blow_in large part because they are
themselves so wrapped in protective camouflage and insulation that they lose
both mobility and accuracy.
So
we have a widespread pattern of professors protecting themselves from injury by
wrapping their ideas in dull prose, and yet the danger they try to fend off is
not a genuine danger. Express yourself clearly, and it is unlikely that either
your head_or, more important, your tenure_will be cut off.
How,
then, do we save professors from themselves? Fearful people are not made
courageous by scolding; they need to be coaxed and encouraged. But how do we do
that, especially when this particular form of fearfulness masks itself as
pomposity, aloofness and an assured air of superiority?
Fortunately,
we have available the world's most important and illuminating story on the
difficulty of persuading people to break out of habits of timidity, caution,
and unnecessary fear. I borrow this story from Larry McMurty, one of my rivals
in the interpreting of the American West, though I am putting the story to a
use that Mr. McMurty did not intend.
In
a collection of his essays, In a Narrow Grave, Mr. McMurty wrote about the
weird process of watching his book Horsemen Pass By being turned into the movie
Hud. He arrived in the Texas Panhandle a week or two after filming had started,
and he was particularly anxious to learn how the buzzard scene had gone. In
that scene, Paul Newman was supposed to ride up and discover a dead cow, look
up at a tree branch lined with buzzards and, in his distress over the loss of
the cow, fire his gun at one of the buzzards. At that moment, all of the other
buzzards were supposed to fly away into the blue Panhandle sky.
But
when Mr. McMurty asked people how the buzzard scene had gone, all he got, he
said, were "stricken looks."
The
first problem, it turned out, had to do with the quality of the available local
buzzards_who proved to be an excessively scruffy group. So more appealing, more
photogenic buzzards had to be flown in from some distance and at considerable
expense.
But
then came the second problem: how to keep the buzzards sitting on the tree
branch until it was time for their cue to fly.
That
seemed easy. Wire their feet to the branch, and then, after Paul Newman fires
his shot, pull the wire, releasing their feet, thus allowing them to take off.
But,
as Mr. McMurty said in an important and memorable phrase, the film makers had
not reckoned with the "mentality of buzzards." With their feet wired,
the buzzards did not have enough mobility to fly. But they did have enough
mobility to pitch forward.
So
that's what they did: with their feet wired, they tried to fly, pitched
forward, and hung upside down from the dead branch, with their wings flapping.
I
had the good fortune a couple of years ago to meet a woman who had been an
extra for this movie, and she added a detail that Mr. McMurty left out of his
essay: namely, the buzzard circulatory system does not work upside down, and
so, after a moment or two of flapping, the buzzards passed out.
Twelve
buzzards hanging upside down from a tree branch: this was not what Hollywood
wanted from the West, but that's what Hollywood had produced.
And
then we get to the second stage of buzzard psychology. After six or seven
episodes of pitching forward, passing out, being revived, being replaced on the
branch and pitching forward again, the buzzards gave up. Now, when you pulled
the wire and released their feet, they sat there, saying in clear, nonverbal
terms: "We tried that before. It did not work. We are not going to try it
again." Now the film makers had to fly in a high_powered animal trainer to
restore buzzard self_esteem. It was all a big mess. Larry McMurty got a
wonderful story out of it; and we, in turn, get the best possible parable of
the workings of habit and timidity.
How
does the parable apply? In any and all disciplines, you go to graduate school
to have your feet wired to the branch. There is nothing inherently wrong with
that: scholars should have some common ground, share some background
assumptions, hold some similar habits of mind. This gives you, quite literally,
your footing. And yet, in the process of getting your feet wired, you have some
awkward moments, and the intellectual equivalent of pitching forward and
hanging upside down. That experience_especially if you do it in a public place
like a seminar_provides no pleasure. One or two rounds of that humiliation, and
the world begins to seem like a treacherous place. Under those circumstances,
it does indeed seem to be the choice of wisdom to sit quietly on the branch, to
sit without even the thought of flying, since even the thought might be enough
to tilt the balance and set off another round of flapping, fainting and
embarrassment.
Yet
when scholars get out of graduate school and get Ph.D.'s, and, even more
important, when scholars get tenure, the wire is truly pulled. Their feet are
free. They can fly whenever and wherever they like. Yet by then the second
stage of buzzard psychology has taken hold, and they refuse to fly. The wire is
pulled, and yet the buzzards sit there, hunched and grumpy. If they teach in a
university with a graduate program, they actively instruct young buzzards in
the necessity of keeping their youthful feet on the branch.
This
is a very well_established pattern, and it is the ruination of scholarly
activity in the modern world. Many professors who teach graduate students think
that one of their principal duties is to train students in the conventions of
academic writing.
I
do not believe that professors enforce a standard of dull writing on graduate
students in order to be cruel. They demand dreariness because they think that
dreariness is in the students' best interests. Professors believe that a dull
writing style is an academic survival skill because they think that is what
editors want, both editors of academic journals and editors of university
presses. What we have here is a chain of misinformation and misunderstanding,
where everyone thinks that the other guy is the one who demands, dull,
impersonal prose.
Let
me say again what is at stake here: universities and colleges are currently
embattled, distrusted by the public and state funding institutions. As
distressing as this situation is, it provides the perfect setting and the
perfect timing for declaring an end to scholarly publication as a series of
guarded conversations between professors.
The
redemption of the university, especially in terms of the public's appraisal of
the value of research and publication, requires all the writers who have
something they want to publish to ask themselves the question: Does this have
to be a closed communication, shutting out all but specialists willing to fight
their way through the thickest of jargon? Or can this be an open communication,
engaging specialists with new information and new thinking, but also offering
an invitation to nonspecialists to learn from this study, to grasp its importance,
and by extension, to find concrete reasons to see value in the work of the
university?
This
is a country in need of wisdom, and of clearly reasoned conviction and vision.
And that, at the bedrock, is the reason behind this campaign to save professors
from themselves and to detoxify academic prose. The context is a bit different,
but the statement that Willy Loman made to his sons in Death of a Salesman
keeps coming to mind: "The woods are burning boys, the woods are
burning." In a society confronted by a faltering economy, racial and
ethnic conflicts, and environmental disasters, "the woods are
burning," and since we so urgently need everyone's contribution in putting
some of these fires out, there is no reason to indulge professorial vanity or
timidity.
Ego
is, of course, the key obstacle here. As badly as most of them write,
professors are nonetheless proud and sensitive writers, resistant in criticism.
But even the most desperate cases can be redeemed and persuaded to think of
writing as a challenging craft, not as existential trauma. A few years ago, I
began to look at carpenters and other artisans as the emotional model for
writers. A carpenter, let us say, makes a door for a cabinet. If the door does
not hang straight, the carpenter does not say, "I will not change that
door; it is an expression of my individuality; who cares if it will not
close?" Instead, the carpenter removes the door and works on it until it
fits. That attitude, applied to writing, could be our salvation. If we thought
more like carpenters, academic writers could find a route out of the trap of
ego and vanity. Escaped from that trap, we could simply work on successive
drafts until what we have to say is clear.
Colleges
and universities are filled with knowledgeable, thoughtful people who have been
effectively silenced by an awful writing style, a style with its flaws
concealed behind a smokescreen of sophistication and professionalism. A
coalition of academic writers, graduate advisers. journal editors, university
press editors and trade publishers can seize this moment_and pull the wire. The
buzzards can be set free_free to leave that dead tree branch, free to regain to
regain their confidence, free to soar.