On bad writing in the humanities

[traductio]

If the satire and the original can't be distinguished, then the original is bad writing. Think of the Onion pieces that people have passed on thinking they were real. It happens becuase the sources being parodied are doing things like over-dramatising or over-simplifying. A thoughtful, balanced presentation wouldn't be fodder for parody.

That doesn't seem right. There are a few different lessons you could draw from being unable to determine which of two texts is the satire, and which not (I'm assuming they're distinguishable, since otherwise they're identical, and that's a whole other kettle of fish). I'll grant that one plausible conclusion is that the original is poorly written. Another is that the satire is poorly written. Yet another is that the satire accidentally or incidentally says something of genuine value (and, thus, is rather a bad satire).

There are different things someone might mean by 'is good writing'. Here are at least two of them: (1) you might mean that the quality of the prose, considered by itself, is high (or low, for 'bad' writing), or (2) you might mean that the argument being advanced is compelling or of high quality, the story engaging, etc. Those two things can come apart. Indeed, they often do in student writing--hell, they often do in professional articles, too. Most of the arguments I read in my field are compelling, but the quality of writing is variable and sometimes pretty poor.

More generally, I'm not convinced that satire reliably tracks quality of writing. I'm not sure it reliably tracks quality of argumentation, either, but that case seems more plausible to me. And that's just because it seems to me that satire can shine an improving light on just about any vice, not just poor writing. Consider Austen's Northanger Abbey, which just about everyone agrees is a satire of the Gothic novel. But Gothic novels aren't necessarily bad pieces of writing (nor, indeed, are they necessarily bad novels!). To satirize something you need to be able to find fault in it, but that doesn't entail that your criticism is fair or true, or that the original source is bunkum.

What's interesting to me about the Sokal affair is the moral panic it caused. Well, moral panics au pluriel, among those who equate capital-t Theory with "bad writing" (so, Sokal, it would seem) and among those who defend the complexity of thought that generates what others see as "bad writing." I'm collapsing a lot of categories here -- "bad writing" means something different in each of the two cases ("pretentious nonsense" in the first case, "appropriate or necessary complexity" in the other). "Theory" and "complexity" and "thought" are also all likely to evoke very different ideas for members of each camp. And it's also clearly the case that some people write in complex ways because they have the analytical chops to do it, and some because they're inept.

The pedagogical value, for me at least, is the discussion that addresses the moral panic. I want my students to write clearly. For that matter, I want them to think clearly, a process that's intertwined with writing.

(And Parasaurolophus, your middle paragraph made me think of today's xkcd.)

[Wahoo Redux]

I don't think Sokal's paper is an example of bad writing. It's an example of satire, where the satire looks just like the non-satire, so that it's impossible to tell the difference.

I don't think it was satire.

I think it was a sting operation.   

[marshwiggle]

I don't think Sokal's paper is an example of bad writing. It's an example of satire, where the satire looks just like the non-satire, so that it's impossible to tell the difference.

I don't think it was satire.

I think it was a sting operation.

I would agree. Same goes for the grievance studies articles.

How this relates to bad writing is that in these cases, having the "correct" ideological stance and using lots of dense jargon was enough to be accepted. It's much like how Trump manges to be accepted by Christian conservatives; he has the "correct" ideological stance, and uses the right jargon, so it doesn't matter whether what he says is true, or even makes sense.

Writing which is evaluated more on its ideology than its rationality isn't scholarship; it's propaganda.

Which raises the question of whether propaganda can be good writing regardless of its message......

[spork]

Does Thomas Friedman count as humanities?

[Wahoo Redux]

Does Thomas Friedman count as humanities?

The reporter?

[larryc]

Though I have an ax to grind with the author on account of that time she walked over to my table and took the bottle of wine without saying a word, this piece is excellent: https://observer.com/2015/11/dancing-with-professors-the-trouble-with-academic-prose/

[Katrina Gulliver]

Does Thomas Friedman count as humanities?

The "I was speaking to my cab driver the other day in Addis Ababa...." genre?

[traductio]

Though I have an ax to grind with the author on account of that time she walked over to my table and took the bottle of wine without saying a word, this piece is excellent: https://observer.com/2015/11/dancing-with-professors-the-trouble-with-academic-prose/

That one wins extra points for the Lewis Carroll references.

(On a completely unrelated note, LarryC, I dreamt a few nights ago that we met. You were a Sesame Street muppet with a very large C pinned to your shirt.)

[Katrina Gulliver]

You were a Sesame Street muppet with a very large C pinned to your shirt.

That is how Larry has dressed every time I have met him.

[bibliothecula]

In my world, Gödel, Escher, Bach is considered a hot mess and a masterpiece of terrible writing.

[Wahoo Redux]

In my world, Gödel, Escher, Bach is considered a hot mess and a masterpiece of terrible writing.

Won the Pulitzer.  I'd do that kind of bad writing if I could.

[marshwiggle]

In my world, Gödel, Escher, Bach is considered a hot mess and a masterpiece of terrible writing.

Won the Pulitzer.  I'd do that kind of bad writing if I could.

I can't think of a better illustration of the point the author of the article was making.

[traductio]

In my world, Gödel, Escher, Bach is considered a hot mess and a masterpiece of terrible writing.

Like I said, I read it in high school (20+ years ago), so my memory of it is limited. My tastes have also evolved. I wonder what I'd think of it now.

[Wahoo Redux]

I have a cousin with a PhD in brainology----he's a well-respected neuroscientist and a professor in a medical school----and I tried to read one of his published articles and found it completely incomprehensible, with these long, loopy, circuitous sentences densely packed with jargon (most of which contained words with 14 to 16 letters, I swear) that I had never seen before in my life.  I asked him to explain it to me and he did, which cleared up nothing.

In his case, however, I think the incomprehensible nature of his writing was simply the nature of expert writing for neuroscience. 

I've always wondered if the humanities scholars, who actually have interesting things to say, felt like they needed their own argot.

Anyone not a physicist have any idea what "Let a system of plane waves of light, referred to the coordinate system (r, y, z), possess the energy £; let the direction of the ray angle a with the x-axis. Now suppose that the labelled wavefront reached A at an instant of time t and let OA = r" means?

I've often wondered about, but never been interested enough to pursue, the idea that the humanities felt it needed to compete with the sciences, and so the elder, accessible scholarship-style of Tolkien and Cleanth Brookes had to give way to the sorts of pseudo-scientific discourse we see in Harold Bloom or Judith Butler.

[Parasaurolophus]

Anyone not a physicist have any idea what "Let a system of plane waves of light, referred to the coordinate system (r, y, z), possess the energy £; let the direction of the ray angle a with the x-axis. Now suppose that the labelled wavefront reached A at an instant of time t and let OA = r" means?

Philosophers write like this all the time. It's normal for us because of our background in formal logic, and because journals and referees reward logic-chopping. So, even if you aren't formalizing stuff, it's often pragmatically useful to give the appearance of formal structure. Grad students are often taught to model their writing this way. The advantage is that it's not hard to see what's being done by such sentences at a meta-level, even if the actual content eludes you.

On the other hand, it's mostly unnecessary (for us, anyway) and it makes for tedious reading. The really great writers in the field don't usually resort to it unless they're doing properly formal work, and even then, they'll do a great job of guiding you through verbally. But plenty of people in the field are brill, but horrid writers; they tend to resort to this sort of thing a lot.

(Logic and logicians are a little different. I don't begrudge them their formalisms or dull sentences; I'm too busy struggling to follow along!)