Incoherent Style of Academic Writing

[hazeus]

First let me mention that I'm a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies-so talking about things about race, sexuality, class, etc are nothing new to me. But I've stumbled upon this recurring and popular genre of academic literature that confounds me and I can't tell if its because I'm stupid or because the writing is that bad. Many of my colleagues seem to "get it" and sing praises of these specific books but their commentary so equally amorphous that I feel like some oblivious outsider looking in.

I've been encountering these academic texts that have this style of writing that is absolutely incoherent and impossible for me to decipher (I've been trying in good faith, rereading pages over and over and over). I've noticed most of these books are clustered in the Duke University Press, NYU Press, and some in University of California Press (not saying these presses are bad-some of my favorite books are from them). They take up worthy and critical subjects like race and sexuality, but write so amorphously I can't figure out what the hell they're talking about. They'll spend the entire introduction refusing to clearly articulate their position or what concepts they're using, opting instead for a pedantic back and forth of "im saying this...but also not this" like "queerness is the corporeal potentialities of futurity" "but also a politics of flesh which refuses the very same spatiotemporal and disciplinary logics." I can't figure out what the thesis, methods, or findings are.

Also, I don't know why their editors let them get away with using inconsistent and all over the place qualifiers. One paragraph will list an entangled description of identities like, "children of color, migrants, women of color femmes, poor people" and then the next one will talk about "Latinx, two spirit, and racialized gendered femmes." The same is done for descriptions of historical forces. One paragraph will namedrop, in a single sentence, "the forces of slavery, colonialism, immigration, carcerality, cisheteropatriarchy"  and the next a different list. Each of these merit a book of their own. These qualifiers are *good*, but their exhaustive and fumbled usage is not. And the exhaustive list makes it hard to pin down exactly what story is being told. It's like by trying to say and include everything, absolutely nothing is said.

These texts read more like pretentious blog manifestos than works of scholarship that make novel contributions to a field of knowledge. But they get through peer review and publication by prestigious presses like NYU and Duke...?

[spork]

Your gut reaction is correct. It's terrible writing, used to obfuscate the fact that the authors actually have nothing to say.

[ergative]

Yes, this is a dreadful habit that conflates obscurity with erudition. I try to smack it down in my students whenever it crops up. Sometimes they get rather salty when I tell them that their attempts to impress me with their vocabulary fail. One student tried to use 'dilatory' instead of 'slow', and so ended up talking about the 'dilatory pace of evolution', which I guess works in the context of intelligent design and a lazy clockmaker, but absolutely did not work in context!

[Hibush]

Your gut reaction is correct. It's terrible writing, used to obfuscate the fact that the authors actually have nothing to say.

+1

But don't go shouting that the emperor has no clothes in the wrong places. That will get you expelled from the club.
Nevertheless, now that you have identified this weakness, you can--through excellent scholarship--become a leading scholar in the subjects that led you to major in Africana.

At the very least, the rest of us would appreciate being able to read something that is interpretable from this important and timely field of study.

[Parasaurolophus]

Yeah.

Some (but not all!) of it, I think, stems from the influence of bad philosophy, or of cursory engagement with philosophy, where the author associates difficulty with quality. A lot of people like to read philosophers outside the philosophy classroom, and that's a really good thing. I'm really glad that happens. But the subject is very hard, and depending on what you're reading, it might require you to be acquainted with a pretty extensive background of ideas (and to move through the text much more slowly than you are). And if you don't have that, and you're teaching it to people who don't have that, then there's not a lot left in there for you to glom on to, so you give it a very cursory reading, and your students get a very cursory understanding, and it becomes really easy to conflate difficulty of reading with quality of argumentation. And, to be clear, I don't think people are especially blameworthy for this. Interdisciplinarity is hard.

But it doesn't take very long for a process like that to produce a generation or two of poorly informed scholars who delight in nonsense, especially when you add in incentives to publish and to look like a 'genius' compared to everyone else (*cough* Jordan Petersen *cough*). And the problem, I think, is exacerbated by the fact that that's where the engagement with ideas in philosophy ends--you get some of the mid-20th century, maybe, and then nothing else. None of the responses, refinements, breakthroughs, etc.

Literary 'theory' is my usual go-to on this front (with my sincere appy polly loggies for the ruffled feathers!). Philosophy has had a very skewed influence there, and it's an influence that seems to have mostly ended in the middle of the twentieth century (with one or two late exceptions); but the philosophy of literature is currently experiencing a golden age, almost entirely unbeknownst to literature departments! The trouble is that academic disciplines are institutional in nature, and once an institution gloms on to something, it can really integrate it into its core identity and make it hard to prise back out again.

[mamselle]

I blame deconstructionists who cut their teeth on Dickens. (kidding, somewhat--actually, on reading the previous post, I see we agree...!) Alfred North Whitehead has a lot to answer for as well, in my book. I was required to read a commentary on his work that looked as if blue pencil never touched paper. Going back to the original, I realized the writer was aping his style.

Oh, well....

I personally believe everyone should have to write for journalism for two years.

That will hone your text, trim out all your unnecessary adjectives and adverbs, and get you used to coming in on time, at length, with readable content.

(Well, it used to. I have to avert my 'editor's eye' when I see some of the "influencers' text" these days, and even the errors at the NYT and CNN are becoming more egregious: wordsmith detritus, dangling phrases, and run-ons prevail. But if you end up working with my once and former editor, those will all be beaten out of you with a thick bundle of blue lead pencils...)

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

I blame deconstructionists who cut their teeth on Dickens. (kidding, somewhat--actually, on reading the previous post, I see we agree...!) Alfred North Whitehead has a lot to answer for as well, in my book. I was required to read a commentary on his work that looked as if blue pencil never touched paper. Going back to the original, I realized the writer was aping his style.

;)


(For the record, unlike some other analytic philosophers, I'm happy to grant that deconstructionism has some intellectual merits! But yeah, I think it had a pernicious influence.)

[ergative]

Yeah.

Some (but not all!) of it, I think, stems from the influence of bad philosophy, or of cursory engagement with philosophy, where the author associates difficulty with quality. A lot of people like to read philosophers outside the philosophy classroom, and that's a really good thing. I'm really glad that happens. But the subject is very hard, and depending on what you're reading, it might require you to be acquainted with a pretty extensive background of ideas (and to move through the text much more slowly than you are). And if you don't have that, and you're teaching it to people who don't have that, then there's not a lot left in there for you to glom on to, so you give it a very cursory reading, and your students get a very cursory understanding, and it becomes really easy to conflate difficulty of reading with quality of argumentation. And, to be clear, I don't think people are especially blameworthy for this. Interdisciplinarity is hard.

But it doesn't take very long for a process like that to produce a generation or two of poorly informed scholars who delight in nonsense, especially when you add in incentives to publish and to look like a 'genius' compared to everyone else (*cough* Jordan Petersen *cough*). And the problem, I think, is exacerbated by the fact that that's where the engagement with ideas in philosophy ends--you get some of the mid-20th century, maybe, and then nothing else. None of the responses, refinements, breakthroughs, etc.

Literary 'theory' is my usual go-to on this front (with my sincere appy polly loggies for the ruffled feathers!). Philosophy has had a very skewed influence there, and it's an influence that seems to have mostly ended in the middle of the twentieth century (with one or two late exceptions); but the philosophy of literature is currently experiencing a golden age, almost entirely unbeknownst to literature departments! The trouble is that academic disciplines are institutional in nature, and once an institution gloms on to something, it can really integrate it into its core identity and make it hard to prise back out again.

I mostly agree with you about the origin of the conflation between quality with difficulty. But whenever I've looked at texts in philosophy I've also noticed that they don't make things any easier on themselves because they delight in doing really tortured turns of phrase that do not have any meaning, and seem to be shoehorned into the text solely for the purpose of using a turn of phrase. Like 'This not only a classical problem, but in fact problematizes classification' or 'The origin of nature is also naturally original'. I've made up these examples, but they represent a really tiresome stylistic habit that I only see in philosophy. Yes, very cute, you've kept the same roots but swapped their order and part of speech. But it doesn't mean anything!

Does this show up anywhere besides philosophy?

[Hibush]

I mostly agree with you about the origin of the conflation between quality with difficulty. But whenever I've looked at texts in philosophy I've also noticed that they don't make things any easier on themselves ...

The language appears to make it very difficult for the philosophers to communicate. Some years ago, the Berkeley philospher, John Searle, won some big prize. I was curious what his contribution had been to philosophy, so I went to Wikipedia. There one can read that "Searle's early work on speech acts, influenced by J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His notable concepts include the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence."

I felt no more informed than when I arrived. The definitions of speech acts, Chinese rooms and Strong AI were no more informative.

Could the wiki editors perhaps write a few sentences to help out the educated non-philosopher who just wants the gist of this intellectual contribution? The Nobel committee seems to manage that for some pretty abstruse advances in other fields, so I know it can be done.

So I checked out the Talk page (this old version since most has been archived since). Page after page of argument about every sentence, with the editors completely speaking past each other and none heading in the direction of comprehension. I think of that discussion as a good record of the communications morass in which they find themselves. Unfortunately, that morass dooms them to cultural oblivion regardless the profundity of their thoughts.

[Puget]

All this makes my thankful to be in a science field the prizes clarity and concision of writing. Having strict word/page limits for papers and grants helps I think, as does the explicit aim of clearly articulating the basis for your hypotheses based on past research, and communicating what you did and found in such a way that others in the field can replicate and extend it (that is, the idea that science should be cumulative). Major problems with clarity do not make it through peer review. By the time they are published, our papers may be dry, but they are generally clear.

Lack of clarity (in thinking and writing), poor organization, and over-wordiness are problems we try to tackle explicitly at the undergraduate and graduate level. Good, clear, writing can certainly be taught, if a field is motivated to do so.

[marshwiggle]

All this makes my thankful to be in a science field the prizes clarity and concision of writing. Having strict word/page limits for papers and grants helps I think, as does the explicit aim of clearly articulating the basis for your hypotheses based on past research, and communicating what you did and found in such a way that others in the field can replicate and extend it (that is, the idea that science should be cumulative). Major problems with clarity do not make it through peer review. By the time they are published, our papers may be dry, but they are generally clear.

Lack of clarity (in thinking and writing), poor organization, and over-wordiness are problems we try to tackle explicitly at the undergraduate and graduate level. Good, clear, writing can certainly be taught, if a field is motivated to do so.

There's the problem. You expect some sort of objective analysis is possible, so that others can replicate your findings. The reason a lot of the bad writing exists is to avoid the possibility of anyone having the chance to refute any of it. If they don't understand it, they can't challenge it.

[Myword]

I agree, yes. It is awful writing that passes for erudition and is widely used and praised by scholars in certain sub-sub fields across the disciplines. I don't know about Africana Studies. A former colleague friend writes like this and is proudly published. A tiny minority of scholars in a small niche understand and applaud this kind of work. He said he didn't care if he was understood, and couldn't write any other way. (Baffling!)
     Some of it sounds nonsensical to me and I studied impenetrable obscure material. If you are not in the "inside club" it may sound like doublespeak, and you would need a special glossary/dictionary for it. One of my students once said, "he writes like he is afraid of being understood." And you can't fault the translation either.
My professors told that the subject is so deep and profound that it cannot be made clear.

[marshwiggle]

I agree, yes. It is awful writing that passes for erudition and is widely used and praised by scholars in certain sub-sub fields across the disciplines. I don't know about Africana Studies. A former colleague friend writes like this and is proudly published. A tiny minority of scholars in a small niche understand and applaud this kind of work. He said he didn't care if he was understood, and couldn't write any other way. (Baffling!)
     Some of it sounds nonsensical to me and I studied impenetrable obscure material. If you are not in the "inside club" it may sound like doublespeak, and you would need a special glossary/dictionary for it. One of my students once said, "he writes like he is afraid of being understood." And you can't fault the translation either.
My professors told that the subject is so deep and profound that it cannot be made clear.

So is a pile of manure.

[Caracal]

All this makes my thankful to be in a science field the prizes clarity and concision of writing. Having strict word/page limits for papers and grants helps I think, as does the explicit aim of clearly articulating the basis for your hypotheses based on past research, and communicating what you did and found in such a way that others in the field can replicate and extend it (that is, the idea that science should be cumulative). Major problems with clarity do not make it through peer review. By the time they are published, our papers may be dry, but they are generally clear.

Lack of clarity (in thinking and writing), poor organization, and over-wordiness are problems we try to tackle explicitly at the undergraduate and graduate level. Good, clear, writing can certainly be taught, if a field is motivated to do so.

There's the problem. You expect some sort of objective analysis is possible, so that others can replicate your findings. The reason a lot of the bad writing exists is to avoid the possibility of anyone having the chance to refute any of it. If they don't understand it, they can't challenge it.

The idea applies in the humanities in a modified form. I tell students that I know I'm reading a good undergrad paper when I start arguing with the author as I read it. If you've got me muttering "well, actually couldn't that also mean x" or "but, really, if you look at what z says, couldn't you interpret it as meaning..." it means that you're actually making an argument, using evidence to support it and the whole thing is compelling enough to engage me.

Bad papers never get there. There's usually nothing to disagree with. 

[marshwiggle]

Some interesting examples of the problem with journals that encourage this kind of bad writing.

The Sokal affair

The Grievance studies affair