As Cecile Alduy points out in a recent ARCADE post, bad writing is far too common in literary criticism, which is surprising given the degree to which we are supposed to be attentive students of language and style. Cecile's post has gotten me thinking, Why do we write so badly? This badness originates, I think, from a set of conflicting institutional imperatives, which get turned into habits of mind. Here go a few explanations I've come up with. Please do add more in the comments section.
(i) Despite various disciplinary innovations over the last three decades, we are still asked to become specialists in historically and nationally defined fields, but we are simultaneously told that the essence of literary study is attention to form. Thus, our object of expertise is confused right from the start. Are we formalists or historians? Can we be both?
(ii) Despite the wane of theory, we are still told that literary study must be made "rigorous" through the "application" of various kinds of theory. Unfortunately, each theory or theoretical tradition is taught to us only in partial or fragmentary form, either in "Introduction to Theory" courses or as secondary reading in traditionally (historically, formally) denominated courses. E.g., Let's read a helping of queer theory with our early modern drama! This gives birth to a theoretical "mash-up" culture, in which radically incompatible theories populate our arguments. E.g., I'm a Lacanian postMarxist deeply concerned with a Spinozan debates surrounding postcolonial ethics, especially in relation to the Victorian novel!
(iii) Part of our scholarly training involves reading huge amounts of secondary material larded with jargon. We learn that to be a serious scholar or critic is to speak in a certain idiom. Canny aspiring professionals, we write in the style of what we are asked to read.
(iv) Often, despite our disciplinary self-definition, there is an attendant sense that simply writing about literature or cultural phenomena is not sufficient. If we want the grant or the fellowship that will get us through the next year, we need to concoct elaborate answers to the "so-what" question. We therefore have an incentive to aggrandize the importance of our work: we're being political, challenging norms, overturning conventional modes of thought, etc. Who knew a close reading of a naturalist novel could do so much positive political work!
(v) Finally, after we've written our stylistically mangled dissertations, which try to speak to or satisfy all of the above, we're asked to turn the dissertation into a book that has a "wider audience." Well, we've already written three or four hundred pages in our carefully cultivated "bad" style. We're not likely to make much of a change, and -- I'd suggest -- we've largely internalized the habits of writing that result in the badness of our style. From here on out, this is how we've habituated ourselves to write critical prose. Breaking those habits -- which, if we're lucky, have led to our successful academic careers -- will be very difficult, indeed.
This is, as I say, only a partial list of explanations, and certainly not meant to be a deterministic account of why any one person makes whatever choices he or she makes on the page. It is, at best, a model that offers guidance in formulating a new way forward. If we want to overcome our badness, I am suggesting, we need to become aware of why we've become bad in the first place. That is, we don't write badly because we're bad writers. We write badly because we're canny or good writers, who write to survive in a very confused institutional ecology. As we change our writing -- and we are each responsible for our own writing -- we must also change that ecology. How to do so may become the subject of a future post. Suggestions are welcome.
What a wonderful and timely post -- and also one that had me thinking, with immense guilt, about my own writing style.
I find your list of explanations extremely persuasive, and just want to add one more small thought (which is perhaps just a variant of one of yours). It strikes me that one reason why jargon is effective -- why users of jargon are often rewarded with book contracts and the like -- is that it indicates a familiarity with the terrain. If I write about neuroscience and say "the language bit of the brain" instead of "Broca's and Wernicke's," I'm very likely to lead my reader to think I don't really know what I'm talking about.
This leads me to two questions, following up from yours:
(1) are there different kinds of opacity? I tend to think, for example, that Kant, who is talking about extremely complicated matters and trying to be as clear as he can, is different from Derrida, who is deliberately cultivating obscurity for its own sake. (Incidentally, I think the same holds for Proust and late-period James, but that's another story.)
(2) with the unintentional kind of opacity, is there a good way to make it less opaque? that is, is there a good way to write without any technical language and still be taken seriously? (One option: give technical term plus translation; not bad, but can become unwieldy.) What do people think?
I fully agree that our stylistic choices (like all stylistic choices, probably--wouldn't it be fun to inquire into the causes of bad writing in different periods?) are under pressure from conflicting institutional imperatives. But I want to resist the antiprofessionalism that I think undergirds some of the laments about bad style in literary studies. So here are some more possible explanations for our style, with prejudicial intent:
(1) Scholars distinguish their work from the elegant critics of the large-circulation print media (New Yorker & co.) by making full use of the sophisticated but specialized professional idiom developed over the last 80 years in literary studies. What they lose in belletristic grace they gain in intellectual rigor.
(2) As we become professionals, we internalize the rule that academic requirements of comprehensive detail and systematic argumentation trump mainstream literary norms of breeziness, punchiness, and readability.
(3) Whereas in literature--at least high literature--style makes or breaks a writer, in the academy it is the quality of ideas and the depth of research that come first. If these are good enough, they more than outweigh a clumsy style. It would not be a good sign for the profession if it prized style over substance (a distinction that makes much less sense in novels and poems than it does in scholarly essays).
How can we articulate the criteria for good academic writing while acknowledging (a) the important functions of our technical vocabulary and (b) the often tremendous complexity of our subject matter? What are the grounds for distinguishing false forms of rigor and sophistication from true ones?
Thank you, Andrew; this is exactly the question.
I agree that this is the central question my post begs. If we grant that there is a distinction between writing whose difficulty is necessary or justified and writing whose difficulty obscures -- i.e., writing which uses complexity to mask simplicity; writing whose difficulty conceals incoherence and a lack of understanding -- we must start making decisions and distinctions. As someone who loves difficult writing, I am sympathetic to the defense of difficulty. Difficulty is not meant to be synonymous with badness, but the two categories can sometimes blur together in challenging ways.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I do not see any grounds for judgment outside the close analysis of individual cases. All writing must be subject to close scrutiny and critical interrogation. Far from antiprofessional, I think the call for better style is essential to the defense of our profession. In the explanations listed above, bad style originates from a misfire of professionalism: a lack of clarify about our object of study, a piecemeal education in a particular tradition or theory, the unthinking reproduction of a received style, a subsumption of thought to habit. I listed these factors partly because I see them operating in my own writing practices, and have worked to resist them.
After we've decided that a particular kind of difficulty is necessary, a problem remains. After all, the problem that many are bringing up in these recent postings is a lack of connection between literary studies and a broader reading public. If we do specialized work that requires difficulty, it still behooves us as a profession to reward those who do the work of translating that difficulty for a broader reading public. If the fictional Lacanian postMarxists or Kantians above are doing work we decide is important, it isn't a bad idea to encourage someone to write up the punchy, breezy, readable explication of that important work.
... is a question-begging opposition if there ever was one. The "rigorous" critic who think he or she is rigorous but writes badly--most likely is a sloppy thinker as well as a sloppy writer. There are plenty of people who think really deeply about literature and also take the trouble to write well. I'll take Louis Menand over Charles Altieri any day. Yes, I think there is a certain professional gravitas that you can acquire by writing in a clumsy way, but usually this approach has intellectual as well as stylistic costs. Muddy writing is usually less "rigorous" as well as less clear.
People write badly because it is hard to write well. It takes talent and dedication. If you aren't a particularly clear thinker it is easier to hide behind a cumbersome style.
Adorno in Minima Moralia has this to say about beautiful language:
"The writer ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all 'too beautiful', but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly. But he who, on the pretext of unselfishily serving only the matter in hand, neglects purity of expression, always betrays the matter as well" (86-87).
This seems to settle the matter for me. What do you think?
...that many would accuse Adorno of being guilty of writing badly. Not me. Love him. But he's a whipping boy too. Still, that's just being difficult, perhaps. Thanks for the quotation, Sunjoo.
We speak of bad writing as a matter of craft and as a matter of aesthetics. But we also speak of it as an ethical wrong.
Bad writing is "bad" in that it degrades truth, conduces to moral fuzziness, misrepresents the world. Bad writing is deceit, fraud.
It would be worth examining when and why we conflate aesthetics with ethics in our profession.
Lee, Thanks for the post, and to all others, for the comments that followed. I'm fascinated! In part because my partner often pushes me on the question of clear writing, but I think he does in terms that are totally outside of the realm of what even we would call clear writing. Not sure he's after the breezy. But nor would he necessarily say that even the clearest of academic writers is all that clear--largely due, I think, to all sorts of assumptions about even the least charged of words, or the seemingly most stylish turns of metaphor.
I have some questions to pose, some in defense, it might sound, of bad writing, but really just questions trying to get at what might be the "good faith" ethos behind "bad writing."
Why does a variety of approaches mean that our object of study is confused, and isn't this a somewhat idealist question? And why would confusion over our object of study lead to bad writing? Also, when were institutional ecologies anything but complex crosscurrents of inertia and confusion?
What is wrong with eclecticism in a project that is honest about its premises, goals, and approaches? Must it resolve its eclecticism by way of all the theoretical systems it evokes, or can it attempt to think without such a stringent demand?
What if we were sensitive to the fact that some audiences are specialized, while others are interdisciplinary, while others are outside the academy? Jargon thus has a place, as does expressing ideas beyond those who speak the native tongue.
Isn't it possible to establish a "so what" of some significance without over-aggrandizing?
What if we find cognitively interesting certain ways of writing, and feel that we are working at style when we write what others call "bad"? Sometimes, when I am reading someone who sounds like an alien, I learn something. So I sense that there had to be some good faith behind this "bad" writing. Further: what if opacity--that sense that an alien is talking--is interesting once you try to translate your opaque interests as they are articulated within the field to others outside of it (a task I am currently pursuing in an essay on 9/11 and the contemporary novel for a journal read by historians)?
Do people really write "badly" because they are sloppy thinkers? Sometimes. But I also feel like so many of the big names that people might peg as bad writers are trying to think rigorously, and they work at questions of language in doing so. I am impressed, for instance, by Lauren Berlant. As she puts it on her blog: "Another aspect of the blog’s animating project is to learn how to write: to experiment with narrating the ordinary via the usually lost moments of gesture, glance, and tonal intensity; to track aleatory experience; to figure out how concepts and encounters open up consciousness without having themselves to be dramatically memorable events; to understand better what an event is, and can be. This is a question of storytelling, remediating the stuff of paying attention. I want to think about how, in these encounters, people endure what’s overwhelming: being in the room with what’s structurally unjust, affectively impossible. Like all affective scenes, injustice is both a structural fact and a sense of something. I think that these wants are related." I'd add here that one of my most memorable close-reading experiences was 2.5 hours spent on Lacan's opaque mirror-stage essay.
I like the way Andrew puts it: "How can we articulate the criteria for good academic writing while acknowledging (a) the important functions of our technical vocabulary and (b) the often tremendous complexity of our subject matter? What are the grounds for distinguishing false forms of rigor and sophistication from true ones?"
I'd add: How can we cultivate an ethos in which we take one another's writing projects, intentions, and styles seriously as complexly motivated and inspired, not assuming from the get go that we write badly, but that we--like our students--write the way we write for sometimes very private and public reasons, many of them "good" aesthetically and ethically?
As a teacher with a 4/4 load, at least half of which comprises composition, I would only add here the probably obvious point that good writing comes with time and reflection. I just copy-edited what was possibly my most embarrassing article in years, and I shuddered at the mistakes I would have penalized any student for making: long, difficult sentences; unfortunate clauses, and an introduction that rivals Homi Bhabha's writing (in obfuscation, not intellectual acumen, I assure you).
Some of these difficulties do arise from the rigors of academia. In this case, we were producing a book, a scholar backed out at the last minute, the replacement article had to be written fast, and we knew of no one else to do it on the spur of the moment.
Some of it came from complexity of ideas which were new enough to me that I had trouble articulating them. I was, I think, trying to do too much in the space I had, and I failed to make the transitions as clear as they should have been. But again, this recognition struck me during the copyedit, not in preparing the original drafts.
But I also believe some of these difficulties come from our technologies overreaching us. When things had to be typewritten, or handwritten, people wanted their ideas to be right before they undertook to put them on paper. And they were forced to work slower, so they had time to think carefully about what they wanted to say even as they were writing them. I'm a fast enough writer myself that I can "vomit" out a twenty-page article on virtual command if that's what it takes to get tenure. But I know my best writing, modest though it is, is writing that has taken me years of work and revisions to accomplish before publishing. Even then, there are parts of the works that I would revise given the opportunity.
I would just like to say, Bonnie, that I salute you.
My thanks, Natalia, for the kind salutations, though if you'd read the work -- notice I'm not offering any titles here -- you might not be so enthusiastic. :)
Unfortunately, I may have dumbed down a conversation about the relationship between beautifully clear writing ("aesthetics") and good ("rigorous") thinking, which was not my intent.
Along these lines, I wonder if aesthetics can be removed from meaning. T.S. Eliot's Waste Land, for example, is supposedly a masterwork and is lauded among scholars. Can it be beautifully written when no one seems to know what it's really about? I must have a sort of "blind eye" when it comes to aesthetics, because I can't tell if a work is good if I don't understand its point. I'm not sure I think form and content can be understood separately. In this, I guess, I agree with Jonathan's argument: clear thinking and clear writing really should (and most often do) go together. I don't mean to make light of Eliot's work. I only mean that I find that I'm forced to reserve judgment about his aesthetics until I discover what I think he's up to. It may be awhile.
I really enjoyed this post, Lee, as well as the comments that have followed. I’ve been thinking about the issues raised here in terms of the writer’s relationship to her reader, as it seems to me that good writing is in large measure a matter of the writer’s ability to put herself in the place of a reader and to provide for the reader’s needs. What, then, might the prevalence of bad writing in literary studies reveal about how we think—or don’t think—about our readers?
Moreover, while bad writing makes for hard reading, it makes for even harder listening. Why do literary scholars (and actually, I think other scholars in the humanities may be guilty, too) so often do such a bad job of writing for oral delivery? Does this, too, reveal an indifference to our audience? Or are we trying to deflect potential questions about our arguments by stunning our listeners with jargon and left-branching sentences? Or are bad conference papers simply the result of a lack of the time and reflection which, as Bonnie points out, good writing requires?
I sympathize and agree with Bonnie: deadlines could be added to the list of institutional demands that make potentially great ideas end up blurred or not mature enough for lack of time.
The fast typing and copy/paste problem is of a different kind. For almost 18 months I could not type at all (wrist problems) and had to dictate all my writing – I assure you that I had to really think through every sentence, paragraph, and thought before putting anything down (for one thing, when typing becomes miserably painful, every word is weighted in a radically different way: each would better be exact, meaningful, and no ornament for the pure pleasure of ornament is physically possible). However frustrating and painful the experience was, it made me reflect in new ways of the interconnection between thinking and typing (we think with our fingers, don't we? but we might think better if we used our brains first).
Commentators have asked numerous important questions that I can't fully address here. I hope to return to these themes in future posts. The one question I want to address is the relationship between "bad" writing and "bad" thinking, the relationship between aesthetic and ethical "badness." I will respond with a bit of a cop out, by claiming that bad writing arises only contingently and historically from bad thinking. Some bad thinking causes bad writing. Some bad thinking is expressed in beautiful prose. Some great thinkers can't seem to write well, and a lucky few write and think beautifully. The combinations and causal relations are numerous. My post addresses the first category.
Beyond that project, we are always also talking about matters of taste. If Lauren Berlant writes, "Another aspect of the blog’s animating project is to learn how to write: to experiment with narrating the ordinary via the usually lost moments of gesture, glance, and tonal intensity," I might quibble with a word here or there. Why does "animating" modifying "project"? Is there another project somewhere among her posts that doesn't animate the blog? Why "the ordinary"? Why nominalize an adjective? Does this not risk obfuscating the real subject of the sentence: ordinary what?
But I find Berlant largely legible -- it is perfectly clear what she wants her blog to do and be -- and I suspect she could perfectly well justify her writing. There is a limit to this sort of debate beyond which we arrive at matters of taste, and return to the warm fold of the fashion system. Telling the difference between the two types of discussion is the hard part.
Some might find this collection of essays interesting:
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=5337
Alison Bechdel's recent blog post made me think of this discussion again. Bechdel is the author of the acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home, and in her post she is both pleased and bemused to find her work analyzed in GLQ. "It’s an odd sensation," Bechdel writes, "reading an academic examination of my work. ... [B]ecause I don’t really have any training in critical theory, I only have a partial grasp of what people are talking about."
(Notably, Bechdel never accuses literary critics of "bad writing," but rather attributes her lack of understanding to the fact that she doesn't have certain training. The critic is a friend of Bechdel's.)
The most interesting part, to me, is that Bechdel provides "a nice disorienting quote," presumably exemplary of the jargony soup that literary critics use. With that kind of an introduction I was expecting something in the Bhabha style, but in fact I found the quotation completely straightforward. So my first thought was, "Really, that's the funkiest-sounding quotation you could come up with? In a GLQ article?"
As we all know from teaching introductory literature courses, the biggest determinant of perceived clarity is not lexicon or specific grammatical structures but the familiarity of the ideas being introduced. If you're a literary critic, the idea of a "proliferation of subjects" is easy to grasp, because it's one you've grasped before, many times. But if you are not (as Gertrude Stein says), then not. The idea that a proliferation of subjects is a generic feature of autobiography is, however, exactly the idea that Bechdel seizes on as confusing.
Bechdel's post reminded me of the distance between what I think of as unclear writing and what someone outside the field might think of as unclear writing--and that they may be determined by entirely different criteria.
Reading your post, I remembered the bewilderment I had over the widespread use of the term "subject," among my classmates and in the articles I read, when I started grad school. It was bewildering because, what happened to the "death of the subject"? Which seemed to be late 20th century French thought in a nutshell? Only from hearsay, but I knew of the "death of the subject," even before entering grad school, and I felt briefly fazed whenever someone mentioned "subject" and meant it not as something dead. I'll have to quote from Lee's original post and say that I was taught theory "only in a partial or fragmentary form." More so than most, it seems, and I never really figured out how the subject is pronounced dead and at the same time we go on talking about it the way (or ways) we do. Are they two (or more) different things? Do we all know that they are different things? I really don't know. So when you said, "If you're a literary critic, the idea of a 'proliferation of subjects' is easy to grasp, because it's one you've grasped before, many times," I had to ponder. In a way, it certainly was easy to grasp. In another way, it still isn't. Not just "subject," but many other terms in our critical lexicon can be thought-daunting, and not in a good way, like this. Am I the only one benighted this way?
I've been thinking a lot lately about what the critiques of "the subject" come to, and my sense is that in fact they are confusingly multiple. Some focus on the fact that the subject is fractured (into a conscious and an unconscious part, for example). Others focus on the fact that the subject changes across time. And others still reject the very term "subject," since it implies a subject-object distinction that is taken to have been dismantled. I have a hunch that the "proliferation of subjects" idea is yet a fourth line of attack, having to do with the idea that all appropriation of the world is perspectival (here the attack would be on something like the "transcendental subject"). All of these lines of inquiry are interesting and important, but sometimes it's a little tricky to know which one is being invoked.
And then of course there's the fact that the subject, that resilient little devil, has somehow survived the multi-front onslaught, just as you say. Indeed, the fourth line of attack depends on the existence of relatively coherent subjects. So one can have plenty of sympathy for Bechdel!
Thank you. Your comments are very clarifying. I feel as if I'm just given a brief introduction to a history of a concept (of "the subject"). I wish I were a first-year student and thus entitled to all kinds of small, silly, dumb questions, if only I could have good answers like this!
Two of my posts from November 2009 deal with Lévi-Strauss and the subject. The first, Subject and Object, starts with Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" essay, moves to an observation Maurice Bloch made in his L-S obit about how others simply followed L-S's lead on this and ends up looking at a bit of Mythologiques:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/levi_strauss_2_subject_and_obje...
I end up arguing that L-S's pseudo-math was an attempt to objectify the myth system (I believe Moretti's "distant reading" is a similar attempt). The second essay uses Tristes Tropics as its point of departure and ends up with collective synchronized flashing among fireflies:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/levi_strauss_3_whats_the_subjec...
Thank you for letting me know about your posts.
I had read a wee bit of Tristes Tropiques in Korean translation a long time ago, but reading your posts, with the mention of the book, I remembered there was a passage in the few pages I read that I liked immensely. I happen to have both Korean and English translations with me - so I looked up. It is in the first pages of Chapter 1, where Lévi-Strauss tells the reader about the times when the work of ethnographers was seriously unappreciated and unrewarded. Upon returning home, they would lecture, in poorly equipped classrooms, to audiences who are there not for the lecture but for a mild, harmless distraction it may give. Lévi-Strauss says:
"To this mixture of moth-eaten ghosts and restless infants the lecturer was privileged - as the supreme reward for so much effort, care and hard work - to reveal his precious store of memories, which were permanently affected by the chill of the occasion, and which as he spoke in the semi-darkness, he felt slipping away from him and falling one by one like pebbles to the bottom of a well" (18).
Well, it was great to read this passage again. I'm realizing maybe I liked it because it is one of the best passages written on dejection, not just a teacherly kind but dejection in general. The phrases - "the chill of the occasion" or "memories ... slipping away ... falling one by one like pebbles to the bottom of a well" - seem to describe accurately the way we feel when we are dejected.
The Korean translator says something interesting in her "translator's introduction." Lévi-Strauss is an anti-historicist of sort, she says, to whom Utopia is possible only on the condition that the temperature of history cools down. I don't know whether this is an accurate assessment of Lévi-Strauss's thoughts, or whether I'm translating her words right. But the expression alone - history's temperature cooling down - was intriguing, because I've been wondering why "ahistorical" should be such a term of abuse. (*Um, I'm sorry if this is not a response at all to your posts, which were, I have to confess, really tough to read! I wanted to respond any way I can!)
Sunjoo: There's a famous passage on Freud and geology in chapter 6 of Triste Tropiques, "The Making of an Anthropologist." He's talking of geology:
Note that in this analogy the diachronic process of history, in which one ocean arose, disappeared, and was succeeded by another, is now present in a synchronic phenomenon, the layers of a rock formation. One might think of this process as one of cooling down and, in the case of volcano erruptions, we have literal cooling which will result in layering.
L-S goes on about geology and brings psychoanalysis into the mix:
And then he brings in Marxism and the notion of constructing a model to understand society.
I got curious and read early chapters of the book. Following the first passage you quote, L-S says: "As I follow the traces of their age-old stagnation desite all obstacles - sheer cliff faces, landslides, scrub and cultivated land - and disregarding paths and fences, I seem to be proceeding in meaningless fashion. But the sole aim of this contrariness is to recpature the master-meaing, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition." His view of history must be a much grander one than I thought. History's temperature cooling down - if this was his own phrase, he must have meant it, at least in part, in a geological sense, as you insightfully point out.
About why geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism appealed to him, he says: "All three demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. For all cases, the same problem arises, the problem of the relationship between feeling and reason, and the aim is the same: to achieve a kind of superrationalism, which will integrate the first with the second, without sacrificing any of its properties." I'm ABD in English. One of my dissertation chapters is on Bachelard's theory of the imagination, and it was great, in this passage, to find L-S speaking for Bachelard. Was what he calls "superrationalism" in the air? In parts of France? But then, there were echos of Adorno's ideas too, so maybe three great minds just happened to be thinking alike.
Anyhow, thanks for the quotes and comments! I decided I'd have to read the whole thing soon.
the passages useful. TT is the book that put L-S on the intellectual map and it is very much worth reading.
"I am not (I know of no one who is) a scholar in all the fields touched upon in this book: ancient and modern philosophy, moral and aesthetic philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, American transcendentalism, and the aesthetics and history of film. If teachers confined themselves to ideas and texts about which they considered themselves experts, some of the best courses I ever took would not have been given." (Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of Moral Life)