Academese and all its Bluster

Academic writing is often quite bad. When was the last time you read an academic article and felt the writer was helping, not hindering, your learning? I often feel that “academese” as Harvard Professor Steven Pinker calls it, is foggy, mystifying, and deeply unclear.

Consider the example below from Judith Butler, a professor at Berkeley:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power” (Judith Butler, 1997)

What on earth is Butler trying to tell us? To the best of my knowledge, the above passage translates to: ‘instead of understanding capital as what makes power dynamics, we can see a ‘hegemonic’ concept of power, where power exists because we believe it exists in certain places and spaces. So, instead of seeing power as an object, Butler contends we see power as a concept which exists in the places and spaces we see it as existing.’

Even that was painful to write, and I can imagine, painful to read. 

Here is another example (admittedly less egregious), which comes from a course of mine:

“The basic argument- that excessive esprit de corps and amiability restrict the critical faculties of small decision-making groups, thereby leading to foreign-policy fiascos-- is both an appealing and a stimulating one.”

This passage is understandable. That does not make it good writing. It includes unnecessary foreign-language terms, three separate clauses, forgoes short Anglo-saxon words for lengthy Latin ones, and seems more preoccupied with demonstrating the author’s intelligence than conveying a message. It could be rewritten:

“His argument that excessive camaraderie makes small-groups think less critically-- which leads to foreign-policy fiascos-- is interesting.” Notice, I removed as many unnecessary words as I could. Undoubtedly there are more which a writer better than I could coax out. Regardless, the prose of the above can be greatly simplified. And I think it should have been.

The style of academic writing matters because it is how scholars translate their knowledge to other scholars and to students of the discipline. Here is yet another example from an article in my field. The article is meant to communicate the important point that analogies are used by foreign policy decision-makers as heuristics. They use these heuristics to positive and negative ends. The paper uses statistical analysis to decide which leaders use what analogies and how well they use them. See if any of that comes through in the following excerpt:

“Secondly, given our interest in analogical reasoning, the Hermann conceptualization of conceptual complexity as a relatively stable personality trait provides a separation between our independent variable (complexity as a personality trait) and dependent variable (analogizing as an instance of framing behavior in specific decision-making contexts). The integrative complexity construct would not provide such a clear separation, as it is in itself a decision-making behavior based construct…”

The phrase “conceptualization of conceptual complexity” should be banned and those who wrote it should live in eternal shame.

So, why do we love non-fiction wonders like Sapiens, but wince at the titles adorned as they are with latin phrases, jargon, and colons? Why does the title, Reiterated Understandings of Intertemporal Fractionalization: A reimagining and reframing within a postmodern modality, make our eyes water?

Because books like Sapiens have to sell. Editors spend hundreds of hours ensuring that the prose of such books is accessible. Academic articles are written for academics, by academics who scrutinize it. And scrutiny can be avoided through obscurity.

We would all do well to simplify our writing. Without an accessible lexicon, academics will continue to hurl esoteric nonsense at one another’s ivory towers-- producing so much blather while understanding little.