Stylish Academic Writing

Helen Sword

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674069138
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Authorship
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read—and to write.Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword's analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce. Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.

STYLE AND SUBSTANCE

I

CHAPTER 1

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Pick up any guide to effective writing and what will you find? Probably some version of the advice that Strunk and White offered more than half a century ago in their classic book The Elements of Style: always use clear, precise language, even when expressing complex ideas; engage your reader’s attention through examples, illustrations, and anecdotes; avoid opaque jargon; vary your vocabulary, sentence length, and frames of reference; favor active verbs and concrete nouns; write with conviction, passion, and verve.1

Pick up a peer-reviewed journal in just about any academic discipline and what will you find? Impersonal, stodgy, jargon-laden, abstract prose that ignores or defies most of the stylistic principles outlined above. There is a massive gap between what most readers consider to be good writing and what academics typically produce and publish. I’m not talking about the kinds of formal strictures necessarily imposed by journal editors—article length, citation style, and the like—but about a deeper, duller kind of disciplinary monotony, a compulsive proclivity for discursive obscurantism and circumambulatory diction (translation: an addiction to big words and soggy syntax). E. B. White, that great master of literary style, lets his character Charlotte the spider explain the fine art of sucking the lifeblood from a fly:

“First,” said Charlotte, “I dive at him.” She plunged headfirst toward the fly.… “Next, I wrap him up.” She grabbed the fly, threw a few jets of silk around it, and rolled it over and over, wrapping it so that it couldn’t move.… “Now I knock him out, so he’ll be more comfortable.” She bit the fly. “He can’t feel a thing now.”2

Substitute “reader” for the fly and “academic prose” for the spider’s silk, and you get a fairly accurate picture of how academic writers immobilize their victims.

The seeds for this book were sown when, several years ago, I was invited to teach a course on higher education pedagogy to a group of faculty from across the disciplines. Trawling for relevant reading materials, I soon discovered that higher education research journals were filled with articles written in a style that I, trained as a literary scholar, found almost unreadable. At first I blamed my own ignorance and lack of background in the field. However, the colleagues enrolled in my course—academics from disciplines as varied as computer science, engineering, fine arts, history, law, medicine, music, and population health—were quick to confirm my niggling feeling that most of the available articles on higher education teaching were, to put it bluntly, very badly written. Instead of gleaning new insights, we found ourselves trying to make sense of sentences such as this:

In this study, I seek to identify and analyze stakeholders’ basic beliefs on the topic of membership that can be considered in normative arguments on whether to allocate in-state tuition benefits to undocumented immigrants.

Or this:

Via a symbolic interactionist lens, the article analyses the “identity work” undertaken in order to assert distinctive identities as specialist academic administrators.

Or this (ironically, from an article on improving academic writing):

Rarely is there an effective conceptual link between the current understandings of the centrality of text to knowledge production and student learning and the pragmatic problems of policy imperatives in the name of efficiency and capacity-building.3

At every turn, we found our desire to learn thwarted by gratuitous educational jargon and serpentine syntax.

Do higher education journals hold a monopoly on dismal writing, I began to wonder, or are these articles just the tip of a huge pan-disciplinary iceberg? It didn’t take me long to confirm that similarly turgid sentences can be found in leading peer-reviewed journals in just about any academic field—not only in the social sciences but also in humanities disciplines such as history, philosophy, and even my home discipline of literary studies, where scholars pride themselves on their facility with words. I asked myself: What exactly is going on here? Are academics being explicitly trained to write abstract, convoluted sentences? Is there a guidebook for graduate students learning the trade that says, “Thou must not write clearly or concisely” or “Thou must project neither personality nor pleasure in thy writing” or “Thou must display no originality of thought or expression”? Do my colleagues actually enjoy reading this stuff?

Much has already been written—mostly by academics—about academic discourse in all its disciplinary variety.4 Notably, however, most of these studies replicate rather than challenge the status quo. For example, in his groundbreaking book Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing, Ken Hyland examines 1,400 texts from five genres in eight disciplines, providing fascinating insights into how various academic genres (the footnote, the research letter, the book review, the abstract, and so forth) construct and communicate disciplinary knowledge. Hyland’s own prose style reflects his training as a social scientist, and specifically as a linguist:

Such practices cannot, of course, be seen as entirely determined; as language users are not simply passive recipients of textual effects, but the impact of citation choices clearly lies in their cognitive and cultural value to a community, and each repetition helps to instantiate and reproduce these conventions.5

Note the passive verb construction (be seen), the disciplinary jargon (instantiate), the preposition-laden phrases (of textual effects, of citation, in their value, to a community), the multiple abstract nouns (practices, recipients, effects, impact, value, community, repetition, convention), and the near erasure of human agency. Hyland’s discourse about disciplinary discourse has itself been shaped by disciplinary conventions that insist academic prose must be bland, impersonal, and laden with abstract language.

Yet common sense tells us otherwise. So, indeed, do the authors of the many excellent academic writing guides already on the market, some of which have been in print for decades. William Zinsser, for instance, identifies “humanity and warmth” as the two most important qualities of effective nonfiction; Joseph M. Williams argues that “we owe readers an ethical duty to write precise and nuanced prose”; Peter Elbow urges academic writers to construct persuasive arguments by weaving together the creative and critical strands of their thinking; Richard A. Lanham offers strategies for trimming lard-laden sentences; Howard S. Becker advises apprentice academics to avoid the temptations of so-called classy (that is, intellectually pretentious) writing; and Strunk and White remind us to think of our reader as “a man floundering in a swamp” who will thank us for hoisting him onto solid ground as quickly as possible.6 Many academics routinely assign these books to students but ignore their advice themselves, perhaps because such commonsense principles strike them as too generic or journalistic to apply to their own work.

So why do universities—institutions dedicated to creativity, research innovation, collegial interchange, high standards of excellence, and the education of a diverse and ever-changing population of students—churn out so much uninspiring, cookie-cutter prose? In a now classic 1993 New York Times Book Review article titled “Dancing with Professors,” Patricia Nelson Limerick compares academics to buzzards that have been wired to a branch and conditioned to believe they cannot fly freely even when the wire is finally pulled (an extended metaphor that has to be read in its original context to be fully appreciated). She concludes:

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.7

Other explanations range from the sympathetic (stylistic conformity offers a measure of comfort and security in an otherwise cutthroat academic universe) to the sociopolitical (the social organization we work in demands high productivity, which in turn encourages sloppy writing) to the practical (we have to learn appropriate disciplinary discourses somehow, and imitation is the easiest way) to the conspiratory (jargon functions like a secret handshake, a signal to our peers that we belong to the same elite insiders’ club) to the flat-out uncharitable (Limerick reminds us that today’s professors are the people “nobody wanted to dance with in high school”).8

The question I want to address here, however, is not so much why academics write the way they do but how the situation might be improved. Four strands of research inform this book. As a starting point, I asked more than seventy academics from across the disciplines to describe the characteristics of “stylish academic writing” in their respective fields. Their responses were detailed, opinionated, and surprisingly consistent. Stylish scholars, my colleagues told me, express complex ideas clearly and precisely; produce elegant, carefully crafted sentences; convey a sense of energy, intellectual commitment, and even passion; engage and hold their readers’ attention; tell a compelling story; avoid jargon, except where specialized terminology is essential to the argument; provide their readers with aesthetic and intellectual pleasure; and write with originality, imagination, and creative flair.

Next, I analyzed books and articles by more than one hundred exemplary authors recommended to me by their discipline–based peers. Most of these stylish academic writers indeed exemplify the criteria described above. However, I found that they achieve abstract ends such as engagement, pleasure, and elegance not through mystical displays of brilliance and eloquence (although they are undeniably brilliant and eloquent scholars) but by deploying some very concrete, specific, and transferable techniques. For example, I noted their frequent use of the following:

• interesting, eye-catching titles and subtitles;

• first-person anecdotes or asides that humanize the author and give the text an individual flavor;

• catchy opening paragraphs that recount an interesting story, ask a challenging question, dissect a problem, or otherwise hook and hold the reader;

• concrete nouns (as opposed to nominalized abstractions such as “nominalization” or “abstraction”) and active, energetic verbs (as opposed to forms of be and bland standbys such as make, find, or show);

• numerous examples, especially when explaining abstract concepts;

• visual illustrations beyond the usual Excel-generated pie charts and bar graphs (for example, photographs, manuscript facsimiles, drawings, diagrams, and reproductions);

• references to a broad range of academic, literary, and historical sources indicative of wide reading and collegial conversations both within and outside their own fields;

• humor, whether explicit or understated.

Significantly, I confirmed that stylish academic writers employ these techniques not only in their books, which are often targeted at nonspecialist audiences, but also in peer-reviewed articles aimed at disciplinary colleagues.

For the third stage of my research, I assembled a data set of one thousand academic articles from across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities: one hundred articles each from international journals in the fields of medicine, evolutionary biology, computer science, higher education, psychology, anthropology, law, philosophy, history, and literary studies. (For a full account of my sources and research methodology, see the appendix.) This corpus barely scratches the surface of academic discourse in all its rich disciplinary variety. Nevertheless, the articles in my data set provide a compelling snapshot of contemporary scholarship at work. I used them not only to locate real-life examples of both engaging and appalling academic prose but also to drill down into specific questions about style and the status quo. For example, how many articles in each discipline contain personal pronouns (I or we)? How many open with a story, anecdote, question, quotation, or other narrative hook? How many include unusually high or low percentages of abstract nouns? The answers to these and other questions are summarized in Chapter 2 and elsewhere throughout this book.

Finally, to determine whether the realities of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Style and Substance
• Part II: The Elements of Stylishness
• Afterword: Becoming a Stylish Writer
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index