The Wrong Way to Write

Fairy Godmother’s Magic Dress in Disney’s 1950 Cinderella

Salago-doola / Menchicka boola / Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo / Put 'em together / And what have you got? / Bibbidi-bobbidi-Boo

– From Al Hoffman, Mack David and Jerry Livingston in 1948

“Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose.” 

– Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

Maybe Walt Disney and his writers were suggesting a path for academic scribblers to ensure that no untrained eyes could follow their Byzantine script.

It isn’t just lawyers. We see it across the sciences, philosophy, economics, sociology, comparative literature and other academic professions. Although learned in graduate schools, no one ever speaks of it directly but, through reading the assigned papers, you learn both the jargon and the art of obscurity. That way, you can get into the best journals, get tenure, and become A Member of the Club.

Every academic specialty has thousands of examples like this one from Barbara Vinken, 

“This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization.”

Here’s another quote about the foundation of queer Theory by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 

“In consonance with my emphasis on the performative relations of double and conflicted definition, the theorized prescription for a practical politics implicit in these readings is for a multi-pronged movement whose idealist and materialist impulses, whose minority-model and universalist- model strategies, and for that matter whose gender-separatist and gender-integrative analysis would likewise proceed in parallel without any high premium placed on ideological rationalization between them.”

Not to leave out economics, here’s part of a summary from a paper by Giacomo Lanzani in a recent issue of Quarterly Journal of Economics,

“I offer an axiomatization of risk models where the choices of the decision maker are correlation sensitive. By extending the techniques of conjoint measurement to the nondeterministic case, I show that transitivity is the von Neumann-Morgenstern axiom that has to be relaxed to allow for these richer patterns of behavior.”

These examples were just picked at random, and no doubt the authors must have felt that, in order to get their paper published in a serious journal, they needed to write like this to prove their bona fides. Maybe so, but where does that leave us with, as I wrote about last week, trying to get through thousands, if not millions of papers on a subject of interest. 

Such writing isn’t just a headache, it raises the cost to read and understand what the author is saying and, like every other commodity, if you raise the price of a good (i.e., reading and comprehension), you get less of it.

The results are much disputed but one study in 2007 noted that “as many as 50% of (academic) papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.” They also claim that 90 percent of papers published are never cited.” Another claimed that the average academic article is read in its entirety only by about 10 people. Perhaps the quality of the writing has something to do with it.

Maybe it serves one purpose, by keeping only the trained experts in the academic guild, it keeps the amateurs out who have not paid with time and treasure to, not just learn the subject matter, but the skill of writing incoherently.

How about a few brave editors of journals say, “Enough!” Write plainly or we won’t publish it. Several things might happen: journalists might actually report academic results correctly and more Americans might become science (and other subjects) literate. 

That would be just as magical as Bibbidi-bobbidi-Boo.