Why you probably don’t like academic writing

George Orwell, Source: UCL Imagestore

Sam Vladimirsky argues that we need to break away from disaffecting academic habits.

I am a graduate student in art history at a prestigious London university. It might come as a surprise then that, by and large, I can’t stand academic writing. Here is an actual sentence taken from one of  my assigned readings: “It passes over the preliminaries, when being is being-well, when the human being is deposited in a being-well, in the well-being originally associated with being.” (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958.)

Here is another: “…the time-complex can be thought, with ‘speculation’ taken primarily as a time-historical speculation, like futurity, rather than an exteriority to experience or an exteriority of thought.” (Suhail Malik and Armen Avanessian, ‘The Time-Complex. Post-Contemporary’, in DIS Magazine.)

The academics behind such texts check off virtually every box on the checklist of crimes against the English language that George Orwell listed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language.” He argues that pretentious diction is often “used to dress up simple statements” resulting in vague, poorly thought-out, and indecipherable ideas. Much writing in the humanities, he goes on, is chock-full of hyper-sophisticated, meaningless words that “do not point to any discoverable object [and] are hardly ever expected to…”

Language is intended for clear communication, and clear communication leads to readers developing their own original thoughts and ideas, the ability to think critically, to create, and participate in social action. The failure to communicate clearly — which Orwell attributes to imitation — prevents critical thinking (which is particularly useful to politicians vying for your non-critical attention.) The idea behind a text may have been original and well-conceived, but if readers can’t process and internalise it, then that idea is lost.

In a controversial New York Times op-ed, the journalist Nicholas Kristof suggested that although “some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors [most] of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.” To some extent, at least as far as circulation goes, he has a point. It is far more likely for the average reader to pick up a copy of the Times than to peruse online databases that require a paid subscription or university affiliation. But his view does not capture one crucial fact: plenty of academics write for the press. It’s not uncommon for the same content to live on both academic and media platforms, albeit reduced or adapted.

The question, then, is one of presentation. At the New Yorker Festival in the summer of 2011, Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin) interviewed the magazine’s chief art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, whose voice is among the strongest, if also the more provocative, in the New York art world. When asked how he manages to make “art speak” accessible to a wider audience, Schjeldahl retorted that “academic writers write for people who have to read them. And if they show any style or flair, their colleagues are just going to get impatient. If I don’t show style and flair, I starve.”

Schjeldahl is right on the mark, but as Joshua Rothman points out in the New Yorker’s response to Kristof’s op-ed, the problem is not just a question of style, but a symptom of the academic ecosystem itself. “Since the liberal-arts job market peaked in the mid-seventies,” he writes, and the number of students majoring in fields like history or French (my two undergraduate majors) declines every year, “the audience for academic work has been shrinking. Increasingly, to build a successful academic career you must serially impress very small groups of people (departmental colleagues, journal and book editors, tenure committees).” As the employment pool for full-time humanities professors shrinks, it becomes increasingly common for academics to center their scholarship around a particular niche, aiming to impress small targets by fetishising obscure topics that have yet to be written about. “Writing a first book, you may have in mind particular professors on a tenure committee,” explains Rothman, “miss that mark and you may not have a job.” Those professors who write with the aim of reaching a wider audience, in a language that is clear and accessible, are often dismissed as popular panderers of unworthy scholarship that simply isn’t serious. So they overcorrect. As a former high school teacher of mine put it, “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

In short, it won’t do any good to ask professors to write like journalists. “Academic writing and research may be knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialised, forbidding and clannish,” writes Rothman, but only “because academia has become that way, too.”

What you end up with is a chicken-and-egg situation. Academic writing isolates many readers from engaging with what might just be interesting, even useful, material. On top of this, fewer students are taking humanities courses because of public perception that they are elitist, niche, result in unemployment, or worse, are not worth talking about. After reading enough academic writing, even those of us who have stuck around sometimes find ourselves wondering, what’s the point? In turn, the field shrinks. Subsequently, scholars write for ever smaller audiences, and those small audiences then become candidates to replace the even tinier pool of experts who taught them in the first place, some waiting years to earn more than an $8,000 annual pay check.

To be clear, I’m not trying to suggest a dichotomy in which academic writing is bad, and popular writing is good. In fact, a number of scholars are tackling the issue internally as I write this. What I am saying, though, is that the problem lies in the academic system, and is reinforced through repetition. Breaking away from this pattern requires recognition and direct action.

So, where do we go from here? I wager that the answer lies in the classroom. I’ll use art history as a notorious example of a field whose writing and institutions might come across as inaccessible and disengaging.

Read Closely and Pay Attention

When I sent a draft of this article to Richard Miller, a former professor of mine at Rutgers University, he made the case that from Plato forward, “it is possible to argue that much of what gets depicted as brilliantly insightful is actually poorly articulated sentences.” When writing his own undergraduate thesis, he was “overwhelmed by the sense that all [he] was doing was converting horrible writing into something comprehensible.”

The lesson here is two-fold. One, read slowly, critically, and thoughtfully. Some brilliant minds take more deciphering than others. Give them time, give them attention. That said, don’t assume that a university affiliation makes someone an original mind or a good writer. When you read, try to really read. Constantly question the text, ask if it makes sense, if it provokes you to think deeper, if it elicits a response, if the argument is sound. Never assume that it does any of these things.

Don’t ignore Orwell

A good idea is only as strong as one’s ability to communicate it to others. You don’t have to christen a Schjeldahl in every undergraduate student — flair and style are secondary to a well-conceived argument — but changing the way we talk and write about art might entice students into taking more humanities courses than their gen. ed. curriculum requires (this applies to students in the U.S. and Canada). Provoking enthusiasm is not a populist notion, but a way to create a new generation of critical thinkers, and an atmosphere of inclusivity.

Write for someone that isn’t paid to read it

While it isn’t always possible to write for those outside your field — after all, you must be grounded and specific in something if you want to make a meaningful contribution— some of the best writing is interdisciplinary. It can become meaningful and applicable to a wide net of thinkers.

In an undergraduate class on slow reading, Miller encourages his students to venture beyond “the point that they are producing writing that only one person reads, and that person is paid to do so.” For grad students or faculty workshops, “the goal is to get beyond producing writing that is only read because it is assigned. Aim to produce writing that people read, by choice, because it stimulates new thinking.

Your Major Is Not Your Job

The skills you learn in the humanities are applicable in any number of fields, writing chief among them. Studying art history for instance, doesn’t mean you’ll be a curator or an art dealer. But it might make you a stellar lawyer. You’ll forget about that one Raphael painting you really liked, but you won’t forget building a whole argument around it, deconstructing it until you felt like it was yours.

No more bowls of fruit

You probably won’t make a conceptual artist out of someone forced to take an intro to art class in college, but drawing bowls of fruit and perfectly straight boxes only reinforces tropes about the ridiculousness of what many existing art curriculums demand. If this is how art is presented to young people, it is no surprise that they’re not eager to read about it. Life drawing might instil an aesthetic appreciation for realism and figurative art, but it entraps students’ imaginations in the very boxes they are asked to draw.

Ask them to depict what death looks like. Teach them Facetune and talk about the politics of representation. Let them dress up as eccentric characters or in drag, and perform in front of a camera. Have them re-enact a scene from their favourite show or movie. Make a music video. Cut up a wedding dress.

Take a page from MoMA’s playbook

In their October 2019 re-opening, the Museum of Modern Art in New York introduced to the world a MoMA centred not on the “-isms” canonical to the art world, but an institution dedicated to contemporary issues experienced on the street outside its walls. The sales pitch works, not just because MoMA will always be able to attract visitors, but because reframed in this way, art has the potential to ignite conversation and debate around issues that matter to twenty-first century audiences. If the issues brought up by the art are relevant, the art becomes relevant too.

We ought to present the discipline of art history not exclusively as the history of art, but as the visual history of people, places, and things in the real world, both physical and subconscious. It is the history of knowledge, communication, representation, and class struggles, a history of faith as much as science, of love and friendship, design, transportation, advertising, the history of the stage and the high rise, the traces of lost civilisations, and plans for those of the future.