Stylish Academic Writing - Helen Sword 2012

Show and tell
The elements of stylishness

“Show, don’t tell” is the mantra of the novelist, dramatist, and poet. Creative writers learn to convey key emotional information by means of physical details: the storyteller invokes primal terror by spinning a tale about a child alone in a dark forest; the poet represents the whole history of human grief with “an empty doorway and a maple leaf.”¹ “Show and tell,” in contrast, is the mantra of the stylish academic writer, who illuminates abstract ideas by grounding theory in practice and by anchoring abstract concepts in the real world.

As a starting point, nearly all stylish academic writers ply their readers with well-chosen examples, examples, and more examples. For example, philosophers Glyn Humphreys and Jane Riddoch open a highly technical article on action and perception by posing a provocative opening question immediately followed by an illustrative case in point:

What is an object?… Consider watching someone walk behind a set of railings, a circumstance in which all the parts of their body are not visible at a given time. The lay answer, that the object is the person behind the railing, fails to account for how we see the fragmented parts of the person as a single “thing.” How does our visual system construct the whole object, when the sensory evidence for the object is fragmentary?²

Without the image of a person walking behind a railing firmly planted in our minds, the authors’ subsequent discussion of “bottom-up grouping,” “familiarity-based grouping,” and other key principles of Gestalt psychology would be considerably harder to follow, and their central argument—that our perception of discrete objects “depends on the actions we are programming and on the presence of action relations between stimuli”—would be much more difficult to grasp.

Anecdotes are examples drawn from real life, as when psycholinguist Steven Pinker illustrates the ideological power of grammar with two historical vignettes:

In 1984 George Orwell has the state banning irregular verbs as a sign of its determination to crush the human spirit; in 1989 the writer of a personal ad in the New York Review of Books asked, “Are you an irregular verb?” as a sign of her determination to exalt it.³

An anecdote is, in essence, a miniature story, sometimes sketched in a sentence or two, sometimes spun out over several paragraphs. Not only do anecdotes effectively illustrate abstract concepts, they also satisfy our natural desire for narratives that feature human beings rather than merely ideas. A carefully placed anecdote can revive a reader’s flagging attention and even inject some welcome humor into an otherwise sober academic discussion.

Case studies, likewise, draw us into stories about real people; they show and tell how theoretical concepts get played out in the world at large. In professionally oriented disciplines such as business, medicine, and education, entire academic journals—the Journal of Business Case Studies, the Journal of Medical Case Reports, the Journal of Education Case Studies—are devoted to the practice and discussion of case-based research methodologies. Academics in other, more theoretically oriented disciplines use case studies in less-rigorous but equally fruitful ways, anchoring and exemplifying larger arguments through attention to real-life situations. Philosopher and feminist geographer Gillian Rose uses home-based interviews with fourteen middle-class English mothers to explore the role of family photographs in defining domestic space; Pacific studies scholars David Gegeo and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo examine a specific rural development project in the Solomon Islands to reveal “how modernization, globalization, and older Anglo-European notions of community development continue to fail rural development in the Solomons”; organizational management experts Jeffrey Pfeffer and Tanya Menon analyze the disproportionately high “knowledge valuation” assigned to external business consultants by tracing the consultancy experiences of two different companies.⁴ Through detailed analysis of specific situations, these authors make large, transferable claims about cultural identity formation, postcolonial rural development, and organizational knowledge, respectively.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

MICHAEL CORBALLIS

A few years ago I visited a publishing house in England and was greeted at the door by the manager, whose first words were: “We have a bit of a crisis. Ribena is trickling down the chandelier.” I had never heard this sentence before but knew at once what it meant, and was soon able to confirm that it was true. For those who don’t know, ribena is a red fruit drink that some people inflict on their children, and my first sinister thought was that the substance dripping from the chandelier was blood. It turned out that the room above was a crèche [day care], and one of the children had evidently decided that it would be more fun to pour her drink onto the floor than into her mouth.

In his book From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, psycholinguist Michael Corballis offers this perfectly pitched anecdote—apt, unusual, humorous, and concrete—to illustrate “that language is not just a matter of learning associations between words”:

I had never in my life encountered the words ribena and chandelier in the same sentence, or even in the remotest association with each other, yet I was immediately able to understand a sentence linking them.

Weaving “a story about the evolution of language from threads drawn from a broad range of disciplines,” Corballis deploys a wide range of stylish techniques. He opens every chapter with a relevant example, illustration, or question. He chooses his words with care: “I am beguiled by the frivolous thought that we are descended, not from apes, but from birds.” Even his chapter titles are eye-catching, memorable, and concrete: “Why Are We Lopsided?”; “Three Hands Better than Two?”

A scenario functions very much like a case study, except that it depicts a fictional situation rather than a real one. Sometimes scenarios skate along the edge of satire, as when, in an article titled “Embodiment, Academics, and the Audit Culture,” sports scientist Andrew Sparkes tells the funny but not so funny story of a “mythical (perhaps?) academic at an imaginary (perhaps?) university in England that is permeated by an audit culture.” In the article’s introduction, Sparkes explains that he based the “embodied struggles” of his tortured professor on “informal interviews with academics at various universities in England and selected personal experiences.”⁵ More realistic scenarios might explore the possible outcomes of an expected or likely sequence of events, such as global warming or nuclear war. (In some disciplines, such as climatology, scenario is in fact a technical term for computer-generated “what if” models.) The most effective scenarios, by and large, function much in the same way as anecdotes, examples, and case studies: they make abstract ideas concrete and imaginable. However, a scenario can invite ridicule if it proves too unlikely or outlandish, as when philosophers concerned with the ethics of abortion write about “hypothetical women impregnated by flying insects and the like,” or when a theoretical physicist opens a report on how to increase a farmer’s milk production with the words “Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum.”⁶

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

BRIAN BOYD

In a game that asked us to associate natural kinds and famous people, “butterflies” would yield the answer “Nabokov” as surely as “hemlock” would trigger “Socrates.” … After all, Humbert pursued nymphets, not Nymphalids, Luzhin captured chessmen, not Checkerspots, Pnin accumulated sorrows, not Sulphurs. Why did butterflies so fascinate Nabokov, and why should that so fascinate us?

In his introduction to Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, literary biographer Brian Boyd begins with a quotation from Nabokov—“My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting”—to justify his own appropriation of butterflies as an extended metaphor for Nabokov’s gorgeous, fluttering prose:

Let me pin Vladimir Nabokov into place alongside several superficially similar specimens.

From this point on, literature and Lepidoptera dance an elaborate pas de deux through seventy years of Nabokov’s life.

Whenever a butterfly or moth plucked from its natural habitat in a particular novel demands attention, identification, and explanation, the anthologist’s net suddenly becomes the reader’s lens.

Boyd notes that “from as far back as we can see, Nabokov had a love of both detail and design, of precise, unpredictable particulars and intricate, often concealed patterns.” One might say the same of Boyd, whose carefully constructed displays match Nabokov’s in their stylistic virtuosity. In addition to metaphor, Boyd deploys alliteration and wordplay (“nymphets, not Nymphalids”; “chessmen, not Checkerspots”), active verbs (yield, trigger, pursue, capture, accumulate, fascinate, pin, dance, pluck), and concrete details (butterfly names, literary characters, specimen boards, nets, lenses, ballet steps) to communicate the vibrancy and variety of Nabokov’s prose.

Figurative devices such as simile, metaphor, and personification show and tell in a different way, weaving memorable imagery into the very fabric of a writer’s sentences. Some academics, particularly scientists and social scientists, regard figurative language with suspicion, associating metaphor and its cousins with the flowery, emotive outpourings of the novelist or poet. Yet scientists frequently invoke physical metaphors—Petri nets (computer science), DNA bar codes (molecular biology), step-down therapy (medicine)—to explain the work they do. Indeed, philosophers of language George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that all language is deeply metaphorical; the language of embodied experience, they claim, is (metaphorically) hardwired into our very brains.⁷

Stylish academic writers choose their metaphors carefully, harnessing the physical world in the service of abstract ideas, as when literary theorist Peter Brooks and psychologist Robert J. Sternberg ascribe physical qualities to argument and intimacy, respectively:

The plot of my own argument in this study will make loops and detours in the pursuit of its subject.⁸

The swinging back and forth of the intimacy pendulum provides some of the excitement that keeps many relationships alive.⁹

Sometimes, however, academic writers let their metaphors choose them:

In this chapter I have tracked rhetorical paths of thought to illustrate some ways rhetorical hermeneutics works as theory and as critical practice. Following these paths reveals how interpretations of phronesis have historically tied rhetoric and hermeneutics together.¹⁰

Here, literary theorist Steven Mailloux’s ambition to “track rhetorical paths of thought” is derailed by conflicting metaphors—illustrate, tie together, tool—that get in the way of his dominant “tracking” image. A writer more attentive to the workings of figurative language would stick to the path alone.

When an author strings several related comparisons together—“as A is like B, so C is like D”—we move into the realm of analogy, or extended metaphor. Scientists frequently use analogies to explain the workings of nature and the unseen world. In 1940, for example, biologist H. B. Cott noted that interdependent species engage in mutually escalating evolutionary behaviors:

The fact is, that in the primeval struggle of the jungle, as in the refinements of civilized warfare, we see in progress a great evolutionary armament race.… Just as greater speed in the pursued has developed in relation to increased speed in the pursuer; or defensive armour in relation to aggressive weapons; so the perfection of concealing devices has evolved in response to increased powers of perception.¹¹

Cott’s “evolutionary arms race” analogy—animal species are like nations at war, heightened perception is like a weapon, camouflaging devices are like defensive armor—has been taken up and elaborated upon by numerous other scientists, including biologist Leigh Van Valen, who in 1972 coined the phrase “Red Queen’s hypothesis” to explain how evolutionary systems maintain their fitness relative to other codeveloping systems. Van Valen’s theory takes its name from the scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass where the Red Queen tells Alice that she must run faster and faster just to stay in the same square of the chessboard: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”¹² Both Cott’s evolutionary arms race and Van Valen’s Red Queen’s hypothesis belong to a long list of analogies that scientists and scholars have drawn upon to help us make sense of our world. Computer programmers “boot” their hard drives (the term derives from the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”), linguists who study metaphor and analogy speak of “conceptual mappings,” and educators construct pedagogical “scaffolding” to help their students learn. Sometimes such analogies can be misleading; for example, so-called “junk DNA,” which denotes noncoding portions of a genome sequence, has turned out to have more important biological functions than its throwaway name would suggest.¹³ Many scientific analogies, however, are so effective and compelling that they have entered our cultural lexicon and perhaps our very consciousness. The programmer who first slapped familiar office labels onto various computer functions—“desktop,” “file,” “folder,” “control panel,” “recycle bin”—certainly knew something about human psychology and our hunger for language that invokes physical reality.

Van Valen’s Red Queen analogy is also an allusion, a device used by stylish authors such as anthropologist Ruth Behar and literary scholar Marjorie Garber to link abstract concepts with stories and images already familiar to most readers:

To write vulnerably is to open a Pandora’s box. Who can say what will come flying out?¹⁴

Assistant professors are shown this forking path: You cannot get there from here. Write a solid, scholarly book for specialists in your field; otherwise you will step off the yellow brick road to tenure.¹⁵

We know that Pandora’s box contains unknown dangers and that the yellow brick road leads to a place of Technicolor happiness—unless, of course, we are unfamiliar with Greek mythology and The Wizard of Oz, in which case the allusions fall flat. (Garber’s passage also contains a veiled allusion to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of the Forking Paths.”) A careful stylist will either provide an explicit reference to the source being cited (as Van Valen does with his Red Queen’s hypothesis) or, as in the two examples above, he or she will ensure that a sentence still makes sense even if a reader does not “get” the allusion.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

STEVEN PINKER

This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student. At first glance that approach might seem to lie in the great academic tradition of knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. But please don’t put the book down just yet. Seeing the world in a grain of sand is often the way of science, as when geneticists agreed to study the lowly fruit fly so that their findings might cumulate into a deep understanding that would have been impossible had each scientist started from scratch with a different organism. Like fruit flies, regular and irregular verbs are small and easy to breed.

Psycholinguist Steven Pinker opens his book Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language with a concrete, easy-to-grasp explanation of his methodology: he seeks to “illuminate the nature of language and mind” (a lofty ambition indeed) by focusing on a single grammatical exemplar, the irregular verb. His opening passage draws on just about every technique in the stylish writer’s tool kit:

• a clearly stated thesis (“This book tries to illuminate”)

• vivid verbs (illuminate, choose, examine, cumulate, breed)

• colorful nouns and adjectives (bane, from scratch, lowly)

• direct conversation with the reader (“But please”)

• self-deprecating humor (“the great academic tradition of knowing more and more about less and less”)

• literary allusions (“To see the world in a grain of sand”—William Blake)

• metaphor and analogy (“Like fruit flies, regular and irregular verbs are small and easy to breed”)

Even Pinker’s chapter titles—“Broken Telephone,” “The Horrors of the German Language,” “A Digital Mind in an Analog World”—are by turn concrete, humorous, allusive, and thought-provoking. Nearly every paragraph of his book contains examples, illustrations, or other manifestations of the “show and tell” principle at work.

Examples, metaphors, and allusions work their magic by painting pictures in our minds: we can practically see those hapless young assistant professors setting out merrily along the yellow brick road to tenure, still unaware of the hazards (lions and tigers and bears!) that lurk in the bushes along the way. Visual illustrations, by contrast—photos, drawings, diagrams, graphs—literally show us in images what the author tells in words. As neuropsychologist Allan Paivio and others have documented, words and images are processed by the brain along entirely separate pathways; unsurprisingly, readers understand new concepts more clearly and recall them more readily when they are presented both verbally and visually rather than just one way or the other.¹⁶ The most effective illustrations, by and large, are those that complement rather than duplicate the text: a well-chosen diagram, graph, or screen shot speaks mostly for itself without requiring a long-winded explanation. At the same time, authors do no one a favor by dropping in illustrations that never get mentioned in the text. Nor do confusing or badly constructed graphics serve the stylish academic writer’s cause. Convoluted flow charts and snazzy 3-D bar graphs can end up alienating rather than enlightening readers, who expect illustrations to forge an uncluttered path to the ideas and data presented in the text, not to throw up new roadblocks (see Figure 9.1).

The “show and tell” principle can be adapted to suit any academic context or disciplinary style. At the sentence level, a single concrete verb—sweep, illuminate, forge—helps lift a phrase into the realm of lived experience. Metaphors and analogies produce a similar effect, but more explicitly and on a more expansive scale. Anecdotes, case studies, and scenarios add narrative energy and human interest. Visual illustrations activate the eyes as well as the mind. Each of these techniques relies on a breathtakingly simple formula: abstract concepts become more memorable and accessible the moment we ground them in the material world, the world that our readers can see and touch.

Figure 9.1. Example of a higher education diagram that risks confusing rather than enlightening readers with its various labels, arrows, and clouds. The caption to the original diagram reads, “Leadership discourses, subject positions, and corresponding modalities of power.”

Things to try

• Examples: For every sentence that you write about an abstract concept or principle, follow up with the words “For example …” This technique can lead to stylistic monotony if overused; however, if you are stuck for ideas, it is a good way to get you started thinking concretely. (Rule of thumb: Use the phrase “for example” no more than once per paragraph or, better yet, once per page. Cultivate other, more subtle ways to introduce examples.)

• Anecdotes: Start a file of anecdotes—ministories no more than a few sentences or paragraphs long—that relate to your research area. Weave them into your research writing at key points, whether to assist your readers’ understanding or simply to regain their attention. If you don’t know where to start, try using an anecdote as your opening hook.

• Case Studies: If your research involves human subjects, consider framing it as a case study: that is, an exemplary story (see Chapter 8, “The Story Net,” for further examples and ideas).

• Scenarios: A scenario presents a hypothetical situation and explores its possible outcomes. As a prompt, start by addressing your reader directly with an imperative verb such as imagine, picture, or suppose. You can later remove this direct address and present the scenario on its own.

• Figurative Language: Stylish writers employ similes, metaphors, analogies, and other figurative language to capture their readers’ attention, aid their understanding, appeal to their physical senses, and generate new ideas. If figurative language doesn’t come naturally to you, try the following steps:

• Choose a bland, abstract sentence from your book, thesis, or article. (Example: “Speech errors occur frequently in human conversation, but the many different varieties of errors have not yet been adequately analyzed and categorized by scholars.”)

• Identify the subject of the sentence and come up with some concrete similes. (“Speech errors are like: sprouting weeds, lost children, swarming insects.”)

• Choose one of those similes and expand it into an analogy. (“If speech errors are like swarming insects, then the people who study them are like entomologists, and the act of studying them is like catching and classifying insects.”)

• Get playful with the analogy: push its limits, explore its shadow side. (“If speech errors are like swarming insects, studying them is like intentionally walking into a cloud of mosquitoes. If linguists are like entomologists, classifying speech errors is like dipping butterflies in formaldehyde and pinning them to a board.”)

• Now work the analogy into your original sentence, as linguists Douglas Hofstadter and David Moser do when they invoke the “speech errors are like insects” analogy in a statement about error making and human cognition: “Speech errors of all kinds swarm in our linguistic environment like hordes of variegated insects waiting to be caught, labeled, and categorized.”¹⁷

• Finally, try out your metaphorically enriched writing on a few colleagues—the conservative ones as well as those who are stylistically adventurous. Do they like it? Do you?

• Visual illustrations can be inviting, distracting, confusing, or illuminating, depending on how they are used. As with any other aspect of stylish writing, the key principle is to employ them self-consciously and with a clear sense of purpose:

• For each illustration you include, ask yourself, “Why do I need this image? How does it aid the reader’s understanding? Does my illustration supplement rather than duplicate what is already in the text?”

• Because images are relatively expensive to print but easy to reproduce digitally, add colorful illustrations to Web-based publications and live presentations (subject to copyright provisions, of course) but use them sparingly in print.