Stylish Academic Writing - Helen Sword 2012

The big picture
The elements of stylishness

If you ask a roomful of academics to characterize stylish academic writing, at least a few will inevitably reply that the authors they most admire are those who “express complex ideas clearly.” Some might embellish the point, noting that stylish academic writers express complex ideas clearly and succinctly, clearly and elegantly, clearly and engagingly, or clearly and persuasively. Others will propose variations, stating that stylish academic writers express complex ideas in language that aids the reader’s understanding or challenges the reader’s understanding or extends the reader’s understanding. Central to all these definitions, despite their differing nuances, is the elusive art of abstraction; that is, the stylish academic writer’s ability to paint a big picture on a small canvas, sketching the contours of an intricate argument in just a few broad strokes.

Paradoxically, the most effective academic abstracts—a noun I use in this chapter to designate any summary statement of academic purpose, such as a grant proposal, article synopsis, or book prospectus—are often highly concrete, harnessing the language of the senses as well as the language of the mind. Performance scholar Sally Banes, for example, uses the sensual word “stink” to communicate the physical and symbolic importance of odor in Western theater:

For a century at least, in Western cultures, strong odors were mostly regarded as “bad,” stinks to be done away with. Banes finds that performing artists are attempting to restore the sense of smell to the theatrical experience. She anatomizes the rhetoric and practice of “aroma design” in theatrical representation and looks at smell as a paradigm of “liveness.”¹

Similarly, psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland invoke real people and places (students, guards, Abu Ghraib) in their study of the psychological dispositions that underlie abusive 'margin-top:0cm;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:8.65pt; margin-left:20.95pt;text-align:justify;line-height:15.95pt;text-autospace:none'>The authors investigated whether students who selectively volunteer for a study of prison life possess dispositions associated with behaving abusively. Students were recruited for a psychological study of prison life using a virtually identical newspaper ad as used in the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE; Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973) or for a psychological study, an identical ad minus the words of prison life. Volunteers for the prison study scored significantly higher on measures of the abuse-related dispositions of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance and lower on empathy and altruism, two qualities inversely related to aggressive abuse.… Implications for interpreting the abusiveness of American military guards at Abu Ghraib Prison also are discussed.²

These two otherwise very different abstracts are clear, direct, and to the point, albeit rather impersonal (“Banes finds,” “the authors investigated”) and passively phrased (“strong odors were mostly regarded,” “implications … are discussed”). Nouns and verbs sit close together so we know exactly who is doing what: “performing artists are attempting,” “the authors investigated,” “volunteers for the prison study scored.” Both abstracts contain vocabulary that might challenge a nonacademic reader (anatomizes, paradigm, Machiavellianism, narcissism). However, the authors steer clear of the kind of arcane, opaque, discipline-specific jargon that demands highly specialized subject knowledge.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

MALCOLM COULTHARD

For forty years linguists have talked about idiolect and the uniqueness of individual utterances. This article explores how far these two concepts can be used to answer certain questions about the authorship of written documents—for instance how similar can two student essays be before one begins to suspect plagiarism? The article examines two ways of measuring similarity: the proportion of shared vocabulary and the number and length of shared phrases, and illustrates with examples drawn from both actual criminal court cases and incidents of student plagiarism. The article ends by engaging with Solan and Tiersma’s contribution to this volume and considering whether such forensic linguistic evidence would be acceptable in American courts as well as how it might successfully be presented to a lay audience.

In his abstract for an article titled “Author Identification, Idiolect, and Linguistic Uniqueness,” linguist Malcolm Coulthard eschews the complex syntax and specialized vocabulary beloved by so many other researchers in his field. Aside from some sloppy punctuation, his sentences are clear and well structured, laying out the various questions that his article attempts to answer and foreshadowing his use of concrete examples from both the college classroom and the criminal court. Coulthard’s article opens with an anecdote about a man accused of murder based on incriminating statements that forensic analysts later proved to have been forged by police. Fittingly, Coulthard structures his own work something like a mystery story or courtroom drama; rather than delivering his thesis up front, he waits until the final paragraph to deliver his verdict. Yes, he eventually concludes, the concepts of idiolect and linguistic uniqueness (phrases that he carefully defines at the beginning of the article) are indeed robust, providing a basis for answering “with a high degree of confidence” important forensic questions about authorship.

Compare the above examples with the following abstract, which appeared in a leading higher education research journal:

Policy in higher education suggests that curriculum should be more responsive to economist arguments than was the case in the past. Although some guidance has been given to how to develop more work-integrated curricula, little attention has been given to interactions in meetings between workplace and academic representatives in which issues of curriculum development are discussed. As such there appears to be a gap in current curriculum theory. The author suggests that such interactions may be fruitfully examined using concepts derived from studies in the sociology of science and organizational dynamics. Such analyses may contribute to understanding what conditions enable productive interactions, which may be the development of hybrid objects and languages which speak to both groupings.

The article addresses a topic that could presumably be of interest to academics from many different disciplines: how can faculty, especially those in professionally oriented fields, engage in more productive conversations about course and curriculum design with the people who will eventually hire their students? The author, however, makes no attempt to invite such readers to the table. The abstract is dry, impersonal, wordy, and vague, filled with agency-free claims (“some guidance has been given”—by whom?), hedging maneuvers (“appears to be,” “may be,” “may contribute”), and syntactically fuzzy sentences (“Such analyses may contribute to understanding what conditions enable productive interactions, which may be the development of hybrid objects and languages which speak to both groupings”—the first which has no clear referent, and the second which should be that). Aside from “the author,” no human beings appear anywhere in the abstract, unless we count the shadowy “workplace and academic representatives” whose interactions “may be fruitfully examined”—but will they be examined here, or will the article merely circle around them, as the abstract does? Rather than rendering complex ideas clear and comprehensible, the author has taken a rather simple idea—sociological concepts can teach us how to run better meetings—and twisted it into a discursive pretzel.

The purpose of a scholarly abstract is not merely to summarize an article’s content but to persuade one’s discipline-based peers that the research is important and the article is therefore worth reading.³ In the higher education abstract quoted above, the author makes plenty of insider moves, including the obligatory claim that his article, like a thumb artfully inserted into a leaky dike, will plug a “gap” in the existing scholarship. Yet the abstract lacks persuasive power—not in spite of, but precisely because of, its adherence to disciplinary conventions. The art of persuasion necessarily involves human conversation; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines persuasion as “the addressing of arguments or appeals to a person [my emphasis] in order to induce cooperation, submission, or agreement.”⁴ Authors who adopt an impersonal, “academic” tone are neglecting one of the most powerfully persuasive tools at the stylish writer’s disposal: the human touch.

In the social sciences and humanities, researchers can draw readers into their argument by giving a voice and presence to human subjects: for example, the performance artists discussed by Banes or the students involved in Carnahan and McFarland’s psychology experiments. Scientists who study nonhuman subjects can make their research accessible in other ways, such as by using first-person pronouns (“we approached”) to signal the researchers’ presence in the work:

All birds dropping hard-bodied prey face a trade-off. It is likely that the impact damage to the prey increases as drop height increases, as this will influence the speed at which the prey hits the ground, and so the energy it experiences on impact. However, the time and energy costs of flight also increase with increasing drop heights. Furthermore, if a bird drops a prey item more than once, it incurs additional time and energy costs while landing, retrieving the prey item and taking off again. The main aim of this paper, therefore, is to examine how this trade-off influences decisions taken by birds dropping hard-bodied prey. We approached this problem in two ways.⁵

Note the many ways in which the authors of this article—titled “The Economics of Getting High: Decisions Made by Common Gulls Dropping their Cockles to Open Them”—engage and inform their readers. They begin by clearly defining the problem that motivates their research: “All birds dropping hard-bodied prey face a trade-off.” In verb-driven sentences filled with concrete nouns, they vividly describe the gulls in flight and the hard-bodied objects they drop from on high. If we are persuaded to read beyond the abstract, it is because the authors have conveyed not only the arc of their research but its essence. Rather than taking elementary concepts and spinning them out in complex language, they have achieved the stylish writer’s nirvana: “complex ideas clearly expressed.”

The following grid, adapted from one developed by higher education researcher David Green, offers one way to visualize the various registers into which academic writing typically falls:⁶

While some academics may stray between two or more sections of the grid—for example, writing a simple and clear abstract followed by a complex and difficult opening paragraph—the stylish academic writers quoted throughout this book mostly gravitate toward the top right-hand corner: complex ideas communicated in clear, comprehensible language. There is, of course, a place in the world for simple ideas expressed in simple language—for example, in a primary school textbook or a government-issued voting manual—and academics in fields such as literary studies or philosophy may argue for the educational and intellectual value of complex ideas expressed in rich, challenging language. But can anyone justify expressing simple ideas in difficult language? Green’s grid offers a useful starting point not only for evaluating other academics’ writing, but for honestly assessing one’s own.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

STEPHEN K. DONOVAN

The libraries of universities and other research institutions are home to an abundance of academic journals, published in multifarious sizes, thicknesses, languages, and formats, with covers varying from black to psychedelic and covering every subject imaginable. More uniformity of format would favour the author, who would no longer have to tailor style to wherever the latest contribution is being submitted, but the current diversity of formats is aimed at the reader. Long may it so remain.

Paleontologist Stephen K. Donovan—whose publications include books with titles like Jamaican Rock Stars, 1823—1971: The Geologists Who Explored Jamaica—brings both a scientist’s clarity and a stylish writer’s panache to this compact yet engaging three-sentence abstract, the teaser for an article in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing.

In the first sentence, Donovan teleports us into the physical space of the university library and invites us to picture what we will find there: academic journals of various sizes and thicknesses, with covers ranging from “black to psychedelic.” Despite its concrete imagery, however, this opening line also conveys an abstract argument: the diversity of the journal covers, Donovan implies, mirrors the diversity of their intellectual coverage.

In the second sentence, Donovan sets up the conflict that his article will explore at length: uniformity of format favors the author, he argues, while diversity of format favors the reader. He ends by forthrightly declaring his own allegiance to the diversity camp. A less-confident author might have spun out a laborious, jargon-studded thesis sentence: “This article analyzes the conflicting claims of both the writerly and readerly paradigms, concluding that the readerly benefits of material and epistemological variety should be given precedence over the writerly convenience afforded by stylistic standardization.” Instead, Donovan ends by summing up in just five words his argument that diversity should be defended: “Long may it so remain.”

Condensing a complex research project into a pithy abstract is no simple task, to be sure. An even greater challenge is to boil that abstract down into an “elevator statement”: the seemingly off-the-cuff but in fact brilliantly polished single-sentence summary that you offer to the colleague who turns to you in the elevator at an academic conference and asks, “So what are you working on?” You have just a minute or two to respond: the time that it takes for the elevator to arrive at its destination floor. Stylish academic writers often offer an elevator statement of sorts at the start of their scholarly books or articles, as a means of engaging their readers’ attention and inspiring them to continue reading:

This is a book about plots and plotting, about how stories come to be ordered in significant form, and also about our desire and need for such orderings.⁷

This book is about the impact of trauma both on individuals and on entire cultures or nations and about the need to share and “translate” such traumatic impact.⁸

As I shall try to show in this book, human language has a complexity and creativity that is unmatched by any other form of animal communication, and probably depends on completely different principles.⁹

Note that each of these opening statements describes not only the book’s subject but its argument, not only its what but its why. Literary scholar Peter Brooks promises to explain why we tell stories; cultural theorist E. Ann Kaplan investigates why we feel compelled to share and transform traumatic events through literature and art; and psycholinguist Michael Corballis explores why human language has evolved to be so complex and creative.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

JONATHAN CULLER

I began work on this topic for a conference at the University of London on style in philosophy. The organizers suggested that I address the question of what it is for a piece of philosophy to be badly written—no doubt thinking that as a reader of French philosophers, I would have special expertise on this question or at least a lot of relevant experience. In fact, I was happy to take up this question because I have been intrigued of late by claims made in the world of Anglophone philosophy about bad writing. The journal Philosophy and Literature … had for several years announced a Bad Writing Award, and since this award had recently been conferred on a sentence by Judith Butler that appeared in Diacritics during my stint as editor, I had a personal interest in the concept of bad writing in philosophy and the criteria of selection.

Literary scholar Jonathan Culler is a study in paradox: an apologist for “difficult” writing who himself is a master of determinedly lucid prose. Here, in the opening paragraph of an essay titled “Bad Writing and Good Philosophy,” he engages his readers’ attention and sympathy by establishing both his personal interest and his professional stake in the topic of “bad writing.” Next, he provides an extended gloss of cultural theorist Judith Butler’s prizewinning ninety-three-word sentence, which contains twenty-eight abstract nouns but no concrete language whatsoever, aside from invocations of “structure” and “structural totalities.” Culler generously concludes that Butler’s sentence is in fact “quite pedagogic writing. Key points are rephrased and repeated so that if you don’t catch on the first time around, you have another chance when they come by again.” In Culler’s evocative phrasing, Butler’s disorienting syntax becomes a spinning merry-go-round with a gold ring held out to the persistent reader.

The secret ingredient of an effective elevator statement—or, for that matter, of a persuasive abstract, article, or book—is a strong thesis or argument. Both words are frequently heard in the freshman composition classroom but seldom in the research laboratory. However, identical principles apply in both venues: writers who put forth a bold, defensible claim are much more likely to generate engaging, persuasive prose than those who offer bland statements of fact with which no one could possibly disagree. In the sciences and social sciences, a strong thesis follows naturally from a compelling research question, as when a group of behavioralists ask how seagulls solve the height versus energy problem when dropping cockles onto the rocks below. Some academics may resist the notion that a complex argument can always be reduced to a single sentence; with poet and literary critic Charles Bernstein, they might even decry the “epistemological positivism” of an academic environment in which “one’s work is supposed to be easily summed up, definable, packaged, polished, wrinkles and contradictions eliminated, digressions booted” and in which “dissertations must not violate stylistic norms because that might jeopardize our young scholar’s future.”¹⁰ Yet it is worth noting that even Bernstein’s polemic against academic conformism (which contains plenty of wrinkles, contradictions, and digressions of its own) can be summed up, elevator-style, in a persuasive thesis statement: Prevailing stylistic conventions, Bernstein argues, inhibit scholarly inquiry and stifle innovation.

For stylish academic writers, clarity and complexity are bedfellows, not rivals. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who for more than a decade held the post of Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, offers the following advice to scientists:

Do not talk down. Try to inspire everybody with the poetry of science and make your explanations as easy as honesty allows, but at the same time do not neglect the difficult. Put extra effort into explaining to those readers prepared to put matching effort into understanding.¹¹

Dawkins’s formula can be adapted by academics in any field. Researchers who master the art of abstraction—the ability to express complex ideas clearly—will enlighten and persuade not only nonspecialist audiences but their discipline-based colleagues well.

Things to try

• Use David Green’s grid to rate examples of academic writing that you particularly admire or dislike. (For “clear” and “difficult,” you can substitute “easy to read” and “hard to read,” “lucid” and “opaque,” “illuminating” and “bewildering,” or any other oppositional adjectives that you find helpful). Most likely you will find that the best writers in your field inhabit the “complex but clear” box, whereas those whose work you find hard to digest employ convoluted language either to express complex concepts or, more problematically, to obfuscate simple ideas. Be honest with yourself: Which grid does your own work fall into?

• Answer the following questions in simple, conversational language, avoiding disciplinary jargon:

• What is the main point of your article, dissertation, or book? (Why is it important, whether to you or to anyone else?)

• Who is your intended audience?

• What research question(s) do you aim to answer?

• What new contribution(s) does your research make to theory? to practice?

• What is your overarching thesis or argument?

• What evidence do you offer in support?

Keep your responses close at hand as you construct your summary statement, which should answer most if not all of these questions, especially the first one (“What’s the point?”).

• Make sure your abstract contains the following:

• Clear, well-structured sentences in which nouns and their modifying verbs sit close together.

• At least a few concrete nouns and/or verbs.

• A touch of humanity: for example, first-person pronouns (I/we), real people (research subjects, other researchers), or language that grounds abstract ideas in human experience.

• A contestable thesis or argument.

• Show your abstract to a few trusted friends or colleagues, both from within and outside your discipline. Ask them to give you candid answers to the following questions:

• Do you understand what my research is about and why it’s important?

• Does my abstract make you want to keep reading?