Stylish Academic Writing - Helen Sword 2012

Voice and echo
The elements of stylishness

Think of an academic writer whose work you particularly admire. Most likely you will choose someone whose words convey passion and commitment, whose writing engages you in a direct and visceral way; you feel as though this person is chatting with you over a cup of coffee, perhaps sketching diagrams on a napkin to illustrate a point, rather than lecturing to you in a monotonous voice from a computer printout or PowerPoint screen. Now think of an academic whose writing you find hard to digest, even if his or her ideas are perfectly sound. In nine cases out of ten, I’ll wager, you will find the following:

• The author writes in an impersonal voice (the pronouns I and we might crop up occasionally, but could just as well be absent).

• The author makes no attempt to engage in a direct conversation with the reader (no humor, no asides, no engaging anecdotes, no you).

• The author writes paragraphs in which nearly every sentence either has an abstract noun as its subject (“this study,” “the observation”) or, thanks to grammatical sleight of hand, no named subject at all (“it can be seen,” “the patients were examined”).

Once upon a time, PhD students across the disciplines were taught that personality should never intrude upon scholarly writing. Apprentice scientists, social scientists, and even humanities scholars were warned that their research would not be taken seriously unless they reported on their work in a sort of human-free zone where I and we dared not speak their names. Some academics, forbidden to say I, resorted instead to the royal we (“in this paper, we [the solo author] will argue”), the inclusive we (“from these results, we [the author and readers] can surmise”), or awkward, third-person constructions (“this writer has argued elsewhere,” “the present researcher has found”). Some took on a godlike persona, surveying the research landscape from on high and delivering subjective pronouncements in adverb-inflected language that cleverly disguised opinion as fact (“cleverly disguised opinion as fact”). Some let their research stand in as a kind of proxy for the absent I (“this paper will argue,” “this example demonstrates”). And some twisted their sentences into passive verb constructions that hinted at but never acknowledged personal agency (“it can be shown,” “the research was performed”).

These days, first-person pronouns are allowed in most academic disciplines: of the sixty-six peer-reviewed journals in my cross-disciplinary study, I found only one—a prominent history journal—that apparently forbids personal pronouns. Nevertheless, as the following examples from my data set demonstrate, academic writers still frequently employ the inclusive or royal we:

In addition to questioning the class basis on which this long-accepted distinction rests, we need to create new histories of feminism that are no longer encumbered by problematic assumptions about women and putative class interests or by socialist politics of the past. [History]

They still couch their arguments in an impersonal yet authoritative style that represents opinion as fact:

Tax law is one of those areas that tends to be portrayed as discrete, dry and somewhat dull. The ECJ’s recent direct tax jurisprudence most definitely does not fit that bill. [Law]

They still refer to themselves and their research teams in the third person:

The study investigators recruited the patients from March 2003 until April 2004 after a review of medical records and the completion of screening procedures to establish their eligibility for the trial. [Medicine]

They still ascribe agency to the research rather than to the researchers:

The concern of this article is language, and specifically the various projects of linguistic “purification” that were part of literary modernism in Britain. [Literary Studies]

And they still delight in contorting their sentences into passive or agentless constructions:

If, however, resemblance is identity, these features can be explained simply by appealing to the properties of identity. [Philosophy]

Nondeterminacy is a fundamental notion of computing with many important roles. [Computer Science]

Indeed, these last two phenomena—the “research as agent” sentence and the “agentless” sentence—occur so frequently in academic writing that both constructions can often be found cohabitating in a single paragraph:

Here it is demonstrated that the informativeness of a character can be quantified over a historical time scale. This formulation may play a role in resolving these controversies. [Evolutionary Biology]

If the authors of this article allowed themselves to speak as themselves—“Here we attempt to resolve some of those controversies by demonstrating”—their sentences would immediately become more energetic, more persuasive, and easier to understand.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

NATHANIEL MERMIN

Your question was: Does this qualify as “strikingly different” enough to publish? I have never read anything like it, and I have read a lot on EPR [Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Channels], though far from everything ever written.… After reading the paper I put it aside and spent the next week working hard on something totally unrelated. Every now and then I would introspect to see if some way of looking at the argument had germinated that reduced it to a triviality. None had. Last night I woke up at 3 a.m., fascinated and obsessed with it. Couldn’t get back to sleep. That’s my definition of “striking.” So I say it’s strikingly different and I say publish it.

In 1992, physicist Nathaniel Mermin was asked to review a discovery paper on “dense coding” for the journal Physical Review Letters. Although his words were originally intended for a private audience of one—namely, the journal’s editor—the personal, passionate quality of Mermin’s referee report suffuses nearly all his academic writing, from his titles to his chapter epigraphs:

• “The Amazing Many-colored Relativity Engine,” American Journal of Physics [article title]

• “Copenhagen Computation: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bohr,” IBM Journal of Research and Development [article title]

• “These ’bras’ and ’kets’—they’re just vectors!”—Newly enlightened computer scientist [chapter epigraph]

Mermin even manages to present mathematical formulas in a conversational mode tinged with humor:

• We begin with a silly formulation of ordinary non-quantum classical computing.

• While the operation X defined in (4) makes perfect sense for Obits (representing the logical NOT), the operation Z makes no sense at all.

His chatty style will not appeal to every scientist. All the same, we can see from these examples why Mermin, an expert communicator, has succeeded not only as a groundbreaking scientist but as the author of best-selling undergraduate textbooks and influential articles on the teaching of physics.

Social scientists often tell me that they have been trained to avoid I and we, even though the APA Publication Manual, the dominant style guide in the social sciences, has advocated the use of personal pronouns since 1974: “We means two or more authors or experimenters, including yourself. Use I when that is what you mean.”¹ “So why aren’t you allowed to write in the first person?” I ask my social science colleagues. “Well,” they reply, “it’s because we’re supposed to sound objective, like scientists.” Yet most scientists have long since abandoned the impersonal passive mode, a stance reflected in their most influential style manuals: the ACS Style Guide explicitly recommends using I or we when appropriate (“Use first person when it helps to keep your meaning clear and to express a purpose or a decision”), and the AMA Manual and the CSE Manual implicitly encourage first-person pronouns.² Thus we end up with the intriguing paradox that the evolutionary biologists in my data sample, who write mostly about plants and animals, use personal pronouns in every one of the fifty articles I surveyed (100 percent), while the higher education researchers, who write mostly about human beings, use I or we only about half the time (54 percent; see Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2).

An even more surprising anomaly occurs in the humanities, where only 40 percent of the historians in my data sample employ I or the personal we, in contrast to 92 percent of the philosophers and 98 percent of the literary scholars. Historians who avoid personal pronouns often insist that they do so as a means of maintaining an objective authorial stance. Yet of all the researchers in the ten disciplines I surveyed, the historians were the most clearly subjective—manipulative, even—in their use of language:

This is admittedly a vast geographical and institutional canvas, and it is therefore necessary to focus on some issues to the exclusion of others.

Fischer astutely responded that these polar approaches present false choices.

Atlantic history has matured to the point where it needs to break out of the straitjacket imposed by the two models that have dominated interpretations of the historiography of the Americas.

These three examples were published in the American Historical Review, the only journal in my data sample that contains no first-person pronouns (aside from the collective we) in any of the articles I surveyed. The authors of these sentences never say I; however, they do pack their prose full of subjectively weighted nouns (canvas, choices, straitjacket), adjectives (vast, necessary, polar, false, preset), adverbs (admittedly, astutely), and verbs (focus, matured, needs to break out, imposed, dominated, force, abandon) designed to sway readers to a particular point of view. Compare the above sentences with the following extracts from Isis, a history of science journal in which first-person pronouns predominate:

A few years ago I was stumped for several days by this question: Why is it that when we look in a mirror, left and right get reversed, but up and down do not?

The scientific preeminence of the Paris museum in this period calls to mind that elegant phrase, “the power of place,” that Janet Browne has used as the subtitle of the second volume of her biography of Charles Darwin. I think this is a wonderfully evocative phrase. With apologies to Janet if something is lost in geographical translation, I want to ask how the phrase could help us think about the Paris museum.

Writing with a frankly personal voice—“I was stumped,” “I think this is a wonderfully evocative phrase”—these authors present themselves as fallible, emotive individuals. Their prose is not necessarily more elegant, eloquent, or well argued than that of their I-shunning colleagues. It is, however, more honest, making no attempt to camouflage opinion as historical truth.

So which mode is preferable? As with most questions of style, an author’s decision whether or not to use personal pronouns remains very much a matter of personal taste. The “right” choice, then, is the one that the author has made consciously and carried through with consistency and craft. Some academics employ I or we to establish a deliberately familiar, conversational tone:

Amid the silver jewelry as popular with foreigners as it is disdained by Yemeni women, who now favor gold, I was amused to find a doll that I immediately baptized “Chador Barbie.” [Anthropology]

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

JOHN HEILBRON

Perhaps Bohr’s greatest strength was his ability to identify, and to exploit, failures in theory. His exercise of this ability amounted to a method. He would collect instances of failure, examine each minutely and retain those that seemed to him to embody the same flaw. He then invented a hypothesis to correct the flaw, keeping, however, the flawed theory to cover not only parts of experience where neither it nor the new hypothesis, with which it was in contradiction could account for phenomena. This juggling made for creative ambiguity as well as for confusion: Pushing the contradiction might disclose additional anomalies, and perhaps a better, more inclusive hypothesis.… To work in this way one needs not only creative genius, but also a strong stomach for ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction.

Historian of science John Heilbron writes in the “impersonal historical” style favored by many historians, seldom if ever uttering the word I, yet nonetheless conveying a strong sense of authorial presence and persuasive power through his carefully selected verbs (exploit), nouns (genius), adjectives (greatest), and adverbs (minutely). Subtly rather than overtly, he nudges readers toward his own view—in this case, that the particular scientific genius of physicist Niels Bohr resided in his ability to embrace contradiction and failure.

Like all good science writers, Heilbron recognizes the importance of couching abstract ideas (failure, theory, method, hypothesis, phenomena, anomalies, ambiguity, uncertainty, contradiction) in concrete language. He describes instances of failure as quasi-physical entities that can be collected, examined, and retained like unusual rocks or rare biological specimens. Theories and hypotheses are juggled, contradictions are pushed, and anomalies are disclosed. Bohr needed a strong stomach, Heilbron tells us, to handle the kinds of “ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction” (he might just as well have written “laboratory experiments involving maggots”) that make other scientists queasy.

Some writers—particularly in science and social science disciplines where coauthored papers are the norm—take a more distanced stance, writing active, pronoun-driven sentences but making no attempt to build a direct connection with the reader:

We extracted DNA from 3 different sample materials: blood, liver, and feces.… In addition, we used blood samples from 3 western gorillas from the Leipzig Zoo (Germany) and also a liver sample from a single deceased eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri) from the Zoo Antwerp (Belgium). [Evolutionary Biology]

Some authors, especially in the humanities, craft third-person prose that is nonetheless imbued with subjectivity and character:

Settled by an extraordinarily literate people and long privileged by the American history establishment, colonial New England’s every square inch has been seriously scrutinized. Or so the conventional wisdom has it. Consider this: Scholars have missed only 100,000 square miles, more or less, of terrain known intimately to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century villagers—the coastal ocean and its seafloor. The irony is superb, for the area seaward of the shore was the first part of the northwest Atlantic reconnoitered by Europeans. [History]

And some scholars write deliberately distanced, third-person prose that contains neither personal pronouns nor any vestige of a personal voice:

The present research evaluates whether psychache mediates the influence of perfectionism on suicidal manifestations. [Psychology]

Each of these modes poses its own stylistic challenges. Academics who write highly subjective, first-person prose run the risk of sounding unprofessional and self-indulgent to their peers. Those who choose a mixed mode (personal pronouns with an impersonal voice or third-person pronouns with a subjective voice) must work through the potential inconsistencies of their personal-yet-distanced stance. Finally, those who favor third-person, impersonal prose need to ask themselves what they are trying to achieve by suppressing personal agency, especially given that so many of their academic colleagues, including research scientists, now employ first-person pronouns. “I write that way because I have to” turns out in most cases not to be a valid reason.

Coincidentally, the percentage of articles in my five hundred—article data sample that contain personal pronouns almost exactly matches the percentage of advanced academic writing guides in my one hundred—book sample that advocate personal pronoun usage (78 percent and 79 percent, respectively; see Figures 2.1 and 3.1 in Chapters 2 and 3). Nearly all of the peer-reviewed academic journals in my sample allow personal pronouns; however, I also found examples in every discipline of authors who avoid them and of writing guides that recommend against them. These seemingly contradictory statistics offer a message of empowerment and free will: pronoun usage is a matter of choice. Writers who feel uncomfortable using personal pronouns can produce strictly third-person prose if they prefer to, even in disciplines such as literature or philosophy, where first-person pronouns predominate. Meanwhile, those who have long avoided adopting a more personal voice out of habit, convention, or fear—perhaps because they were told by a teacher or supervisor long ago that personal pronouns sound “unprofessional” or “unacademic”—can relax and give I or we a whirl.

For many academic writers, permission to use personal pronouns comes as a tremendous relief. Referring to our actions in the first person (“I think,” “we discovered”) comes naturally to most humans; suppressing our own agency, by contrast, requires considerable syntactical effort and ingenuity. Most academics publish books and articles because we hope, on some level, to change our readers’ minds: we want our colleagues to accept the validity of our data; to affirm the usefulness of our methodologies; to understand literary texts, historical events, philosophical problems, or legal issues in new ways. When we muzzle the personal voice, we risk subverting our whole purpose as researchers, which is to foster change by communicating new knowledge to our intended audience in the most effective and persuasive way possible.

Indeed, attention to audience is a hidden but essential ingredient of all stylish academic writing. One simple way to establish a bond with readers is to employ the second-person pronoun you, either directly or by means of imperative verbs, a mode particularly favored by philosophers and mathematical scientists:

Look back at your parents’ decision to bring you into the world. [Philosophy]

Consider a large retail chain with multiple stores and warehouses, where products are ordered and shipped daily from the warehouses to replenish the inventory in the stores. [Computer Science]

However, academics can find many other ways of striking a conversational note and keeping an ear cocked for replies. You might visualize specific people looking over your shoulder as you write—the eminent colleague, the taxi driver, the curious high school student—and respond to their imagined questions. Peter Elbow urges a more direct approach: “You must walk up to readers and say, ’Let’s go for a ride. You pedal, I’ll steer.’ ”³ Of course, no writer can expect to connect with every reader every time or to anticipate every possible response. All the same, the most engaging writers are almost invariably those who pay the closest attention to the real people—specialists and nonspecialists, colleagues and strangers—in whose ears their own words will echo.

SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

RUTH BEHAR

Throughout most of the 20th century, in scholarly fields ranging from literary criticism to anthropology to law, the reigning paradigms have called for distance, objectivity, and abstraction. The worst sin has been to be “too personal.” But if you’re an African-American legal scholar writing about the history of contract law and you discover, as Patricia Williams recounts in her book The Alchemy of Race and Rights …, the deed of sale of your own great-great-grandmother to a white lawyer, that bitter knowledge certainly gives “the facts” another twist of urgency and poignancy. It undercuts the notion of a contract as an abstract, impersonal legal document, challenging us to think about the universality of law and the pursuit of justice for all.

In an eloquent plea for academic writing that dares to say I, anthropologist Ruth Behar dares to say you. Rather than narrating legal scholar Patricia Williams’s story using the third-person pronoun she, Behar puts us, squarely and perhaps uncomfortably, in Williams’s own place: “If you’re an African-American legal scholar … and you discover.…” Behar’s tone is at once conversational and confrontational: she wants us on her side, but she also wants to rock the boat we’re sitting in.

A passionate advocate of impassioned scholarly prose, Behar turns again to the second-person pronoun in her book The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart:

When you write vulnerably, others respond vulnerably.… Call it sentimental, call it Victorian and nineteenth century, but I say that anthropology that doesn’t break your heart just isn’t worth doing anymore.

Challenging ethnographic conventions that privilege objectivity over human feeling, Behar joins a long line of anthropologists who have turned an incisive scholarly gaze on their own discipline. “To be able to write skillfully in a personal voice takes training and practice,” Behar notes. Her own work offers living proof that it can be done.

Things to try

• Choose a piece of your own writing and rate it according to the following chart. Circle one item per column (A, B, C, D):

What happens if you change one or two of these variables? For example, if you usually write in a third-person, impersonal, objective, formal mode, introduce I or we and see how you feel about the results.

• Play around with you. For instance, you could start your opening paragraph with a direct exhortation to your reader (“Picture the following scene”) or add a conversational aside (“You might wonder why”). Even if the second-person pronoun sounds too informal for your everyday writing, you can keep this trick up your sleeve for occasions when you especially need to establish a rapport with your audience, such as a conference presentation or a public lecture.

• Write down the names of at least five real people and tape the list to your computer screen. The list should include:

• A top expert in your field (someone whom you would really like to impress)

• A close colleague in your discipline (someone who would give you a fair and honest critique of your work)

• An academic colleague from outside your discipline

• An advanced undergraduate in your discipline

• A nonacademic friend, relative, or neighbor.

Read your writing aloud and try to imagine each person’s response to your words. Depending on discipline and context, you might not necessarily aspire to write in a way that all of these readers will understand all the time. Nevertheless, it can be an interesting exercise to think about how far each person is likely to get. For example, will the advanced undergraduate make it past the first paragraph of your article, your abstract, your title?