When Professor of Sociology Claude Fischer urged the students in his graduate writing seminar
to use simple words and sentence constructions, one of his students replied, “If I write simply, no
one will know it’s sociology.”
Welcome to the debate over academic style.
For years, academic style was something of an oxymoron. Scholarly writing had a reputation for being stilted, colorless, and difficult to understand—and that was considered a compliment. The rule seemed to be the more convoluted the sentence structure and abstruse the language, the more serious the scholarship.
“There’s a kind of anxiety that leads to overwriting, jargonistic writing, too-complex writing,” laments Fischer, whose books include Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Myth Curve. “It’s a writing handicap created in graduate school, especially if students get exposed to someone who really believes you have to be hard to read to be thought profound.”
Professors we talked with for these stories, like Fischer, support the modernization of academic style. They want academic writing to be accessible to wider audiences. They discourage off-putting jargon. And they support the use of active voice, first-person narration, and personal anecdotes, devices that give writing energy and personality.
At least many professors do. As might be expected in a university, the evolution of academic style is a matter of debate. Language, after all, is a nuanced subject. Behind such choices as whether or not to use a specialized vocabulary or to refer to yourself in first or third person lie decisions about whom to address as your audience and how to represent yourself as a researcher.
Choices about writing, then, speak to the heart of the academic enterprise. And since those choices are changing, this is a particularly good time for graduate students to be reflecting on what it means to write in the academy, says Glynda Hull, director of the College Writing Programs and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education. Some familiarity with the choices—over jargon, audience, first person, and personal anecdotes—may help you develop your own academic voice.
Jargon
“I certainly see the need for theories to be explained in a language that does justice to their complexity,” Hull says. “On the other hand, sometimes reading a piece is like wading through glue, and it doesn’t have to be. I would want students to err on the side of clarity instead of getting lost in jargon.”
Jargon is an admittedly derogatory term for language only practitioners of a certain specialty, from mathematical theorists to literary deconstructionists, understand. Defenders say there’s a place for such language when writing for highly specialized audiences. Scholars grow by stretching to understand difficult ideas, and complex ideas require complex language.
Critics—many of whom, Hull says, have been influenced by feminism—counter that the use of specialized language only serves to maintain an insider-outsider status quo.
Celebrated writer Maxine Hong Kingston, who teaches in the Department of English, offers the perspective of someone who’s been the subject of dissertations.
“I feel very disappointed in scholarly writing,” says Kingston, author of the award-winning books The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey. “I’ve had lots of Ph.D. dissertations done on my work, and I’m appalled that scholars read my work and then write jargon back to me.”
Kingston brushes aside the notion that a certain level of specialized language is needed to convey complex ideas. “Poetic language is complex language,” she says.
Judith Swan, who teaches writing to graduate students at Princeton and who writes and consults widely on writing and the sciences, argues that convoluted sentence structure is more a barrier to understanding than jargon. (See “The Write Stuff.”) In other words, if you choose to use a specialized vocabulary—and keep in mind that academic style is as much about choices as rules—that’s still no excuse for incomprehensible writing.
Audience
Whether to write for a scholarly audience, a popular audience, or some medium between the two is a question being debated by everyone from the scholars who write books and articles to the presses and journals that publish them.
Fischer, for example, admires sociologists who can write for both specialized and general audiences. Such versatility, he believes, is a worthy goal for students. But this early in their careers, he tells his students to aim for publication in scholarly journals rather than popular magazines.
“To aspire in the long run to have that wider audience is terrific, but first they have to establish themselves as scholars,” he says.
For his part, Carlos Fernandez-Pello, professor of mechanical engineering, would like to see more scientists writing for the general public.
“There is this concept of the engineer-scientist as this wacko with funny hair doing these strange things,” he says. “If we were able to write in a way that average people could read, probably they would find many of the things we do interesting.”
Fernandez-Pello admits that many of his colleagues believe cutting-edge science can only be understood by other scientists. But he disagrees. “A big part of our work is funded with tax money,” he says. “The average taxpayer should know and comprehend what we do.”
Deciding which audience to write for is a particularly abstract problem for graduate students. Attuned to writing undergraduate papers designed to win good grades from a particular professor or teaching assistant, they have a hard time imagining a wider audience. Some have a hard time imagining any audience.
Consider the story of the graduate student who put a hundred dollar bill inside the copy of his dissertation to be filed in the Library. He checked back 10 years later to find the money untouched. The story is no doubt apocryphal—what graduate student could spare a hundred bucks? But it’s telling, nonetheless: Graduate students have a hard time imagining anyone cares what they write.
Even experienced writers have “tricks” to help prime their imaginations. Because writing can be a solitary occupation, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology, posts photographs around her desk as a reminder of who will be reading her work. Sometimes they’re the subjects of her research, other times they’re people in power she’s hoping to influence. She once wrote an article with the pope in mind.
First Person
For Roy Caldwell, professor of integrative biology, using first person is a matter of streamlining the language, getting away from convoluted constructions like “It was discovered by the investigator that...” and writing instead, “I found.”
“After about three or four red-inked papers, our students figure out they can write in simple past tense and use first person if they want to, and get away from ‘scientificese,’” says Caldwell.
For Ron Takaki, using first person is more than a matter of syntax. “In writing about Asian American history,” the ethnic studies professor says, “I realized I was part of it.”
In this case, the use of first person reflects a change in how researchers think about themselves.
“The issue of using first person or not has to do with changes in research paradigms and how people are becoming more conscious of the role they play in research,” explains Hull. “Whether, for example, you make yourself invisible and through that invisibility assert a kind of authority, or whether you admit your position and use ‘I’ and even talk frankly about your role in the research. It’s no longer the case that people always assume that as researchers, they’re neutral.”
Personal Anecdotes
Students in Hull’s classes ask her, “Can I use an anecdote? Can I use something that happened to me? Is it okay if I write about myself when I write an academic paper?”
How does she reply?
“For a long time, you didn’t reveal anything about yourself. That was anathema,” she says. “Sometimes I think we’re going overboard now, in the other direction. You’ll see long prologues about who I am. Some people call it navel-gazing.”
Still, Hull believes that the trend, if not used excessively, is a good one. “It was a good corrective to the neutral stance that researchers have traditionally taken,” she says. “And it was that neutral stance that students have had a hard time mimicking.”
Takaki uses personal anecdotes in his writing. He also avoids jargon, addresses a general audience, and uses first person. Takaki tells a story—naturally—of how this style evolved.
In 1977, he went on sabbatical to Hawaii, where he’d grown up, to write Iron Cages: Racial Inequality in 19th Century America. Written in traditional academic style, the book is dense with theory and intended mainly for graduate students and other scholars.
While in Hawaii, Takaki spent time with his favorite uncle, who hadn’t graduated from high school and was thus especially proud of Takaki’s accomplishments. Both Takaki’s mother and his uncle Richard had been born on a sugar cane plantation. Their father—Takaki’s grandfather—had been one of the first Japanese immigrant plantation workers.
One day, as Takaki tells the story, Uncle Richard’s eyes lit up and he said, “Hey, Ronald, why don’t you write a book about the plantation workers of Hawaii? Why don’t you write a book about us?”
So Takaki did three years of research on the role of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii’s sugar cane industry. Then, when he sat down to write, he had an epiphany.
“I wanted to write a book that was scholarly, but that my uncle and the working people of Hawaii would also find interesting and readable,” he said. “That was my breakthrough. Thanks to Uncle Richard, I began to write narrative history.”
Finding Your Academic Voice
Do using first person, incorporating personal anecdotes, and writing books a general audience can understand mean expulsion from the academic world? Not if Takaki’s any example. He’s a fellow of the Society of American Historians, a select group of which there are only 250 members, all of them elected by the membership.
Writing for a wider audience need not mean dumbing down ideas, no more than writing for a scholarly audience should mean using unnecessarily elaborate language or syntax. Finding the balance is akin to what Hull calls finding your academic voice, which she describes as a blending of a personal voice and the voice more collectively associated with the discipline.
“What’s key for graduate students,” she says, “is finding a way they as individual writers can participate in this academic conversation. That means that students don’t merely mimic the writing they see in journals, they don’t lose themselves in what they imagine to be an academic voice, but find a meeting place where they can develop their own voice as a writer and still be listened to in the discipline.”
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