Good Academic Writing, Bad Academic Writing, and My Preference

Introduction

The debate about good academic writing and bad academic writing indicates that there is in existence of a standard, or conception, of what constitutes a good, and what constitutes a bad. And if we are to question what is the conceptions that define a good academic writing, we should understand that it must have something to do with the purpose or end goals of academic writing per se: it is a form of formal textual medium by means of which investigation, exploration and discussion of knowledge are putting into words for people to read, understand, and use, and will be used as the basis for further academic queries and development. In modern academic world, it is thus a most important arena whereupon the exchanges of ideas, thoughts, discoveries, evaluations of others works, etc, are undertaken. Academic works are thus almost solely to do with the advance of knowledge and exploration of truth. Only by virtue of such an understanding it would be easy for us to understand, what should be the appropriate style for such kind of writing; i.e it should be conducive to the purpose we have just mentioned: the advance of knowledge

In the light of such we may understand that

i) Good academic writing, is characterised by short and simple clauses and sentences, simple vocabulary, clear and straightforward logic, a well-organised structure and clearly stated arguments.
ii) Bad academic writing is characters by sophisticated grammatical structure; complicated vocabulary and extensive employment of terminology; unintelligible logical deduction, padding and prolixity, and an overall presentation marked by inaccessibbility in terms of style.

Good academic writing is of course easy to read, whereas bad academic writing is difficult to access to and understand. Our intuition is certainly that good academic writing is a preferable style (otherwise it will not be called ‘good’), and bad academic writing should be discouraged for good.

And let’s narrow our discussion to the field of philosophy. The good academic writing is normally thought to be associated with the English (and later, American) tradition; whereas the bad academic writing has been thought to be associated with the Continental tradition. That’s correct: Hobbes, Bentham, Hume etc employed drastically different style from Kant and Hegel. The English tradition has been advanced by many modern philosophers such as Russell, Ayer and prominently contemporary writers such as Nozick; whereas the Continental style has been appropriated by most theorists associated with most modern and post-modern theorists, from Heidegger onwards to notorious examples such-and-such as Baudrilard and Kriestva. But it is surely mistaken to say that the Continent has no good writers; for instance, Rousseau and Sartre are both top-rate writers who are capable of very good academic writings and express their ideas remarkably well.

Never the less, by the measure we have given above, it is tempting to say that the empiricist, pragmatist Anglo-American style is closer to ‘good’ academic writing, as Hazlitt has tried to define what amounts to a genuine, familiar or truly English style:

“[It] is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command or choice of words or who could discourse with ease, force and perspicuity setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.”

In comparison, the abstract, obscurantist and jargon-ridden Continental style, is closer to ‘bad’ academic writing.

Now I would like to give several examples of ‘bad’ academic writings, the first one is Guattari’s (a prominent French psychologist) text.

“We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between line are signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.”

Also from Kriestva, a French postmodernist philsopher

“The notion of constructibility, which implies the axiom of choice associated with all we have put together for the poetic language, explains the impossibility of establishing a contradiction in the space of the language of poetry.”

And one from Irigaray:

“The Other can exist only if it can draw on the well of sameness for its matter, for the texture of its horizons, the emergence of its beyond-world. If this were not so, that Other would be so other that we could in way conceive it.”

One from Professor Stephen Tyler, an American social scientist:

“It thus relativizes discourse not just to form–that familiar perversion of the modernist; nor to authorial intention–that conceit of the romantics; nor to a foundational world beyond discourse–that desperate grasping for a separate reality of the mystic and scientist alike; nor even to history and ideology–those refuges of the hermeneuticist; nor even less to language–that hypostasized abstraction of the linguist; nor, ultimately, even to discourse–that Nietzschean playground of world-lost signifiers of the structuralist and grammatologist, but to all or none of these, for it is anarchic, though not for the sake of anarchy but because it refuses to become a fetishized object among objects–to be dismantled, compared, classified, and neutered in that parody of scientific scrutiny known as criticism.”

The last one is from prominent American scholar Frederic Jameson:

If you find these sentences completely unreadable, it is not because you lack of any expertise at all about the subject-matters they are talking about, but simply because the texts themselves are so badly written that they are not readable at all. An impression, however, is that these texts were deliberately constructed as such to fit this obscurantist style.

Arguments for ‘Bad’ Academic Writing

None the less, the debate about which style—the clear or the obscurantist—is more preferable, endures. For the Anglo-American world, those academic fields closely associated with Continental thought (such as cultural studies, literary criticism etc), often adopt or accommodate Continental style, whereas the remainders are more likely to stick to the English traditions. Some institutions, such as Yale, are more penetrated by Continental thoughts and academic ethos, and some institution such as Harvard, is traditionally more Anglo-American, thus academics of each institution may be fond of different styles in accordance to the influence they have experienced.

Given the obvious benefits of good academic writing, one would wonder why there are proponents of those ‘bad’ academic writings. Several most frequently resorted arguments to support the cause: emerge, and we may examine each of them and make some queries.

i) The content in those writings thought to be ‘bad’, are inherently difficult. Translation: you do not understand them because they are difficult; alternatively, you can say ideas expressed by those texts are too sophisticated for the authors to put them into simple, accessible words.

But a cursory reading of the bad academic writing texts would tell otherwise. There is a strong impression that simple ideas and thoughts of these authors are deliberately expressed with a complicated language, to make the whole thing more difficult, thereupon renders their value more difficult to assess for the readers.

The contents of many writings are indeed difficult, but this exactly warrants the authors to write them as clear-cut and intelligible as possible, instead of further complicating them. One should avoid to use unnecessary ambiguous, difficult terms and abstract analogies, and clauses should be as tight and neat as possible. The authors at least should show some willingness to attempt to present their materials in a more approachable way in a more sincere attitude.

2) Nevert simplify for the sake of simplicity. Good point. What it means is that if the process of simplification cannot preserve all the important points and ideas in a text, then it should not be simplified at all; simplicity should not be treated as the ends prior to the writing of ideas. If prolixity in expressing an idea is unavoidable, we should concede, and let it be complicated.

But this begs further question. It is true that we should not simplify for the sake of simplicity, and we should not regard simplification as ends in itself, but simplicity is simply not the ends. The ends, if properly understood, is to advance our understandings of knowledge and truth. The best way to write a good academic writing is not necessarily shorten its length to make it more succinct (of course, that is commendable if can be achieved), but to make it more accessible and readable in format and presentation. That has to do with the kind of vocabulary, grammars and structure of sentences and arguments an author adopts. We should not unduly simplify a text if the act would lead to lose of values and point, but we should make an effort to convey our ideas in a most intelligible way, even this may actually increase the length of the text.

In reality, the impression we have is that unduly prolixity has been a central characteristics of bad academic writing: the authors make no endeavour to simplify their texts when such actions would clearly sacrifice no significant value of content, but rather, they try to make their writings as difficult as possible, and rationalise it on the grounds that ‘you should not simplify for the sake of simplicity’, as though the texts are genuinely non-simplifiable.

Some authors try to ‘translate’ complicated sentences made up by authors preferring a bad academic writing style. There was the memorable event in which C. W. Mills tried to re-write key sentences in Talcott Parsons’s text, who is a notorious prominent sociologist enjoyed complicated writing. And Mills did it well. But some are not satisfied and would point out: what if the translation missed the original text’s point? And I have two answers: firstly, the translation by another author may not be satisfactory, but this does not mean that the original text could not be translated into simple language. Secondly, misinterpretation in translation, if there had any, was precisely due to the inherent difficulties in the original text. If prominent academic such as C. W. Mills could not understand Parsons, it begs the question ‘who can’? And should Parsons endorse a more accessible style?

3) Aesthetic value: a matter of style and choice. Some of those adopting a bad academic writing style, justify their preferences by arguing this is a matter of personal style and choice. The converts the debate into a question of faith and sheer personal penchant, and reasonable query is thereupon no longer possible. I want to write such difficult sentences because I like it. Some people, in a more radical way, would simply assign aesthetic value to their difficult writings, as though such writings are in particular way more beautiful and enjoyable. As far as philosophy is concerned, the American philosophy departments are not particularly fond of the Continental stuff and less so style, whereas many Continental followers jeer at the American philosophical community’s incapacity to appreciate aesthetic, literary and poetic value of philosophical writings, which has been an European tradition, if you like. But if we treat philosophy as a special case, should such thinking be extended to other academic realms?

The central purpose of academic writing is not to create artistic works of high aesthetic values, but to advance knowledge and exchange it with other people. Aesthetic value should be cherished insofar as it does not constitute a problem for the central purpose and end goals of academic writing. If excessive aesthetic value renders us far more difficult to understand a text’s substantive knowledge content, it cannot be justified. Those who favour aesthetic writings can find other arena to employ their writing skills and penchant, but stick to a basic academic standard when they are writing academic texts. This is a position of ‘knowing what they are doing’.

Hence, the argument for aesthetic value could not justify bad academic writing. And importantly, for many texts of bad academic writings, we simply cannot see good aesthetic value and significance.