Why Is Academic Writing So Boring?

A few days ago in the Guardian philosophy professor Jonathan Wolff decided to figure out why academic writing was "boring." He laments, "That I ended up in a job where I have to spend half the day blinking my way through artless, contorted prose is a cruel twist of fate." Wolff ventures an explanation for why literary criticism is such a chore to read: Academic essays lack the suspense of narratives. "A detective novel written by a good philosophy student would begin: 'In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.'" He goes on to explain:

Academic writing needs to be ordered, precise, and to make every move explicit. All the work needs to be done on the page rather than in the reader's head. By contrast, good literature often relies on the unsaid, or the implied or hinted at, rather than the expressed thought. But as we tell our students: you will only get a mark for it if it is written down, however obvious, and however infantile it seems to spell it out. Such discipline applies all the way through as the pressures of writing for peer-reviewed journals are much the same. To call a paper "thorough" is high praise.

There's something to Wolff's explanation. As anyone who has published in an academic journal knows, the peer review process can suck the life out of any essay. It should be noted that the primary audience for most academic essays isn't students or general readers. Instead, academics--especially young ones trying to write themselves out of dead-end jobs--write for hiring and tenure committees.

Wolff is hardly the first person to complain about the tediousness of contemporary academic literary criticism. A larger question that Wolff doesn't consider is why anyone should care if literary criticism is so boring. No one seems to object to the dreadful prose produced in the physical and social sciences. Literary critics, to a greater extent than philosophers, have felt a responsibility toward a general readership. Literary criticism has had a special role in the public sphere since the 18th century, when the role of the literary critic first appeared. At that time cultural products became objects that had to be interpreted and evaluated, rather than just simply consumed or enjoyed. At a time when emergent capitalism was forcing people to become narrower and more specialized, critics were central to the project of becoming a well-rounded, educated person.

Another key moment in the history of critical prose was the arrival of structuralism in the American academy during  the 1950's and '60's. Structuralism offered a "scientific" means of interpreting texts, so that literary studies could lay claim to the same objectivity and rigorous methodology as the sciences. Literary criticism gained a powerful array of analytical tools, but at the cost of a language accessible to the general reader, who was abandoned to newspaper book reviewers, themselves now an endangered species.

There isn't an English professor in the world who doesn't long to approach someone reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven in an airport gate and slap them upside the head. However, re-engaging with a broad public audience is tricky. Critics could regress back to belle lettrism, which basically means sending mash notes to great authors. No one has the stomach for that. But the alternative is becoming Professor Eat-Your-Peas, insisting that a subway reader pore over every line in Paradise Lost.

There's a third way, but it's still in development. Some English professors like Michael Bérubé have ventured into the messy world of blogs, while MySpace is developing into another forum for discussions about literature. Developing a criticism that's a pleasure to read, or at least tolerable, means going back to criticism's roots in the early public sphere of open, and un-refereed, debate.

Comments

[proquest digital dissertations]

Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!

[Research Term Papersr]

It is not that much BORING to write as you are mentioning above, Resources like the one you mentioned here will be very useful to me! I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.

[Breanna]

Hello,

I just came across your blog for the first time today. "Why is academic writing so boring?" was my search of the hour, and I find this poignantly expressed.

Here is some crap I wrote for my English class, if you're by some miracle bored enough to read it. It seems now to make sense why my essay was so ill-received (the conclusion especially)...

In "Shame: The Emotions and Morality of Violence," Dr. James Gilligan, professor and faculty member of the Harvard School of Medicine, through copious research, believes to have pinpointed the origin of violence: shame. He proposes we treat violence as a psychological “pathogen”, caused by a "contagious disease" rather than heredity (40). Cultural conditions, for instance, "[stimulate] violence toward both men and women" (40).

To test his theory, Gilligan delves straight into the minds of criminals. Finally, after years of case studies on men incarcerated for violence, a pattern appears (simultaneously, the author establishes his ethos). Each of the criminals was allegedly “disrespected”. Gilligan reckons provocations are overlooked, appearing "trivial" to others. But a common “secret” is revealed among the men: “[They] feel ashamed—deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed, over matters that are so trivial that their very triviality makes it even more shameful to feel ashamed about them, so that they are ashamed even to reveal what shames them.” (43) Hence, Gilligan finds magnitude of shame and superficiality of its cause to be inversely proportional; the more “trivial” the trigger, the more intensified the shame (similar appeals are used to establish effective logos). The cause of aggression, it seems, goes untreated.

Suppose we humanize the criminals (Gilligan’s article adopts a compassionate tone, developing pathos). By listening to their stories, as a fellow human being, he finds that prisoners are treated like animals. Officers actually seem to enjoy de-humanizing them. According to one prisoner's account, the officer went to great lengths to publicly humiliate him. “While [one prisoner’s] self-esteem was already so damaged that he was already antisocial," relates Gilligan, "it is also true that prison was only rendering someone who was already wounded, and therefore dangerous, even more so” (42). Defeated, “these men perceive themselves as having no nonviolent means of warding off or diminishing their feelings of shame or low self-esteem” (44). Thus, misbehavior begets punishment, which begets more misbehavior- “the ultimate ‘vicious’ cycle” (41). Naturally, the men's mindsets only worsen.

It's time to put away the vinegar. All punishment and negativity and no compassion spells contempt and rebellion.

Finally, Gilligan finds that “the [violent] person lacks the emotional capacities or the feelings that normally inhibit the violent impulses that are stimulated by shame” (44). This part of Gilligan's theory is less solid. It seems more likely that feelings of shame have overpowered those of love, guilt, etc. They've been suppressed for so long, they're seemingly nonexistent: like recessive alleles for a gene. They may not be expressed phenotypically, but they're still there. Further, Gilligan claims “Most people are not moved to wipe out their families by the kinds of incidents that provoke those who do… but for those who are predisposed to abnormal, life-threatening pathology murder can be precipitated by events and circumstances that in another person might simply be incorporated into the ongoing metabolism of everyday life” (45). This implies violent people are biologically predisposed to act as they do (which seems to contradict his overall theory). Are they predisposed for violence because they’ve grown up in a ghetto with an alcoholic father, or is the chemical composition of their brains different from that of the “normal” person’s?

My senior year of high school, my math grades plummeted. Out of frustration and humiliation, I became increasingly more volatile to my parents, who, in response, neither understood nor diffused my anger. Instead, they would either equal my anger or punish me. So, ah- the answer seems simple. I watch my tongue, and do as they say, and relations improve. But yet, I persisted. I nearly got kicked out of my own home, by parents who have loved me my entire life.

But it became a sort of game; as my fear and humiliation festered, and my grades stagnated, I sought other means to prove my intellect, and thus, maintain power. Controlling my impulses became challenging.

I was lucky to have support from friends and family, as well as a second chance: Saddleback.

But what happens, I wonder, to those who have no one? Life does not always grant second chances. (Or the strength to discover them).

Perhaps this is how criminals become as they are- maybe a necessary cause of shame? “The theory [Gilligan] is presenting here suggests that most people have nonviolent means available to them to protect or restore their wounded self-esteem” (44). Why this may account for more male criminals, while not extremely higher in proportion than female criminals, is that it is not in a man’s nature (or perhaps, nurture) to ask for help. To do so would be to appear weak and unmanly.

What could have become of these men, had they not befallen the path of violence? Prominent artists share a tendency towards “insanity”, as do authors, musicians, and other highly creative individuals. It is a wonder, therefore, whether these individuals also possess high creative capacity.

[Julia]

It's "pore over," not "pour over." Something to pour over! ;-)

[Richard Prouty]

Hi Julia--

You're right! I should have written "pore over" rather than "pour over." Thanks for the correction!