Stage two of revision occurs after you have fully developed the logic and flow of the structure and argument to your satisfaction. It’s now time to eliminate the bad writing that will inevitably be present throughout the MS. There are a few extremely gifted writers out there who don’t ever write a bad sentence. The other 99% of us are not so lucky. So this is when Pinker’s ideas about classic-style writing become most valuable. In the next few newsletters, we’ll take a look at the attributes of bad academic writing and consider techniques to correct them one by one.
People, including academics, do not think in academese. Sure, formulaic academic expressions flit in and out of our thinking process when engaged in this research writing enterprise. And when engaged in fast writing, doing our organized brainstorming, these expressions can be the perfect phrase for the perfect spot. Not a problem at all. But it is in this stage of revision that academese can creep in.
Preventing academese creep. It creeps in when you are not sure of your own thinking. You haven’t clarified your thoughts so you turn to noun and verb phrases full of abstractions hoping the clarity will come to you that way. But remember these words of Einstein: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” No amount of rummaging around your stock of academic vocabulary can clarify thinking. Only a clear, concrete understanding will get you there. Images and the actions and reactions of materials and living things are the stuff of good writing. Your writing is an attempt to re-create these images, events, actions, and thoughts in readers. This is the classic style. Abstract concepts are not avoided; their use is unavoidable. But if the abstractions can be minimized to make way for writing that describes acting on and thinking about the real, constantly changing material world, the message will become more vivid and memorable. Consider these examples. First are abstraction-heavy excerpts with abstract words underlined, followed by Pinker’s rewriting (in italics) in classic style.
What are the prospects for reconciling a prejudice reduction model of change, designed to get people to like one another more, with a collective action model of change, designed to ignite struggles to achieve intergroup equality?
Should we try to change society by reducing prejudice, that is, by getting people to like one another? Or should we encourage disadvantaged groups to struggle for equality through collective action? Or can we do both?
Here’s another example:
The researchers found that groups that are typically associated with low alcoholism levels actually have moderate amounts of alcohol intake, yet still have low levels of high intake associated with alcoholism, such as Jews.
The researchers found that in groups with little alcoholism, such as Jews, people actually drink moderate amounts of alcohol, but few of them drink too much and become alcoholics.
Which passage would you prefer to read after a day in your office digesting books, journal articles, and textbooks? The classic style looks for more concrete ways to describe and explain. Pinker writes in Sense of Style (p. 49):
Could you recognize a “level” or a “perspective” if you met one on on the street? Could you point it out to someone else? What about an approach, an assumption, a concept, a condition, a context, a framework, an issue, a model, a process, a range, a role, a strategy, a tendency, or a variable?
Because most academic writers have been poorly educated about academic writing in their undergraduate and graduate careers, changing the mainstream academic style will be an uphill battle. For example, I just edited a dissertation in which the writer was told by the chair of her committee to remove all personal pronouns from the work. I wrote to the chair and arrived at a compromise—only in the methodology chapter describing what she did setting up the study could she use ‘I’, ‘me’, or ‘my’. So the results and discussion chapters contained ridiculous phrases like “This researcher considered the findings . . .” and “The results were surprising to this researcher and the researcher’s team because . . .” The rule, developed in the early days of academia, was meant to create distance between what the researchers did or thought and the text. This supposedly ensured objectivity, or at least the appearance of it. But it certainly was and is ridiculous and has nothing to do with bias or objectivity.
Academese has the same goal—to create distance through abstraction and impersonality. It also creates a style that, according to Thomas and Turner, is self-conscious or postmodern, in which “the writer’s chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naïveté about his own enterprise.” Or, getting back to Einstein, to escape being accused of not understanding the idea, even though writing in academese suggests the lack thereof.
Metadiscourse. The next feature typical of academese is metadiscourse—those passages filling introductions and final sentences to chapters, sections, subsections, and sub-subsections—otherwise known as signposting. You are telling the reader what you will be discussing or reporting next, often by telling them what you just did in the preceding section. Headings and subheadings are just as effective and won’t involve readers in this tedium. Or you could open the section with a rhetorical question. Pinker suggests cutting these passages to a minimum and using expressions like as we have seen, or now that we have considered . . ., we continue with an exploration of . . . Uh oh, there are those personal pronouns again! But these phrases engage readers as in a conversation or presentation, not stale, impersonal phrasing, such as the preceding section detailed results that showed that . . .