Debate re bad scholarly writing (long)

[LaVonna Funkhouser <lffunkhouser -at- HALNET -dot- COM>]

Those of you who are professors or who have read
about the Bad Writing Contest for academics sponsored
by the journal /Philosophy and Literature/ (the winners
of which were copied to the COREComm web site) will be
interested in this article.

I post this here as an FYI, with permission of the author.
Please do not try to open the debate on techwr-l.  You may
direct comments to me and I'll tell you what little I know.

Regards,
LaVonna Funkhouser
COREComm
lffunkhouser -at- halnet -dot- com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Bad-Writing Contest Spurs Debate on Rhetoric Mailing List

   By KARLA HAWORTH

   The recent results of a bad-writing contest have kindled debate on
   a scholarly mailing list whose members discuss the quality of
   postmodernist academic writing and the ability of readers to
   understand it.

   The discussion has taken place on H-RHETOR, an
   interdisciplinary electronic mailing list about the history of
   rhetoric and communications. It is part of H-NET, a huge
   mailing-list network that reaches thousands of scholars in the
   humanities and social sciences around the world.

   According to Gary Hatch, one of the moderators of H-RHETOR,
   the discussion started when one of the list's subscribers posted
   the results of the third annual bad-writing contest, sponsored by
   the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature. The point of
   the contest, which singles out "the ugliest, most stylistically
   awful" passages in scholarly books and articles, is to encourage
   humanities scholars to write more clearly. (See a background story
   from Academe Today's Daily Report.)

   Dr. Hatch said that the subject's initial posting, which was
   intended to be humorous, generated an unusually heavy response on
   the list as the discussion became serious. Some subscribers were
   distressed that the writing of Fredric Jameson, a professor at Duke
   University and a prominent postmodernist scholar, had won first
   place in the contest.

   "A lot of people on the list are involved in postmodern theory and
   postmodern projects, and so they were eager to respond to what is
   traditionally thought of as bad writing," said Dr. Hatch, an
   assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University.

   Some contributors wrote that they were concerned that the
   contest was an attack on the intellectual left in general and on
   postmodernism in particular, noting that the "winning" bad entries
   were all postmodernist. One contributor wrote that the contest
   unfairly took short excerpts from works and made "sweeping and
   unqualified" judgments about them.

   Meanwhile, some list members argued that every academic
   discipline has its own jargon. Postmodernists, they wrote, could
   not adequately express some ideas if they abandoned that jargon in
   favor of clearer language. Others wrote, however, that academics
   can -- and should -- write in "a way that is clear and
   interesting."

   "Many of the terms that postmodernists use to replace thinking are
   not uniquely specific, and nearly always lead more to confusion
   than to understanding," wrote Shawn Smith, a graduate student at
   Yale University. "The issue is a rhetorical one -- what good is
   this sort of writing if it does not teach and persuade?"

   "It's not so much the jargon in Jameson and others that bugs me,"
   wrote James Aune, an associate professor of speech communication at
   Texas A&M University. "It's the utter humorlessness of the writing
   ... I have this sense that the difficult style and the high
   seriousness are some sort of defense mechanism -- science envy?
   Ressentiment? Blocked ascendancy?"

   Some writers attributed a baser motive to the defenders of
   postmodernist lingo. Brad De Long, a professor of economics at the
   University of California at Berkeley, wrote: "The claim that these
   terms are 'technical' seems to me to be nothing more than an
   attempt to exercise what one might call discursive hegemony: a
   pretty explicit statement that 'We do not even have to try to write
   in a manner that anyone else might understand, because nobody else
   has any business trying to communicate with us.'"

   Other contributors argued that scholarly writing should be
   challenging. James Fredal, a graduate student at the Ohio State
   University, said he felt inadequate and angry at being "shut out"
   when he first tried reading works by Michel Foucault and Jacques
   Derrida, two leading proponents of postmodernist theory.

   "I remember thinking that in all of these cases the writers could
   have chosen to write so that I could understand," he wrote. "Now I
   think it probably has much less to do with the text I am reading
   than it does with my willingness to throw myself back into the
   fray, to work at 'getting it,' knowing the secret message, and
   being, at least for a while longer, a real insider again."

Reprinted with permission from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Copyright, 1997.

***********************************************
Karla Haworth
Assistant Editor, Electronic Projects
The Chronicle of Higher Education
(202)466-1712
karla -dot- haworth -at- chronicle -dot- com
***********************************************

You may read the press release that sparked this debate (with
the winners of the above mentioned contest) by following a
link off this page:

 http://www.corecomm.com/worst.html

LF

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