Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond
Please prepare yourself for something unpleasant: a couple of sentences from a recent article in an academic journal, plucked after the shortest of searches from the internet. ‘Whilst accepting that reflexivity is a core aspect of agency, we argue that it operates to a backdrop of the routinisation of social life and operates from within and not outside of habitus. We highlight the role of the breach in reflexivity, suggesting that it opens up a critical window for agents to initiate change.’ If you have not already nodded off, or turned the page, and are wondering what that passage means, I cannot help you. But I believe it is typical of modern academic writing. Academics, for all their learning, are, I think, responsible for more bad writing than any other group.
An exception is Professor Helen Sword of the University of Auckland and author of Stylish Academic Writing. She laments academics’ fondness for nouns formed from verbs, adjectives or other nouns. ‘Reflexivity’, ‘agency’ and ‘routinisation’ are examples. Grammarians call them nominalisations but she calls them zombie nouns, because ‘they cannibalise active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings … The proliferation of nominalisations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction,’ she adds, or, as she prefers to put it, ‘Writers who overload their sentences with nominalisations tend to sound pompous and abstract.’
The trend towards wordiness, pomposity and obscurity is not new. Orwell drew attention to it seventy years ago by taking a verse of Ecclesiastes: ‘I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’ This he put into ‘modern English of the worst sort’: ‘Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.’
That’s the sort of language that academics delight in. In their dash to ‘publish or perish’ they are concerned mainly with ‘impact factors’ – the number of times their articles are cited by other academics. These may be ‘peer-reviewed’ for intellectual respectability, but not for intelligibility. No matter if only their colleagues can understand them. For many, teaching is a tedious inconvenience, to be avoided if possible. The production of unreadable articles, and perhaps conferences where they may be presented, are all that matters.
Astonishingly, impenetrable prose is admired. Some academics – notably historians and biographers – publish books that are both scholarly and well written but many, especially in the social sciences, are encouraged to write in abstractions, favouring the use of the passive tense and arid generalisations. This, they are told, conveys an objective, impersonal tone that makes their writing more formal. In other words, they are asked to believe that zombie nouns and all that goes with them lend gravitas to their outpourings.
It would be nice to think that none of this matters. In truth, it is widely copied by businessmen, bureaucrats and others lacking the confidence to use plain language. It also dignifies, and thus protects from scrutiny, much worthless endeavour that passes for serious study at universities. Not that it is easy to write clearly about complexities in simple English. It requires care and thought. As Turgenev pointed out, ‘To write about a drunken muzhik’s beating his wife is incomparably harder than to compose a whole tract about the “woman question”.’
More seriously, the vacuous language of academia cuts off most readers from the thoughts of many of the best brains in the country. Ventilating their ideas is left either to their more literate colleagues, often condemned as ‘popularisers’, or to journalists, even more disreputable. No wonder that two millennia after an olive grove outside Athens gave its name to Plato’s academy, ‘academic’ has gained the meaning of ‘theoretical only, unpractical’.
I should add that I count many academics among my friends – or perhaps did before the publication of this article.