Nov. 4, 2008
Don't write like thisAlways good to be forced every few years to empty the office for remodeling, as I was recently; you never know what you might find under the layers. Among the oldies but goodies that turned up in my rubble was a memorable 1999 essay in The Wall Street Journal by Denis Dutton that I had saved; its title: "Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate." I'd been waiting (and waiting) for a chance to quote from it, so here goes.
Dutton turns a spotlight on "deplorable writing" by some academics. Ironically, Dutton himself is a philosopher—one of the academic disciplines notorious for impenetrable writing. The Internet tells me he teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, writes widely on aesthetics, and is co-editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.
In fairness, Dutton notes that he has come to know "many lucid and lively academic writers." But he spends most of the essay citing some hideous examples of bad writing by theorists who "mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose," he says, "always suggests but never delivers genuine insight." Here's his most striking example, from a journal of literary criticism (I would advise reading closely, except that it won't make any difference):
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of
hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence,
and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking
of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that
takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed
conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and
strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Wow. At 94 words, this is surely a champion among run-on sentences. As nearly every reader of our magazine knows, any sentence that, when read aloud, requires at least three of four breaths by the reader to finish, needs to be put out of its misery and recast. You can read Dutton's entire essay at
http://www.denisdutton.com/language_crimes.htm.
By the way, mentioning Dutton also gives me the chance to recommend, if you're not already familiar with it, the wonderful Web site that he founded and helps edit,
Arts & Letters Daily. (It's now a service of The Chronicle of Higher Education.) This is a continuing anthology of the best articles from newspapers, magazines and journals around the world on arts and ideas, and includes a great deal about writers and writing. An added benefit is a fabulous long list of links to newspapers, magazines and columnists around the world.
You can read more about Dutton and Arts & Letters Daily in this
Salon interview, titled "
The gleeful contrarian."
--Ron Kovach, senior editor
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