Style

Now that the time-honored tradition of griping about academic prose style has, once again, reared its head (see, e.g., discussions here and here), I find myself feeling a trifle curious: who are the good writers? And what do we mean when we say an academic text is well-written? After all, unlike fiction, a monograph or general survey is (one hopes) about something--and most of us would, I suspect, sacrifice a style-rich but content-poor example of academic prose to something quite the opposite. Edward Said, after all, was a fine stylist, but I haven't noticed a groundswell of support for him on that accord. Among literary critics still alive and kicking, Nina Baym, Terry Castle, Claude Rawson, Elaine Showalter, and Judith Wilt all write crisp prose. And I have a penchant for that variety of English academic style characterized by both irony and abrupt shifts from formal to colloquial registers. (It's impossible not to chuckle when, in the "recommended reading" section of God's Last Words, David Katz wryly suggests that we read an "obscure book" by...David Katz.)

Some complaints about jargon seem to be more about unfamiliar technical terms than an excess thereof. I'm the first person to admit that advanced scholarship on prosody often inspires me with a burning desire to go curl up in the fetal position. "Can we credit the non-phonetician listener with utilising such evasive phonetic cues as phoneme prolongation, glottal stop, or the absence of coarticulation in the processing of the rhythmical performance of poetry?" Good question, that. Similarly, my attempt several years ago to read T. F. Torrance's Scottish Theology foundered dreadfully on his cheerful assumption that he didn't need to define terms like federal theology (scroll down). In both cases, my ignorance is/was at issue, not the jargon. When I complain about English academic prose, I'm more likely to be grumbling about passive voice clotted with nominalized verbs than about jargon-stuffed sentences ("the subjective heteronormativity of post-post-colonial fragmented national identities"*). The latter are more likely to occur in "straight" theory--not surprisingly, since literary theory can easily slouch off into abstractions--whereas the former tend to crop up in literary criticism proper.

Back to the question. Who writes well?

*--Yes, I made that up. No, I have no idea what it means. But it sure sounds awful, whatever it is.

UPDATE: And lo! Other people are already on the case.

Comments

[New Kid on the Hallway]

This isn't an example of a good writer (for one thing, I'm in history, not lit, so the conventions are a little different and I'm not sure if my examples would be appropriate), but I once assigned a book (on Robin Hood) that my students hated, so we spent a class untangling why they hated it, and it turned out to be because of style and tone as much as anything else. They demanded of me if I actually enjoyed the book, and I had to explain to them that by now I never really think about whether I enjoy a (scholarly) book or not - it's good if it tells me something that I need to know, and if not, not.

[aj]

"After all, unlike fiction, a monograph or general survey is (one hopes) about something--and most of us would, I suspect, sacrifice a style-rich but content-poor example of academic prose to something quite the opposite."

In my (very brief - I'm still in grad school) experience this is true more of monographs than general surveys, at least in history. Just about everyone appreciates a well-written book but I've actually seen monographs criticized (in reviews) for being so stylized that the writing actually obscures the substance of the conclusions. (Ironically, this is often the result not of literary theory, but of trying to "dress up" dry, quantitative information instead of just presenting it in a straightforward manner.) Good general historical surveys, on the other hand, tend to be praised in broad stylistic terms: "magisterial", "masterful", "eloquent" etc. Content is still important, of course, but because the survey is ideally aimed at a broader audience than the monograph, readibility is a larger consideration.

As for bad writing of the non-theoretical persuasion - I agree: the passive voice is used too much by people who should know better.

[David Katz]

I'd forgotten that I wrote about 'an obscure book'..... Thanks for reminding me!