A case for more inclusive academic writing
I have a couple of questions for writers in academia. Do you want me to zone out a dozen times in getting through just your first two lines? Do you expect me to seek out the help of a dictionary to get through your piece? If I expect to understand what you’ve written, am I asking for too much? Is it true what Noam Chomsky says, “You don’t get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables”?
What is academic writing? I believe it is an objective, critical, and informed piece that either makes a new argument, or reinforces or challenges an existing one. Sounds fair enough, but must you do it so incomprehensibly? Is there a clause in your contracts, hidden away in the fine print, that mandates that you do so? Why must you bury me neck deep in jargon? I do not want to paint in broad strokes and say all academic writing is bad writing. The shining examples of well written pieces are what keep alive my hope that there is a better way. But no field remains untouched by this love of all things obscure and verbose.
My five years of studying architecture left me hesitant and unsure about my own knowledge of English, which I had until then been somewhat proud of. I had to learn many new words I never knew I needed—words like typology, kitsch, stasis, interstitial, blobitecture, phenomenology, genius loci, and autopoiesis. If you do not understand these words, do not fret. I can assure you that you will never need them. And then there were the words I had to relearn—words like space, void, and fabric—turns out I didn’t know them that well after all. This is the cost at the gate to enter the architectural discourse. Over my years I have used, sometimes misused, and even abused these words to sell my designs, and I am not the only one. Archdaily, a popular online architecture magazine compiled a list of the 150 weirdest words that architects are prone to overusing in very specific ways. I am sure every discipline has such a list.
I do understand that every discipline has a set of concepts that may be too complex to be captured exactly by common words. And I understand that most academic writing is written assuming the reader has some knowledge of the subject already. But what if your writing could expand the readership of your field? What if it could ignite a spark in someone who never knew they could hope to access your field, let alone understand it? What if your writing could change the entire course of someone’s life, if only they could read what you had to say? These are the possibilities you extinguish when you choose to write inaccessibly. And it is a choice.
Maybe I am too naïve or idealistic in hoping the exclusion is accidental. While useful to codify certain discipline-specific concepts, jargon also undeniably works to exclude outsiders from the discourse and build a certain sense of authority and superiority among those on the inside. Noam Chomsky says, “Part of the whole intellectual vocation is creating a niche for yourself, and if everybody can understand what you’re talking about, you’ve sort of lost, because then what makes you special? What makes you special has got to be something you had to work really hard to understand, and you mastered it, and all those guys out there don’t understand it, and that becomes the basis for your privilege and your power.”
In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell also talks about similar problems of political language and writing that is often intentionally vague and meaningless, and overly and uselessly complicated. He suggests a remedy of six rules for better writing in general, pushing for, among other things, a simplification of the writing and a reduction of jargon. While most disciplines could do with this simplification and a rethinking of the words they use, I think some need it more urgently than others.
Many friends who are still architects share my apprehension for the confusing language we surrounded ourselves with in university. As a profession, architecture is more connected to and dependent on the layperson than many academic fields. Clients decide if and how and when you do a project. And most of this language is gibberish to the client. By training ourselves to mindlessly master an English vocabulary that hardly anyone understands, in a country where English is not even the most comfortable language for many, we’re dooming ourselves to inescapable irrelevance.
When I left architecture behind and entered the humanities, I had no exposure to or understanding of many of the topics being discussed, nor had I read much academic writing outside my discipline. I felt utterly unprepared for the things I was expected to read, and my job was not made any easier by those whose writing I was assigned to read. I found myself fascinated with these whole worlds I did not know existed, and frustrated at not being able to engage with them even when I had finally discovered them.
I believe very little in any discipline is written about for the first time, and separate from everything that came before. There is an argument to be made for academic writing, that it puts the writing in the context of the larger ongoing discourse within that discipline. David Bartholomae, an American scholar focused on studying writing, research, and teaching, writes, “I say this as though it were obvious. Students write in a space defined by all the writing that has preceded them, writing the academy insistently draws together: in the library, in the reading list, in the curriculum. This is the busy, noisy, intertextual space—one usually hidden in our representations of the classroom; one that becomes a subject in the classroom when we ask young writers to think about, or better yet, confront, their situatedness.” It is pointless to ignore what has come before us, and we are inspired and influenced by what came before. And by continuing to write in ways that exclude, we doom generations of writers after us to the same fate.
By changing the way we write, we also have the opportunity to expand that space to include other disciplines, to enable crossovers and exchanges and new ways of engaging with knowledge. In architecture, for example, there is a lot of path breaking work happening at the intersection of architecture, biology, and computer programming. Simulations of biological patterns are being coded to shape architecture design and even urban planning. This kind of research is only possible when we blur the artificial boundaries separating disciplines, and clear, accessible language in academic writing is a start.
This argument for accessible language in academic writing is not an argument for “dumbing down”, but opening up. And the argument for clarity is not an argument for sterility. An alternative to unengaging jargon-filled writing cannot and must not be uninspiring standardised writing that does nothing to invoke curiosity. In his paper ‘Transparency or Drama? Extending the Range of Academic Writing in Architecture and Design’ Stanislav Roudavski argues against a sterilisation of writing for clarity, instead arguing for the promotion of creative freedom to make situation-specific choices rather than one single approach to clear, standardised writing. He asks us to consider drama in more creative forms of exploring language as a way to think and engage with the subject matter, rather than just looking at writing as representation, looking for transparency by following “writing guide”-type formalistic writing. We need clear creative writing that can inform clearly, enable engagement, and, and inspire curiosity.
Having said that, the ability to clearly and creatively express in English is in itself a privilege, an exclusionary criterion. An expected proficiency in a certain kind of English already excludes several social groups both from access and input to academia. This is directly linked to systemic social disadvantages like race, class, and caste and any approach to writing must acknowledge and address this barrier.
To sum up, writing inclusively is a choice. Whether you choose to or not depends on your answers to a few questions:
Is there a value in opening up academic discourse to non-academicians?
Is there a value in blurring boundaries between disciplines within academia?
Is there a value in writing clearly and creatively to inform, engage, and inspire readers of academic work?
I leave you with another quote from Bartholomae about the nature of discourse and the humanities, “The desire for a classroom free from the past is an expression of the desire for the presence or transcendence, for a common language, free from jargon and bias, free from evasion and fear; for a language rooted in common sense rather than special sense, a language that renders (makes present) rather than explains (makes distant).”
References
Scott, Rory. "150 Weird Words That Only Architects Use." ArchDaily. N.p., 19 Oct. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2017. https://www.archdaily.com/775615/150-weird-words-thatonly-architects-use
Bartholomae, David. “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 46, no. 1, 1995, pp. 62– 71. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/358870
Chomsky, Noam, Mitchell, Peter R., and Schoeffel, John. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. N.p.: New, 2002. Print.
Roudavski, Stanislav. "Transparency or Drama? Extending the Range of Academic Writing in Architecture and Design." Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 3, 2, Pp. 111-133. N.p., 2010. Web. 26 Nov. 2017. http://www.academia.edu/455074/Transparency_or_Drama_Extending_the_Range_of _Academic_Writing_in_Architecture_and_Design .
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