The school make you a bad writer?
To figure it out, I talk to a professional book editor.
Read some of the worst pieces
of academic texts and accidentally stumble across a flaw in the schooling system.
Let's figure out.
But first, thank you to Shortform for sponsoring a portion of this video.
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So, a while ago, we made a video about something.
It doesn't really matter, but in it, Sabrina says:
SABRINA: Why does so much of academic writing need to be written like that?
Like, I don't know if you've experienced this,
but you read a sentence three times over and you're just not getting it.
And you'll wonder, am I dumb?
And then you read it another two times and you're like, No, no, no.
This is written badly.
TAHA: So, why is academic writing written so badly?
I mean, these are supposed to be some of the most educated people in the world.
So what's really going on there?
If you've never come across one of these sentences, then
you might not know what I'm talking about, but I have examples.
On second thought,
I don't want to beef a random academic who's written a badly written sentence.
So I've written a totally not real parody of what academics sound like.
When brevity would be sufficiently practical for the intended function.
Why is it that an intricate and frivolous vernacular is preferred
when the utility of the language in either case is equivalent?
In other words, why waste time?
Say lot word when you work do trick?
Why is it that the most educated
people in the world are the ones that write the worst?
There are a few theories that could explain what's happening here.
The first one is professional narcissism, which is basically just, I'm an academic,
so I'm going to use my big and fancy words to seem big and fancy.
That isn't to say that jargon is never needed.
Every profession has industry terms that they use to communicate
ideas quickly, even if it makes it harder for the everyday person.
But also, academics don't really consider the public when they're writing.
They're writing for their peers, people that they need to impress
to get published in journals or get tenure or just keep their job.
The charitable perspective is that their peers don't
need all of the context that an everyday person might.
So it might seem like writing is needlessly complex,
but it might be a lot more accessible if you have the right context.
However, this needlessly complex writing style can be seen as academics
just trying to impress their friends.
They're trying to emulate the esthetics of prestige in academia.
And this can be a form of elitism, too.
By making academia needlessly complex, it makes it less accessible to the public
and people trying to get into academia.
I mean, you don't want everyone reading the essays
of Kevin from your intro to Philosophy class.
No, no, no.
Those essays are for scholars, but here's the thing
that doesn't make any sense, because if I was talking to someone
and they couldn't string together a clear sentence,
I'm not going to think they're smart.
I'm going to think they're an idiot.
And it turns out the data agrees with me.
A 2005 study finds a negative relationship between complexity
and judged intelligence.
Basically, the more fancy words you throw in, the less smart people think you are.
It doesn't make any sense.
Course it does!
I used the thesaurus. On every word?
So maybe less word. Do do trick.
But not everyone in academia
is a pretentious nerd trying to seem smart by using big words.
Sometimes they're just bad communicators, and sometimes
it’s because they're academics that they become bad communicators.
This is something called ‘the curse of knowledge’.
Have you ever tried to explain technology to a boomer?
You'll say something very simple, like, “Hey, you can just Google that”
and they will not know how to unlock thier phone.
Or more recently, have you ever witnessed anyone try to explain BeReal to someone?
They'll say, Yeah.
So basically you get a notification and then you can take a photo.
It takes the photo on your front camera
and your back camera at the same time, but not exactly at the same time.
You can only take one photo and it has to be at the same time as everyone else.
But you can also take a different time.
Basically, it's a disaster.
It's hard to imagine what it's like to not know something
when you already know it, and it makes it really hard
to explain things to other people.
So academics become bad writers because of the curse of knowledge
and academic narcissism.
But that's just academics.
What are they like?
We're not like that, are we?
Turns out we are.
We're all basically just writing to people with similar reference points
to ourselves and explaining things when you know the thing and they don't is hard.
Academics are just an easy example to some of the challenges to writing well.
But then I stumbled across a lecture called The Craft of Writing.
It's about an hour and a half long and I'll put it in the description,
but in it they describe how school becomes a system that makes us all bad writers.
Allow me to explain.
So when you're in school, you're writing your essays in a rush
to an arbitrary word count,
on things that you barely understand because you've just been taught them.
And here's the worst part, in school.
You're not even writing in a way that's going to mimic real life, in real life.
You're writing to communicate an idea.
You have an idea about something and you're like, Hey,
I would like you to know the same thing, so I will take it out of my brain
and write it down and then send it to you.
And then you will read it and you will put it inside of your brain.
However, in school you're writing to demonstrate knowledge.
Which is a whole different thing and controversial opinion:
I think that's bad.
I feel like we should be learning how to communicate ideas to other people,
but instead
we learn to demonstrate knowledge, which coincidentally, is what mansplainers do.
Why?
Why is that the way things are?
Writing to demonstrate knowledge is what you do when you're writing essays.
You're trying to get a good mark by demonstrating to the teacher
that you know the things that they've just taught you.
So you'll throw in loads of things that make you seem smart
or knowledgeable about the thing.
You don't really care about coherence
or clarity or persuasiveness, or how enjoyable it is to read.
You only care about demonstrating that you know the thing to your teacher.
Nowhere in that interaction do you ever get a chance
to sincerely communicate an idea to anyone at all.
Because the person you are trying to demonstrate knowledge
to already knows the thing, and they are being paid to mark your work.
They don't want to be there.
Your work is terrible.
Yea, I have a prefrontal cortex yet.
Of course it's going to be terrible.
Then after all of that, you go out into the real world where you DO
have to communicate ideas to people and you've not been taught how to do it.
So while I don't know much, what I do know is that school becomes a system
that produces bad writers, which is very sad because you're supposed
to learn things at school.
Remember when I said I didn't want to beef the academic community?
Well, it turns out the academic community wants to beef the academic community.
In 1995, a disgruntled editor of the Journal of Philosophy
and Literature set up this bad writing contest where the co-editors
would come together and judge the worst pieces of writing in academia.
And then they would give out prizes.
And some of the first place winners of these awards sound like nonsense.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
to structure social relations...
power relations of a subject to repetition convergence articulation...
Human-Kantian paradigm of the foundational-isms...
in practice, dialectical connection.
While in his...
[uncaptionable academic nonesense]
Did you get any of that? Simple!
So given all of that,
I decided to talk to someone who shapes writing for a living to see
what they thought
about these badly written passages and what they would do to improve them.
My name is Rachel Jepsen and I am a writing coach and an editor.
I work with non-fiction writers of all different kinds.
What is your thoughts on these?
Do you think these are bad, bad pieces of writing?
Bad has context and even when you say things like it's needlessly complicated.
Well, it's, you have no need for it.
It's complications. Right? Right.
There are reasons that academic writing is this difficult to read.
Anything where you have a really, really, really, really long run on sentence.
It's usually because the person wants to make sure
that they have hit on every nuance and possibility in the argument.
They do not want to make a blanket statement.
And I think that's what you see in really bad writing is that
somebody is not using those critical thinking
skills to actually test their own argument or their own belief.
And in the case of these very overwrought, complicated
academic texts, at least they're trying to be right,
you know, and to take in other arguments, in other contexts.
In academia, is it necessary for people to be writing this, obtusely
or is there a way for that to be more accessible?
But still complete?
The answer is absolutely yes,
because we have writers like Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould
and other scientists who have taken the complex scientific
histories, experience and understanding and formed them into story.
And this is where we really- the rubber meets the road in terms of
how do we communicate with a general reader and try to help them
understand a new context is we tell it through stories.
I'm just going to repeat
what I've been saying this whole time, which is consider your audience,
learn how to ask specific questions about them,
learn where they're coming from, learn where they hang out, what they read.
As you were talking, I was like, This fits with everything all the way from
if I am writing a TV show or a novel,
all the way too, if I am writing an email or a text, think about the reader.
How will they receive it?
All of that works for all types of writing in a lot of ways.
Pick one, one person, write to them
and see how that changes your approach to the argument and the style.
I suggest everybody do a little experiment with that and just see what happens
and see what comes up for you.
So if you want to learn more about writing effectively,
I've left a bunch of resources in the description,
including an uncut version of the interview
I did with Rachel and a brilliant lecture on the craft of writing effectively.
And if you're interested in learning more about language, you can watch a video
about why parents text so weird I made last year.
That's all for me.
I hope
you have a great day and I hope you liked this video.