I just baked three loaves of bread and then saw these nutrition notes posted by Seth. It’s oddly entertaining to read, even though I don’t understand anything about it. Sort of like the feeling you get from reading a John Le Carre novel–it all seems so real!
But I completely disagree with Seth’s comment that “among academics to write clearly is low status, to write mumbo-jumbo is high status.” What Seth is missing here is that it’s difficult to write clearly. My impression is that people write mumbo-jumbo because that’s what they know how to do; writing clearly takes a lot of practice. It’s often surprisingly difficult to get people to state in writing exactly what they did (for example, in fitting a model to data). It takes continual effort to express oneself clearly and directly. Language is inherently nonalgorithmic. It might be that high-status people write mumbo-jumbo, but I suspect that’s just because they’re not putting in the immense effort required to write clearly. Lots of low-status academics write mumbo-jumbo also (as I know from reviewing many hundreds of submissions to academic journals).
Thanks, I like the comparison to Le Carre!
Veblen had a whole book of examples to support his point about mumbo-jumbo being higher status than clear writing among academics. It's possible he was right in the other chapters but wrong in the academic one — but since he was himself an academic, that seems unlikely. It's also possible that things have changed since his book was published but that too seems unlikely. I agree that writing clearly is sometimes difficult — not always: it isn't hard to say something is brown rather than brunneous, but guess which one academics choose? — but I think that if the status markers were reversed (clarity high, obscurity low) things would be quite different. Think of long fingernails, one of Veblen's classic examples.
I'm not sure how much of this is apocrypha, but here's what I've heard. The great Russian physicist Lev Landau supposedly had something like writer's block, just could not figure out how to express himself. For his publications, he would write the equations that he wanted to convey, and then just put a few words between them: "From [complicated equations] we obtain [more complicated equations] after applying the Born approximation," and things like that. Supposedly others tried to emulate the Landau style, and the result was a Soviet style of physics paper that is very hard to follow because there's almost no explanatory material. But this style is _not_ evident in the terrific physics books by Landau and Lifshitz…which people say have "not a word from Landau, not an idea from Lifshitz." So, yeah, it's hard to write clearly.
That said, I think there is a bit of truth to Seth's comment that people like to write mumbo-jumbo because they think they're supposed to use the jargon of their field. I thought I remembered that Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, my hero for clear scientific writing, gave an example, in his autobiography, of the kind of rewriting he would do as editor of a journal back when editors still edited. He said people would send in papers that had sentences like "Desert-dwelling mammals, though well-adapted to life in extremely arid environments, nevertheless exhibit signs of distress when deprived of fluid water for long periods," and he, Knut, would rewrite them…so,the previous sentence was rewritten "Even camels get thirsty." (I say "I thought I remembered" this because when I looked up the example it wasn't this extreme…but the idea is right.)
Writing well is an art that is looked down upon in much of academia, especially in the sciences and to a large extent in the social sciences. In the humanities such as history, English etc. this is less applicable but these disciplines also have their own "mumbo-jumbo" (see: postmodern "theory") that obfuscates relatively simple ideas and tends to serve as an "us vs. them" signal to humanities journals.
But focusing on the social sciences, as the division of labor and the amount of specialization within the academy increases, more "traditional" skills such as writing take a back seat to mathematical and technical knowledge. Generally speaking, those who tend to possess this kind of knowledge also tend to write poorly. I think you would be hard-pressed to find any top political science or economics department in the US that places substantial weight on good writing skills in a candidate for admission over mathematical skills. Harvard’s Government Department, for example, does not even require a writing sample as part of their PhD admission application.
In addition to this, I believe that writing skills among the college educated are on a decline due simply to a lack of reading in general (especially reading “quality” literary fiction). Great writers and poets shape language and serve as examples of eloquence using the written word. From personal experience at least, I found that my writing skills improved dramatically after having read some works of fiction from books dubbed “literary masterpieces” (both modern and classic). The debate over what is a masterpiece is another topic of discussion, but I am pretty sure that Harry Potter should not be included in this category.
As a personal anecdote, I remember having an argument with a former statistics professor who told me that “anyone can learn to write well, but not everyone can do math.” I am not sure if this is true, but it seems as if most act as if it were.
It must be emphasized, once again, that a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds is rather different from the extended c-command discussed in connection with common writing. We have already seen that the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial is not subject to a descriptive fact. Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in studies of high school grammar books and freshman history books, we see that the descriptive power of the base component does not readily tolerate a parasitic gap construction. Furthermore, the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition raises serious doubts about the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that any associated supporting element is not to be considered in determining irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules.
The "rules" for academics are different in the arts and sciences. In the sciences, clarity is valued, but not everyone's clear.
Particularly worrying is overabstraction for the task at hand, such as invoking measure theory for a simple integral, which makes their work seem like mumbo jumbo to the less mathematically inclined.
In the arts, you get a lot of post-modern and deconstructionist mumbo jumbo. If you're not convinced it's meaningless, check out Mark Liberman's summary on the Language Log of Labov's Test. Here's the critical quote from Labov:
I actually got out of the field of linguistics precisely because it's dominated by Chomskyan mumbo jumbo.
P.S. I thought Gleick's biography of Feynmann had an interesting take/case study of the sociology of scientific clarity.
Seth,
I've never seen "brunneus" ever. But I do know that doctors tend to use technical rather than English terms, just because that's what they're used to, I think.
Phil,
Knut's my hero too (search on the blog). But my interpretation of his "thirsty camels" story is that the original author wrote the long-winded version, not because he was trying to show sophistication, but because that was the easiest way for him to write. "Even camels get thirsty" is pithy, but there's a reason that pithiness is praised. It's difficult!
Jason,
Sure, I'll buy your argument. Skills are difficult to learn. I can do math and I can write, but I'm lousy at drawing, basketball, and foreign languages. We don't have time in our life to do everything, and in a field that selects for technical ability, there's no reason to assume that someone will be able to write as well.
Hinheckle,
I don't know what you're saying, which I assume is your point.
Bob,
I don't know how much status Derrida has. He seems more like a walking punch line to me, the example everyone likes to use to mock silly scholars. It's my guess that, at this point, even the pro-Derrida scholars hold that position only in opposition to what they see as excesses of the anti-Derridas. I wouldn't be surprised if Derrida, too, was trying write clearly but just didn't know how to do it (and was sidetracked by being rewarded for cloudy writing).
The clearer the writing, the easier the topic becomes to understand for the reader, which may make the ideas/breakthroughs being conveyed seem more simple and thus less respected. Sometimes, there is a beauty to simplicity that is well-received, but that is often only by those who understand how difficult it was to bring the difficult concept down to a lower level.
The simpler you make the topic seem, the less that others may respect the work that you have done… people may think, "I could have done that", or "This was not difficult research".
Prestige and awards often seem to be awarded to those who research topics considered to be advanced and complicated… the harder the problem seems, the more we respect the solution.
I think about technical writing a lot. The best professors that I have had all had the uncanny ability resolve complicated, jargon filled things, to their fundamental considerations. It was like they spent a lot of time actually thinking problems as a whole, rather than flinging poo at the margins of ideas.
That is where I think that the problem lies. Scholarly discourse is a competitive endeavor. If you make a point simply, someone is going to battle with you about it. In the case of the camel, I would guess that there is some non-zero probability that a reviewer would say, "Well, camels aren't the only things that live in the desert. Your sample size is too small."
So, we resort to jargon as a defensive semantic device to say, "This and all the thinking and caveats that go with it." This is especially so when we try to publish in journals that have big, broad readership. Plus, jargon lets the reader think, "I'm a peer of this person, and we are on the same level," rather than "Why is this d@#$ being pedantic with me? Who does he think I am?"
[As a side consequence, it leads to incredibly long and obscure reference lists (which I will spare you references to).]