Simple ain’t easy

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Let’s start 2010 with an item having nothing to do with statistical modeling, causal inference, or social science.

Jenny Diski writes:

‘This is where we came in’ is one of those idioms, like ‘dialling’ a phone number, which has long since become unhooked from its original practice, but lives on in speech habits like a ghost that has forgotten the why of its haunting duties. The phrase is used now to indicate a tiresome, repetitive argument, a rant, a bore. But throughout my [Diski’s] childhood in the 1950s and into the 1970s, it retained its full meaning: it was time to leave the cinema – although, exceptionally, you might decide to stay and see the movie all over again – because you’d seen the whole programme through. It seems very extraordinary now, and I don’t know how anyone of my generation or older ever came to respect cinema as an art form, but back then almost everyone wandered into the movies whenever they happened to get there, or had finished their supper or lunch, and then left when they recognised the scene at which they’d arrived. Often, one person was more attentive than the other, and a nudge was involved: ‘This is where we came in.’ . . .

Interesting. It’s been awhile since I’ve come to a move in the middle and sat through the next showing until reaching the point where I came in. Maybe this is not allowed anymore?

The real reason I wanted to discuss Diski’s article, though, was because of an offhand remark she makes, dissing an academic author’s attempt to write for a popular audience:

Skerry isn’t really one to let go of jargon. In the preface he explains how to read his book, not as most books are doomed to be read, from beginning to end, but differently and ‘in keeping with the multiplicity of voices that make up the text’. It gets quite scary: ‘The temporal structure of these chapters goes from the present-tense narrative of my research trip in Chapter 1 to the achronological, “cubist” structure of Chapter 3 . . .

“Skerry” sounds like the name of a fictional character, but he’s actually the author of the book under review.

My real point, though, is that I suspect that Skerry was not intentionally writing in jargon; it’s just hard to write clearly. Harder than many readers realize, and maybe harder than professional writer Diski realizes. My guess is that Skerry was trying his best but he just doesn’t know any better.

I had a similar discussion with Seth on this awhile ago (sorry, I can’t find the link to the discussion), where he was accusing academics of deliberately writing obscurely, to make their work seem deeper than it really is, and I replying that we’d all like to write clearly but it’s not so easy to do so.

There are some fundamental difficulties here, the largest of which, I think, is that the natural way to explain a confusing point is to add more words–but if you add too many words, it’s hard to follow the underlying idea. Especially given that writing is one-dimensional; you can’t help things along with intonation, gestures, and facial expressions. (There’s the smiley-face and its cousin, the gratuitous exclamation point (which happened to be remarked upon by Alan Bennett in that same issue of the LRB), but that’s slim pickings considering all the garnishes available for augmenting face-to-face spoken conversation.)

P.S. Here’s my advice on how to write research articles. I don’t really get into the jargon thing. Writing clearly and with minimal jargon is so difficult that I wasn’t ready to try to give advice on the topic.

17 thoughts on “Simple ain’t easy”

  2. Steve: I read it. It seems a bit long for the point that he's making, but, then again, my talks are also probably long for the points they make. Maybe all our talks should just be 5 minutes long. On the other hand, once I gave a 20-minute talk as four 5-minute pieces, and it didn't work so well; people had no sense of what they should be focusing on.

  3. "I had a similar discussion with Seth on this awhile ago (sorry, I can't find the link to the discussion), where he was accusing academics of deliberately writing obscurely, to make their work seem deeper than it really is, and I replying that we'd all like to write clearly but it's not so easy to do so."

    It's extremely noxious when you go for optimizing your posture over your epistemology.

    I think sometimes, and not uncommonly, people including academics do deliberately write obscurely, for reasons including to make their work seem deeper than it really is.

    But isn't that an empirical question? Or for you is it best solved by figuring out what the optimized posture is for you to adopt, Professor Gelman?

  4. Slightly off-topic but the same problem occurs within academia but between disciplines. Many economists, especially those who do applied stuff, have to talk to policy makers, media people and other relatively normal people so we are used to talking about economics in a relatively jargon-free way. Otherwise they don't ask you back. Likewise when cab drivers ask you about the economy.
    But I have been to notionally inter-disciplinary seminars or seen TV interviewers where the speaker (usually "hard scientists") makes absolutely no compromise to those in the audience who don't have the same training. There is a certain irony in neuroscientists who don't appear to have a "theory of mind" I suppose.
    Clearly some jargon is necessary but it is also used to obscure. This is not peculiar to academics 'though, medics do the same in clinical work.

  5. If you didn't get a newspaper, and didn't have a phone (and theatres often had only one line, which was busy) then you just showed up at the movies. Getting here via public transportation probably didn't help any.

    My parents did this (despite getting the paper) so I remember this from when I was a kid. They didn't think it odd to watch the movie from the middle. My mother was partial to musicals, and with most classic American musicals there's not enough plot to matter.

  6. Andrew, it wasn't my point that academics write obscurely to impress others, it was Thorstein Veblen's. In the last chapter of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899, full text available online). It's true that I agreed with him. It was an amusing way to end a book full of big words and long sentences.

  7. Seth: Yes, I remembered it was from Veblen; I even searched your blog for Veblen but couldn't find our particular discussion to link to.

    Zbicyclist: Yes, this makes sense. I only entered the theater in the middle of the movie a few times, but it indeed happened on the times that I just showed up to the theater.

    Kevin: Interesting comparison of disciplines. I recognize that some people write obscurely on purpose (sometimes not to mystify but just to follow the standards of whatever journal they're writing for; that is, they'd like to write clearly but they can't, because they want their manuscript accepted for publication). In many cases, though, I think jargony writing is just the best that people can do. Take me, for example. I write in a less jargony way than many academics, and I have decades of practice, but, even so, I can't shake the jargon off completely, partly for reasons discussed in the second-to-last paragraph of my entry above.

    Hopefully: I think that it's easy for people to underestimate the difficulty of writing clearly.

  8. Andrew: I suspect that your "bi-location" in stats & pol sci influences this? At least I think that having worked a bit away from my natural "territory" had had a good effect for me.

  10. It often depends on the reason for writing – a nice quote from Peirce after studying scientific writing from available thesis dissertations was roughly – "It should be kept in mind, that the purpose of the authors was not to clearly communicate important ideas but too impress upon the examiners that the candidate deserved the degree being sought".

    Writing clearly about important ideas for a wide audience has to be a lot more difficult!

    Keith

  11. To write clearly about a subject takes clear thinking and a deep understanding of that subject. Unclear writing, then, signals that an author is stretching or confused. Jargon-laden writing suggests more: that the author is insecure or trying to hide something.

    In <a>Politics and the English Language, Orwell argued that unclear writing was not merely a symptom of muddled thoughts but a cause: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

    Yes, writing clearly is difficult. As Andrew wrote, simple ain't easy. But Orwell's argument has weight. When we start accepting unclear writing about important subjects because being clear isn't easy, we're setting our standards too low. Research isn't useful unless people can understand it. Maybe we ought to start holding researchers to a higher standard: clarity.

    Cheers,
    Tom

  12. "Hopefully: I think that it's easy for people to underestimate the difficulty of writing clearly."

    You're a political scientist, why is it so hard for you to intellectually engage with the idea of
    some people "deliberately writing obscurely, to make their work seem deeper than it really is"?

  13. What quantitative work has been done into diseccting and sorting clear vs. unclear writing?
    Also, what are the distinctions between clear good writing and clear bad writing, in terms of empirical inquiry, collaboration, and communication of results?

  14. Hopefully Anonymous: You might wish to start with a search on the term "reproducible research" where clear is clearly defined as a qualified reader could reproduce the results with access to the data.

    JG Garden went much further than this and included qualitative research papers by defining clearly re-written as a graduate student successfully programed a computer to re-write the paper or even a new variant of it.

    Perhaps his most successful case study involved the author Claude Levi-Strauss to whom he presented such an example "paper". After reading the paper, Levi-Strauss acknowledged it indeed was one of his papers but he was unable to find an original copy in his files and asked if he could keep this copy.

    Pretty sure Gardin has fully retired now, though some of his material is still floating around the web…

    Keith

  15. Tom: I agree, it's hard to write clearly when you don't know what you're talking about. But some people can do this; see, for example, our discussion a couple of weeks ago about the discussion of drunk driving in Freakonomics 2. Levitt and Dubner wrote this clearly enough that it was clear for others (not just me) to see the problems in what they wrote. It is a virtue of clear writing that it can expose problems with one's own arguments! More generally, though, I think that it's just so hard to write clearly; in most academic settings, I think people just don't know how to do better. It's hard to shake off the sloppy writing habits we get when writing journal articles (where, indeed, clear writing can be punished, not rewarded).

  16. I don't think "deepness" in the sense that say, Eliezer Yudkowsky uses the term, is that relevant here. Rather, using hard-to-decipher technical terms signals that you are knowledgeable enough to use those terms (assuming you're not fakespeaking, which is is a very risky strategy). If you object to someone's writing by saying that it is hard to understand, it is like the Emperor's New Clothes: you have revealed yourself as a greenhorn. I've been trying recently to admit my lack of understanding more often, it's not a pleasant thing to do.

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