Well, I’m personally interested in the history of science and often read articles from the (unfortunately named these days) journal Isis. Even though this is an academic journal the vast majority of articles are perfectly understandable to me, a biologist. Occasionally there will be an article by an obvious postmodernist who talks all about deconstruction and narratives, but for the most part the historians of science seem to have little need for that.
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It’s not my field, but I keep buying history of science books for my husband… he often enjoys them, even if he’s sometimes critical of their approach.
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One of my history profs in undergrad had published a couple of books aimed at a popular audience, so this was important to him. His counter-example to the kind of academic writing one usually finds in history was the kind one usually finds in sociology, which is very (and hilariously) jargon-heavy.
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I have read a fair amount of sociology, so I know what you mean by jargony.
I also think that you can have both kinds of writing… it really isn’t an either/or situation here. I think it’s a matter of training more than anything else. If you do nothing else but read jargon filled books and write historiographic papers in response, then do your research based on that, then of course you’re going to come out with a jargony dissertation and then that’s how you’ll expect all writing to be. But if people write in a variety of contexts during your training, then you’re more likely to master more than one style.
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Ha, there he is. Talking, no doubt, about the contingent utility of lexical encapsulation!
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Lately, he seems to be all about the fate of bourgeois democracy… wonder why that is? 
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I fear it’s because he’s still able to press his ear to the railroad tracks, and can therefore tell what’s coming.
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Indeed. You don’t study society for, what, 60 years, and not learn a thing or two.
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Well, Orwell does provide a loophole (item 6).
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
(source)
The problem is that as a literate, intercommunicating society is rather recent, we don’t know the human world well. Not much more than a hundred years ago you had to subscribe to a Bronze Age myth to attend many universities. In just the last 25 years or so I would say, based on experience, that what we are learning about the human world and its culture is in the nature of a revelation - men are not naturally superior to or ordered by God to be in charge of women. Skin color is not an indicator of intelligence or personality. Monarchy is not a divinely ordained system of government. Much of what we were taught in history is lies written by the upper classes.
And in the same way science is constantly superseding itself as discoveries turn out to be partial. Science, however, tends to cling to its terminology even when it is past its best before. It has also a tendency to recycle classical words - people complain when words like disinterested lose their original meaning, but anyone who knows Greek will wonder why giga and tera have been recycled as powers of 10, or why the names of dead scientists get assigned to units which in fact were not contemporaneous with their work. In the popular mind Tesla is associated with electric sparks, so it’s confusing for children who have to associate it with magnetic field strength. (A Weber per square meter is a Tesla. Max Weber was the founder of sociology. Weber the company makes barbecues. We’re not really trying to make things easy for people who are not really into this stuff, are we?)
Bit of a rant perhaps but the point I’m making is that science is loaded with cruft and jargon that could have been avoided, while the humanities are trying to develop a language free of ambiguity and obsolete cultural assumptions. Perhaps if we’re still around in a hundred years the basics of physics and chemistry will have been tidied up so that an introductory textbook isn’t overloaded with jargon, and history of science is clearly seen as a separate subject that doesn’t need to be taught simply so you can understand that a Newton isn’t a new ton. But I have my doubts.
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The epitome or hyperbole!
A cluster of data-points. I was an English major in college (1962-66). Never used Strunk & White. I started teaching composition in 1966 and never used Strunk & White. Nor did I know anyone who did. My wife has taught writing for nearly 50 years and never used Strunk & White. (She has lately used Eats, Shoots & Leaves, though.) None of her colleagues, to our knowledge, have used Strunk & White.
The fuss over this style guide is strange to watch. There’s a considerable range of handbooks, style/usage manuals, and writing guides in use in classrooms, all of them, I suspect, of later vintage and greater range and specificity than Strunk & White (1959).
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You are specifying things that are already implicitly specified by the context.
Explicitly specified by the context. Be concise and Omit needless words are just headings followed by sections on how to follow them and why you should.
Anything that is deeply studied is not, at that depth, going to be accessible to the public. If it were, it wouldn’t be depth.
Math and the physical sciences have the privilege that people expect them to be difficult. Asking a question like
is like thinking that math is no more than counting and physics can be summed up by “Throw rock up: rock fall down!”.
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THIS!
Plus: context. Many seem to be arguing towards a strict hewing to an enumerated set of straight-forward rules from a viewpoint considering only one type of writing. Journalism isn’t the only reason to write.
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To quote F&F…
“These rules are in order of importance; the last is also the least. It is true that it is often given alone as a sort of compendium of the others. In some sense it is that: the writer whose percentage of Saxon words is high will generally be found to have fewer words that are out of the way, long, or abstract, and fewer periphrases; and conversely. But if, instead of his Saxon percentages being the natural and undesigned consequence of his brevity (and the rest), those other qualities having been attained by his consciously restricting himself to Saxon, his pains will have been worse than wasted; the taint of precosity will be over all he as written.”
(mike drop)
Whoah! Sick burn, dudes!
Do you use the passive voice? This was a late invention too. Shakespere never had it. It has its uses, but an active sentence is often shorter, and punchier, and it has a subject. Kipling edited his work by mentally crossing out every adjective and adverb, then putting back the ones that had to be there for the sentence to work. Sentences can have over 24 words, but they are usually better split into shorter ones. I liked the early style checkers that just highlighted stuff like this. They were simple, but I think they helped clean up my style.
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Jargon is a gorgeous word. It comes from the mediaeval French for the twittering of birds. I love the association with birds defending their territory, and trying to attract a mate.
Mean. Unfair. But still funny.
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Just so everyone knows what we’re on about…
You said it far better than I. The refutation of the author’s argument is not that there’s inaccurate information in there, nor that the book is still occasionally taught, but that the book is never taught in a vacuum of grammar advice.
I would also add that if my former students in Comp 101 had used the book as a bible and followed all of its advice, I still would have been pleased; stylistically it is still valuable (concision, jargon et al).
