I have worked with many academics. One of the persistently frustrating things about their writing is that they have been trained to armor their language against this style of critique. This makes their writing almost impossible for regular people to parse and understand. It’s a dense thicket of run-on-sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses, caveats, jargon, and terms that have a precise meaning within a subfield but mean different things in other contexts.
The only way for politicians to avoid this kind of nitpicking is to start talking like academics, and we know how that would go for their electoral prospects.
I would suggest that what they have trained themselves to do (and not only academics, but many other professional fields - scientists, medics, lawyers, to say nothing of some business roles) is to write so as to avoid risk of ambiguity.
(Which is even harder if you are doing it for an audience whose first language may not be English)
Avoiding ambiguity does involve more words, longer sentences, more clarifying statements, etc.
On which related topic, although, yes, Scott Adams is a fuckwitted arsehole of the first order, in this strip he kind of got it right:
Yes, but I’ve seen plenty of academic writing that uses those same tactics to engender ambiguity… because the person doing the writing isn’t actually that secure in their position and in their knowledge. It’s a fine line between writing against ambiguity and writing into it.
Also, some write in such a manner in order to make everyone else feel dumb so that they can feel smarter. They pretend like their language gives them a moral edge on everyone else…
I agree. And there is a clear difference between writing to avoid ambiguity and writing to, well, encourage a view of the facts that may not be entirely accurate
If in my professional role I wrote ambiguously, one can be sure that I very much intended to.
Perversely, depending on the context, sometimes deliberate ambiguity also involves more words, etc. not fewer!
When I was in undergrad, one of my history profs had all of us choose a random article from a sociology journal as an exercise in showing us how not to write an academic paper.
I think, in general, historians tend to avoid that kind of academic writing? Postmodernism has had an impact, but history isn’t an especially jargon laden field, like philosophy or some lit-crit stuff.
In all writing there is a tension between accuracy and comprehensibility. With skill you can try to be both but in the end you need to consider the audience when that tension is not able to be fully resolved.
There is nothing wrong with the academic style of writing when the audience is academics (or the legal style when the audience is lawyers). When writing for other audiences one needs to be able to code switch — if the audience is not able to understand the message, what matter is it that the (uncomprehended) statement is precise and accurate?
True. Defensiveness in writing may sometimes be a product of the writer’s insecurity. The less confidence one feels in one’s position or statements, the more hedging and obscurity in one’s writing.
I imagine that people feel that subconsciously when listening to a speaker… perhaps another good reason for politicians to avoid that style!
I do not disagree with your note about specific styles of writing for specific audiences (e.g. lawyers for lawyers).
But in general, any specific style aside, I think my general point stands. I spent years writing complex B2B documents that demanded minimal risk of any ambiguity and it is easy to do such that in a generalist/non-specialist environment, even someone with English as a second language can properly understand one’s meaning but it does take more words. English is an especially easy language to be ambiguous in, very often entirely unintentionally and unrealisingly (and often lazily), given the amount of idiom and vernacular, and is also probably one reason why there are so many wonderful double entendre opportunities in English.
ETA but yes, writing for the intended audience is something some people do far too much (excluding other readers) and other people simply do not do at all.
It’s apparent there’s a key socializing step in TFG that got missed or broken. Humans over the age of 5 or so typically understand that playing a game, participating in a sport or a contest comes with the risk that they could lose. And if you throw a tantrum about losing, there will be the consequences that no one wants to interact with you. You don’t get to play. Kittens with siblings figure out that using claws in play fight means no one wants to play fight with you, as that violates game rules. Donald, to this day, cheats at golf, and pretends he’s won tournaments that never happened. My conclusion is there are six year olds and cats who are much better suited for society and the presidency than TFG.
Medical and scientific medicine-adjacent papers are really bad for this. We have words that have very specific meanings in academic papers that have quite different meanings in general conversation, leading to quacks being able to quite easily “misinterpret” them to mean something very different or even diametrically opposite of their actual meaning. I have folks citing these “interpretations” pretty damned frequently and when I try to explain what is actually meant if get “I can read, do you think I’m an idiot?” It is very tempting to say yes, but I can usually resist the urge.
The field of psychology has entered the chat, and politely explained that “field,” “psychology,” and “chat” all have very specific, contextual definitions that each take a full paragraph to explain. We then add that each of these words will be replaced by another word in a generation or two, once the general public has shifted to using the original word as an insult.
