On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, joanna bujes wrote:
> Jon
>
> "Why can't these leftist intellectuals learn to write decently? These
> long, complex sentences, filled with impossible coinages like
> "resingularization"! How can they ever hope to get a strong political
> movement going when only their fellow professors (and not many of them,
> even) can understand what the hey they are saying? And once and for
> all, let's give up the attempt to make "praxis" an English word. Nobody
> but graduate students has ever encountered it, or knows what it means."
>
> Amen! Writing decently, writing so as to be understood, would be a great
> and persusasive argument for their belief in democracy and human
> intelligence.
>
> Perhaps the problem is that intellectuals by and large are trained in
> academia and this training (and the academic plums it can deliver) is
> more important than their professed dedication to freedom.
>
> Joanna
I have mixed feelings about this "clear writing" imperative. From the standpoint of the typical person in our society, even a first-year college physics textbook is full of difficult concepts and symbols (remember that only about 25% of adults in the U. S. have college degrees, and even many of these people cannot make sense of calculus or physics). By the imperative Joanna and Jon apply above, we should berate physics or calculus textbook writers for writing stuff that the "person on the street" will not understand.
I'll agree that much academic writing (and not just in the social sciences or humanities!) is needlessly complex. However, if we immediately disregard or ridicule complex texts, we may miss something useful and interesting that does not occur to someone who simply relies on common sense and familiar concepts.
In short: sometimes writing is complex and difficult to understand because--the topic is.
Miles