[lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion

boddi satva lbo.boddi at gmail.com
Fri Dec 8 16:29:35 PST 2006


On 12/8/06, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote: \
> > The Stalinist idea was that some language is "revolutionary" and some
> > "counter-revolutionary" and that counter-revolutionary language should
> > be excised. The idea here is a very rational, objective test: what
> > percentage of people can understand this text? And it is entirely
> > rational and reasonable that one should always endeavor to maximize
> > that number. Even if the original purpose of the text is to
> > communicate to a small number of people, it is always best to make it
> > readable for the largest number of people. When we say writing is
> > "clear", we are judging clarity not only by some objective measure of
> > precision, but by a measure of reach.
>
> You can't really believe this. This means that all specialized
> scientific research and theory in fields like medicine, physics,
> biology, geology, statistics, and chemistry has to be chucked out.
> Writing every text "to make it readable for the largest number of
> people" would bring scientific progress to a screeching halt. Is this
> your intent? If not--and this is the important question that you and
> Jerry keep sidestepping--what are the conditions under which it is okay
> to use specialized language? And how on earth can these conditions be
> identified a priori?

You're really just flying off into irrationality here. You should always try to write a text that's understandable to the largest number of people. Of course there are people who won't understand it. The "largest number" of people can vary greatly. You have to convey what you have to convey and there are people who won't understand the subject. There is a level of expertise people have to have to understand something. A physics paper cannot explain all of algebra, geometry and calculus before it gets to the analysis of data from an x-ray telescope. But once you decide what things you can't explain because of the limits of the length, you should always try to make it as readable as possible and use as few terms of art as possible.

In the humanities, so many academics write as if everything they write has infinite implications and will be subject to infinite critiques, so they speak in constellations of abstractions. They would avoid both spurious attacks AND explain themselves clearly when they reduce abstraction. But very, very often abstraction is an attempt to divert attention away from one's own, small argument by trying to get the reader to pay attention to someone else's argument. People in the humanities - particularly Marxists - use loaded verbs like "fetishize". These verbs have simple meanings, but have been turned into loaded, complex terms of art by certain authors.

But when an author is coining a term, he is doing the opposite. He is making part of his argument so concise that the reader can accept that part as being represented by a single word. Coining terms - adding to the language is great. If the argument is useful and concise enough, the term will be accepted. Throwing at the reader a bunch of coined terms from OTHER authors is an act of obscuring. Not only is in unnecessary, it is cheating.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list