Is Post-modernism to Blame for Your Bad Writing?

This post is a response to Steven Pinker’s article Why Academics Stink at Writing. The first half of his article is worth reading; the rest rambles. I do not have a problem with the premise or the solution Pinker proposes, but parts of the article irked me. This is not a review or response to Pinker’s longer book The Sense of Style (I do not intend to read it), nor a defense of academic writing (although I think academic writing is not as bad as Pinker makes it out to be). This is an attack on some of Pinker’s ideas on writing both good and bad. Take it as you will.

For a more measured response, see this YouTube video by Tom Nicholas. An interesting perspective on this article from a (truly) post-modernist viewpoint is given in an article by Melonie Fullick.

Guiding Quote

The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say …? Don’t you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don’t talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to “come clear,” to “put your cards on the table.” Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us—in our language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry—that is all right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we can do so only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of ordinary language.

—Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

The Argument

Academics are bad at writing. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are rare. Why?

Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?

Pinker identifies a few commonly bandied causes and dispenses with them just as quickly. Perhaps bad writing is an intentional choice. But surely that can’t be, Pinker says. None of the colleagues he speaks to indulge in prose pyrotechnics to hoodwink their audience. They have nothing to hide. Well, if it isn’t intentional, then maybe we have the opposite problem: Are academics so encumbered by specialized jargon that they cannot make their work accessible? This does not fit either. Even in the sub-field that he is in, Pinker finds articles that are unreadable to him. The third explanation, that there is a secret cabal in academia that forces people to adopt an impenetrable style gets equally short shrift.

Classic Style

Should we continue our search for a cause, or should we pivot the conversation away from why academics write as if cotton candy stuffs their skulls to a conversation about how academics write and how they should write? Pinker decides on the latter and segues into a discussion of the book Clear and Simple as the Truth by French literary critic Francis-Noël Thomas, and US cognitive scientist Mark Turner. The book presents a case for the adoption of a classic style for writers interested in expository writing. As Pinker points out:

Among those styles is one they single out as an aspiration for writers of expository prose. They call it classic style, and they credit its invention to 17th-century French essayists such as Descartes and La Rochefoucauld.

Good style, Pinker argues, is that which has presentation as its purpose and disinterested truth as its motivation. In such a style

the writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. The writer and the reader are equals: The reader can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. And the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation.

In contrast to such a classic style, Pinker finds the style of the academic to be a blend of the business-minded and to the point practical style and the self-conscious and self-effacing postmodern style. Thomas and Turner do not use the term postmodern in the book, but Pinker does and its appearance at this point is prophetic, so I will keep the label.

A brief ironic anecdote: By his own admission, Pinker was compelled to write this article and The Sense of Style while reading John Keegan’s History of Warfare. In his words: “A History of Warfare surprised me in how impenetrable its first chapter was”. The irony here is that Keegan is listed several times by Thomas and Turner as an example of good classic writing.

Classic style is a product of its time. It appears as writers of the Renaissance transition away from Latin into their vernacular, and reaches an apogee in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thomas and Turner claim that the style that evolved in France is distinct and cleaner than what emerged in other European countries at the same time. Despite its far removed origin—I would trace it back further to Thucydides and Cicero—classic style favors many of the traits that people value today: clarity, accessibility, a sense of dialogue between reader and writer, and a leisurely presentation of ideas.

Pinker prefers classic style. He never says other styles are bad, but after having read other articles where he talks about writing, I do get a sense that he would prefer it if everything he read were written in classic style. That said, Thomas and Turner make it abundantly clear that in their taxonomy of styles, each style is suited to a purpose. Adopting a non-classic style does not make one a bad writer, and they give examples of non-classic writing from Samuel Johnson, John Milton, Marcel Proust, the authors of the Bible, and others. It may be possible that Pinker believes these to be terrible writers, but I will not insult Thomas and Turner by suggesting they think the same.

Classic style is the ideal style for academic writing according to Pinker. Most academic writing stinks, by contrast, because

the goal [of academics] is not so much communication as self-presentation—an overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild.

I have my doubts about this, but Pinker has had a longer academic career than me, and is perhaps privy to information I do not have. Pinker then identifies the common tropes of academic bad writing: metadiscourse, professional narcissism, apologizing, shudder quotes, hedging, metaconcepts, and nominalizations. Some of these terms are better defined than others—metaconcepts seems to be another term for “words Steven Pinker dislikes”—, but the basic point is that in writing there are things that make writing less clear.

So far, I agree. I do not believe academics are as bad at writing as Pinker claims they are, but a lot of academic writing can be improved. I think a more normative approach—prescribing rules instead of describing good and bad writing—would work better on academics who find that intentionally honing the craft of writing is not worth their time, but this is a disagreement about methods, and such disagreements can be solved through experiment. Steven likes experiments, has the funds and clout to pull them off, and is significantly more interested in this problem than I am, so I will leave the task to him.

Audience Matters

Let me touch on a point that Pinker muddles. All writing serves an audience. We often assume that academic writing serves (or should serve) a dual purpose: to inform both a peer and an interested layperson. But this assumption is often not borne out by reality. Complicated ideas can be simplified and explained to all in magazines such as Quanta, Nautilus, or Aeon, but the peer-reviewed journal article where the research is first presented is often accessible to a select few. One assumes more knowledge of the peer than the layperson, and can get away with more bad writing tropes if those tropes are commonly used in the field.

I am not saying that we should be more lax with writing standards when writing for our peers, but that the extent to which someone can adhere to classic style varies based on their audience. A large audience introduction to relativity can be given as a Socratic dialogue, illustrated with fruits and a table cloth, or given as a joke:

Astonomer #1: …..so anyway the cop pulls me over and asks if I realized that I had just run a red light. So I said that I did not see the light as being red, because it must have blue-shifted as i was approaching it. Astronomer #2: And he let you go? Astronomer #1: No. He gave me a speeding ticket instead.

—From https://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/2_11.html#subindex

None of these forms would be accepted for peer review. That does not make them bad writing, nor would the impenetrability of the peer reviewed piece to the layperson make it bad writing.

I stress this because it is obvious, and yet Pinker fails to see it. I also stress this to be charitable to Pinker, whose academic book “Language Learnability and Language Development” contains all of the tropes Pinker identifies as bad writing within the first two pages.

Who is to Blame?

Once he has dealt with the symptoms and prescribed a cure, Pinker returns to his initial question. Why does academic writing stink in the first place? How did we get here at all? He begins with a glib remark:

The theory that academese is the opposite of classic style helps explain a paradox of academic writing. Many of the most stylish writers who cross over to a general audience are scientists (together with some philosophers who are fans of science), while the perennial winners of the Bad Writing Contest are professors of English.

I am not sure where this trope comes from. I have heard it before, but cannot for the life of me remember where. Is it right? Anecdotally, I prefer general audience humanities writers to general audience scientists, but Pinker wouldn’t like anecdotes, so I did some digging.

In Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books, I counted 7 written by scientists. Among the books listed in The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written, of which over 90 are non-fiction, there are 9 written by scientists. In Guardian’s list of The 100 Best Nonfiction Books there are 8 written by scientists.

Well, so maybe books written by scientists are neither the most compelling nor the most influential, but it is still possible that they sell better. Of the 20 books on the NYT non-fiction best seller list for 2014, two are written by scientists, three if you count Ben Carson’s political polemic as “written by a scientist”, four if Randall Munroe, author of XKCD, counts as a professional scientist.

Of course, you could argue that most non-fiction is not written by professionals in either the humanities or the sciences. This is true; most non-fiction is written by journalists or essayists, that is, by practitioners of the humanities, not academics in the humanities. I do not have the patience to go through the lists and remove these folks from them, so I have instead been charitable with my counts. The counts include practitioners of science, such as doctors and engineers, even if they were not in academia at the time of publishing. I would argue that by not tallying up the thousands of years of fiction writing produced by the more easily recognised practitioners of the humanities (novelists, playwrights, or poets), I am already giving Pinker a leg up in this race.

It seems the remark is not true, but Steven Pinker is a busy man, and busy men have little time to read general audience books, and little patience to read outside of their area of expertise, so I understand where this is coming from.

The second part of that statement talks about the Bad Writing Contest. I like the Bad Writing Contest, but its stated goal is to “locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article”. Scholarly books and articles are not intended for general audiences. Pinker has moved goalposts here. Am I saying that we can excuse bad writing just for this? No. But I am saying the comparison is unfair. The oft cited Judith Butler quote that exemplifies terrible writing (cited in full in the article as well) is

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

—Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time

Is this clear? No. Could it be better? Sure. It would be remiss of me to not point to Butler’s cogent and readable defense of their writing here, but a simpler defense is to exemplify the inconsistency in Pinker’s argument. Is this any clearer?

Or this?

Or even this?

My point is not to besmirch all academics for writing poorly, but rather to point out that our ability to make sense of a text depends strongly on our familiarity with the subject. My other point, more clandestine, is that I did not have to go looking far for obtuse scientific writing. All of the examples above are snipped from either abstracts or the first sentence of highly cited works. That is, that part of the work that is meant for the widest consumption. The Butler quote above comes from the middle of the article. To compare like with like, here is the first sentence of Butler’s most cited academic work:

Perhaps Pinker is just a touch jealous that Butler’s work appeared in popular media before his.

Spooks of Post-modernism

Remember when I pointed out how Pinker used the word postmodern to characterize academic writing, and how that word does not appear in the book he uses to make his argument? Are you ready for a monumental take on one of the main causes of bad academic writing?

this guiding image of classic prose could not be farther from the worldview of relativist academic ideologies such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, and literary Marxism, which took over many humanities departments in the 1970s. Many of the winning entries in the Dutton contest [of bad writing] […] consist almost entirely of metaconcepts.

For all its directness, classic style remains a pretense, an imposture, a stance. Even scientists, with their commitment to seeing the world as it is, are a bit postmodern.

Well, hold on a minute, Steven, let me make sure I understand. We started off with a problem we both acknowledge: academic writing is bad. You list a few common explanations for why, but brush them off based on your discussions with fellow scientists. You then talk about how to fix the problem by adopting the classic style. Great, with you so far. You follow with an odd tangent on how, when scientists want to, they are more than capable of communicating their ideas clearly to a general audience, unlike English professors (weird flex, but fine). And now you want me to believe that, despite this, the main reason scientists got so bad at writing in the first place is because of those damned humanities people?

Are you OK, Steven? Have the postmodernists hurt you with their cultural critique? Are you harrowed by specters of Derrida when you plod the hallways of Harvard? Do you see a glimpse of Foucault in every shining earth-tone bowl you eat from? Were scientists before the 1970s like Prometheus unbound, carrying the light of knowledge to the huddled masses through lucid prose, only for their writing ability to be chained to a rock and picked at by the ravenous crow Lyotard?

Do the humanities have a bad writing crisis at all? Call me a simpleton, but I would imagine those fields that emphasize long form writing during undergraduate and early graduate programs would produce better writers on average just by sheer writing practice. Those fields are all in the humanities. To give anecdotal evidence: I have read academic papers written by professors of English, history, anthropology, philosophy, and even from (gasp) post-modernists; it took some work some of the time, but I have never run into something that stone-walled me. In contrast, I find most scientific articles outside of my area of expertise incomprehensible.

Even if the humanities have a bad writing problem, the claim that bad writing is an affect of the postmodernist school requires more proof than “Believe me, I am Steven Pinker”. I refuse to take on faith that scientists read postmodernist texts with any sort of regularity, or that the majority of them know much at all about postmodernism.

You could interpret Pinker’s comment differently. He could simply mean that the modes of production of academia (writing) reproduce aspects of the culture at large, and that the culture at large reflects post-modernist ideas. In a sense, that there is a marriage between a culture with all the complexities that that word entails, and the ways that people within that culture express themselves, and that this marriage is not so easily undone without conscientious effort from the part of the individual. Of course, this is a post-modernist reading of an invective against post-modernism, so I doubt Pinker means this.

I am being facetious. I am assuming Pinker knows what he is talking about when he uses words like post-modernism or post-structuralism, but he does not (what is a literary Marxist anyway?). These are vague terms meant to be intimidating. Scapegoats. Academics are not bad writers because they are bad at writing; it’s the Marxists, or the post-modernists.

A Simpler Explanation

Let’s play a game. You would like to compete in the 2024 Olympics in discus throw. You have never thrown a discus in your life, but you have certainly thrown things, so you have some of the basics down. How would you go about training? You haven’t exercised in some time, so the first thing to work on is your quarantine dad bod. After intense training, you reach a level of fitness beyond the average person. While you are training, you might want to figure out how to throw a discus in the first place, and which way works best for you. You need the physical ability to throw and the mental knowledge of how to throw to practice throwing.

The same applies to writing. To form a strong skill base, you should practice writing of any form for the sake of the writing itself. Write blog posts, academic articles, design documents, fiction, or poetry. The quality does not matter as much as the quantity. Refine the knowledge of what good writing looks like by reading good writers both within and outside your field. Identify styles you want to emulate and practice those until you have a good sense of which ones are most natural to you. Only once you have a strong base, and a knowledge of writing styles, that you can tune your writing style to an audience.

If you think that entails a lot of work, you are right. It does. No one was born with a natural ability for this. Descartes and La Rochefoucauld spent years of their childhood and adolescence drilling grammar and rhetoric until they could produce prose as limpid as Cicero’s at will. Students today are neither exposed to large bodies of text that could be called classic, nor are they required to drill examples of metonymy, ekphrasis, or paralipsis. English classes nowadays span centuries of thoughts and styles, and, to the extent possible in so limited a time, equip future writers to explore styles from classical to postmodern without playing favorites to some time period.

Steven Pinker cannot teach you how to write. Despite what he believes, no style is by nature best. Erasmus expresses similar sentiments in a dialogue against the classic Ciceronian style,

If you should take it into your head to try to make your face look like someone who doesn’t resemble you at all, you will waste your time.

—Ciceronianus; or, A dialogue on the best style of speaking

And here is Michel de Montaigne, the most influential French prose stylist of all, arguing for the adoption of a style true to the self:

Could I have assumed unto my selfe any other fashion, than mine owne accustomed, or more honourable and better forme, I would not have done it: For, al I seeke to reape by my writings is, they will naturally represent and to the life pourtray me to your remembrance.

—Essays, Book II, Chapter 37

To impose a style on a person that runs against the self is to strangle that self on the page.

As for the tacit assumption that Steven Pinker writes in the same style as La Rouchefoucauld, or even that he writes well at all:

Self-love is the greatest of flatterers.

La Rochefoucauld, Reflections