And everyone will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
“If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a singularly deep young man this deep young man must be!”
A glance at most academic journals would leave readers overwhelmed by academic doublespeak and nodding their heads in agreement with Gilbert’s lines. But this is to be expected, says Professor Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. According to Armstrong, there are some important rules to follow if you want to publish an article in a scientific or medical journal. In an article in a 1982 issue of the Journal of Forecasting, Armstrong recommends that the aspiring scholar choose an unimportant topic, agree with existing beliefs, use convoluted methods, withhold some of the data, and write the article in stilted, obtuse prose. Armstrong reports that, in one study, academics reading articles in scientific journals rated the authors’ competence higher when the writing was less intelligible than when it was clear. Other studies conclude that obscure writing helps those who have little to say. In other words, in academia, as in most professions, doublespeak pays.
A recent issue of the American Sociological Review carried an article that stated,
In effect, it was hypothesized that certain physical data categories including housing types and densities, land use characteristics, and ecological location, constitute a scalable content area. This could be called a continuum of residential desirabilities. Likewise, it was hypothesized that several social strata categories, describing the same census tracts, and referring generally to the social stratification system of the city, would also be scalable. This scale could be called a continuum of socio-economic status. Thirdly, it was hypothesized that there would be a high positive correlation between the scale types of each continuum.
In ether words, rich people live in big houses in nice neighborhoods.
Not to be outdone by the sociologists, the prestigious journal PMLA (for Publications of the Modern Language Association, a major organization of scholars of English and foreign languages and literature) published an article in its October 1981 issue that contained this gem:
We have now come to see, however, that the partitioning of art and history derives from a false dichotomy. Historical awareness is a construing of records already encoded, which can only be interpreted according to a historical poetics. And Active ideologies are the stuff of history, which must be comprehended by linguistic and dramatistic analysis. All cultural phenomena are artifacts, at once real and Active. This binocular perspective enables us to restore enacted courtesy, courtesy as lived, to the realm of poetic performance and to consider anew what such a way of living would have been like.
The entire article and most of the issue were written in similar prose, as is every issue of the journal.
A 1972 issue of the Antioch Review carried a review that contained such typical scholarly prose as this: “. . . Monod is constrained to use the word ‘teleonomy,’ which stands for living ‘objects endowed with a purpose or project,’ and which includes the genetic replication of such purpose. Yet in no way is this to be confused with ‘teleology’ à la Aristotle, or with final causation, and certainly not with ‘animism,’ which is the projection of organic teleonomy into the universe itself. This is the author’s bête noir, and his stable extends from Plato through Leibnitz and Hegel, down to dialectical materialism. . . .” After reading these examples of scholarly prose, we can better understand “the germs of the transcendental terms” Gilbert was writing about over one hundred years ago. As we have seen, scholarly prose hasn’t changed much since then.
In their article, “Needs Assessment and Holistic Planning,” published in the May 1981 issue of Educational Leadership, authors Roger Kaufman and Robert Stakevas point out that “in order to achieve products, outputs, and outcomes through processes, inputs are required.” An article titled “The Collection of Data About the Nature and Degree of Curriculum Implementation,” published in the January 1985 issue of the CCSEDC Quarterly, states that “the significantly lower scores of implementers in their informational, personal, and management concerns suggest the wisdom of investigating means to raise these concerns, perhaps through increasing curriculum visibility.”
Drop into any meeting of just about any academic society, organization, or group, and you’ll find even the titles of the papers being presented incomprehensible. At the 1984 meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications, there were papers on “Visual Complexity in Television News: A Times Series Analysis of Audience Evaluations of an Electronically Estimated Form Complexity Variable” and “Elaborating the Relationship Between TV Viewing and Beliefs About the Real World: Possible Contingent Variables.” Or, if you had attended the 1988 meeting of the Academy of Management, you could have heard this paper presented: “Enter and Die: Effects of Incumbents’ Waiting Periods on the Duration of Industry Entrants’ Participation in 5 Subfields of the Medical Diagnostic Imaging Industry (1959–1986).”
At the annual meeting of the Mid-South Educational Research Association in 1985, a paper on reading comprehension among Navy recruits included this sentence: “The inferential analysis on high school graduation status indicates that higher percentages of high school graduates are included among the recruits during and immediately following the periods of enlistment restrictions to primary high school graduates.”
At the 1988 conference of the American Sociological Association, one panelist said that “In the emphasis on diversity, the notion of a hegemonic sexual discourse is deconstructed, even among those who claim to have one.” The speaker then went on to say that the “exploration of sexuality within feminism is attentive to the postmodern concern with the multiplying mutations of the self.” Other phrases that popped up were “democratic hegemony,” “distributionally conservative notions,” “inequalities in the sex-gender system,” and the “discourse of status ambivalence in clothing and fashion.”
In 1987 Princeton University Press published The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980, by Lisa Anderson, a book whose prose is illustrated by this sample sentence:
It is also an argument for taking the variation in the periphery as a starting point for investigation and, more importantly, for examining the historical interaction of indigenous and foreign notions of political authority, structures of domination and mechanisms of appropriation as they combine to create the unprecedented circumstances and institutions of politics in the modern periphery.
It’s probably not surprising to learn that teachers like that kind of writing. Although English teachers like to say they prefer the clear, simple style in writing, when given a choice they tend to choose the heavy, ponderous style. In the September 1981 issue of College English, a journal read by a great number of college writing teachers, Professors Rosemary Hake of Chicago State University and Joseph Williams of the University of Chicago reported on research in which they asked English teachers in high schools and colleges to judge groups of student essays. In each group of essays, Hake and Williams included several pairs of essays that differed only in their style.
The results were depressing. The teachers consistently preferred the essays that had sentences such as, “The absence of priorities and other pertinent data had the result of the preclusion of state office determinations as to the effectiveness of the committee’s actions in targeting funds to the areas in greatest need of program assistance.” The teachers consistently gave lower ratings to the essays that were written with sentences such as this: “Because the state office set no priorities and did not have pertinent data, it could not determine how effectively the committee targeted funds to those areas whose programs most needed assistance.” Both of these sentences
