Here’s an interesting essay about the incomprehensibility of some academic writing. (Via Althouse) I can’t speak for the problem in academia generally, but I think the problem in legal scholarship is that complex and sophisticated words create the impression of complex and sophisticated arguments. Indeed, it’s much easier to create that impression through words. (I’m reminded of the reaction of my fellow first-year law students when we couldn’t understand what one of our professors was saying: “He’s so brilliant I can barely follow him!”)
rhhardin says:
Indeed, it’s much easier to create that impression through the former than the latter.
Don’t spoil the moment by scanning back, is my advice.
December 2, 2009, 2:40 pmOrin Kerr says:
rhhardin,
I don’t think I understand your comment. Perhaps you could try again?
December 2, 2009, 2:42 pmDisability Insurance says:
The use of sophisticated words and sentences can be detrimental to you if you are not using them properly. I find it humorous when this happens and the writers are called out in class. If you are going to use these words and phrases, you might as well know what they mean and how to use them.
December 2, 2009, 2:49 pmjcm says:
Kant about another philosopher: since he can not be deep , he is obscure.
December 2, 2009, 2:51 pmAnd about another one: in his work. what is good it is not original. What is is original it is not good.
Some left wing south american intellectual: We can not be deep so we will be obscure
Guy says:
Not just academia, this is a sickness to which lawyers (and judges!) are particularly prone. It’s especially hilarious when the approach backfires because you can tell the speaker or writer has rarely, if ever, heard the words they’re using appropriately in context.
December 2, 2009, 2:56 pmGuy says:
I don’t understand what rhhardin is trying to say either, but I’m suitably impressed.
December 2, 2009, 2:57 pmrhhardin says:
“Former” and “latter” refer to things already forgotten from the previous complex sentence.
I’d guess the average to comprehend the pair would be three rescannings, possibly with drawing of light pencil lines connecting the words, and then trying again to see if the resulting connections made any sense.
So it’s an example of the incomprehensible style itself.
December 2, 2009, 2:59 pmThe Truth Is Out There HAHA says:
This post reminds me of the time a professor, on a bet/dare or some such, wrote an academic paper intentionally full of nonsense, and tried to see if they could get it published on the basis that it sounded smart.
From the Wikipedia article on the paper:
Sokal’s experiment directly tested Gross and Levitt’s claims by attempting to get a paper published in a top deconstructionist journal. If they were correct, the content of the paper would not matter and could be filled with complete nonsense; what would matter would be fawning references to other deconstructionist authors and the proper amount of feminist and socialist thought.
Sokal produced a paper that argued that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that Rupert Sheldrake’s New Age concept of the “morphogenetic field” could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. It concludes that, since “physical ‘reality’ … is at bottom a social and linguistic construct”, a “liberatory science” and “emancipatory mathematics” must be developed that spurn “the elite caste canon of ‘high science’” for a “postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project”.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
See also http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ — some CompSci students created a program that generates CS papers full of CS-sounding nonsense, and one of their papers got accepted at a conference.
Good stuff.
December 2, 2009, 3:02 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Oh yes. I can’t give a cite, but there was a study done many years ago at, I think, Amherst, where academics were asked to rate the intelligence of the authors of two documents which said the same thing, one concisely and the other in academese. The faculty who read the sesquipedalian version gave a much higher estimate of the author’s intelligence than those who read the concise version.
Needless to say, this study has not been discussed in polite society since somewhere in the Sixties.
December 2, 2009, 3:08 pmOrin Kerr says:
rhhardin,
So you made an incomprehensible comment contending that my sentence was incomprehensible, but no one understood your point! I like that.
I’ll clarify the sentence just to make sure you don’t cancel your subscription to our blog, but it seems to me that any difficulty in understanding the post was not due to any effort by me to make the sentence complicated to impress readers.
December 2, 2009, 3:09 pmKirk Parker says:
Orin,
And this time, use bigger words.
December 2, 2009, 3:13 pmrhhardin says:
Oh I don’t know. “Former” and “latter” isn’t exactly informal register.
December 2, 2009, 3:13 pmMartinned says:
Nabokov’s lecture notes on literature are awesome for many reasons, but one of them is applicable here. He writes:
December 2, 2009, 3:14 pmyankee says:
Comments on that post are closed, so I’m just going to take this opportunity to say I never want to hear anything about the trustees of Dartmouth College ever again. My guess is that maybe 0.01% of readers care about that subject, and I’d call that a very high estimate.
Could some of the other Conspirators at least tell Zywicki how to hide content?
[OK Comments: If you have a preference as to what you would like a blogger to write about, or not write about, you can always write a civil e-mail to that blogger.]
December 2, 2009, 3:14 pmMartinned says:
Well, presumably “verbal” isn’t an element in IQ tests or the SATs for nothing. Verbal intelligence is part of intelligence as we usually understand the concept. So using “academese” might reasonably indicate higher intelligence. (Which is only one problem I have with this “study”. The other one is how they can be said to say “the same thing”.)
December 2, 2009, 3:17 pmwohjr says:
Todd is very upset at the way things have turned out in Hanover, so I’d expect more like this. The contradictions inherent in the claims he makes against dear old Dartmouth and his cowardly posts seems to not concern him. Which is too bad, because I’d like to hear how the Phrygan thing is working out for him
December 2, 2009, 3:27 pmKevin R says:
“I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.”
December 2, 2009, 3:31 pmEric Rasmusen says:
Thank you for linking to the Hakes article. It rings true.
The problem it concerns is not exactly poor writing, though. Rather, it is the problem of the brilliant but simple new idea. If you explain it simply, people say, “That’s obvious”, even if they would never have thought of it in a million years. Thus, you have to math it up, or disguise it in a convoluted hypothetical, or quote in foreign languages to get it published.
When I visited Chicago back in 1989 I was amazed at what George Stigler and Gary Becker could do in seminars. They’d ask a simple one-sentence question (“Have you thought about X?”) and entirely demolish (or expand) somebody’s paper. Unfortunately, many of us refuse to recognize that kind of Feynmannian brilliance, which, indeed, is distinct from IQ.
I was just thinking of this topic today because I have what might be a novel idea on why deposit insurance is useful. It’s so simple that I could write the paper in words, with no equations. But I wonder whether a top journal in economics would publish it then, even if the editor believed that the idea was worthy of a Nobel Prize.
What’s the solution? One is to wrap up the idea in unnecessary math modelling. Another, which is often used, is to have two parts to the paper. The first part is to explain the idea in words or with a numerical example. Everybody reads that part, and referees decide whether to accept the paper based on it. The second part is the general model, all mathed up. Referees require that part, but they don’t really read it.
I should add that I am a conventional modern economist, constantly building math models and believing that they are utterly necessary for most economic research. But not every idea needs a math model.
December 2, 2009, 3:41 pmEric Rasmusen says:
p.s.– I found Zywicki’s Dartmouth post fascinating. It’s nice to see real law discussed on law blogs, instead of just constitutional law. If you look at this as a contract post rather than a Dartmouth post you might find it more interesting.
December 2, 2009, 3:45 pmjss says:
I had a friend some time ago who was an atty for the Arkansas Public Service Commisssion, whicn necessarily involved taking litigation. A farmer/landowner was on the witness stand being questioned about his property. When asked by his atty, if “this was low lying land with poor drainage”, the farmer replied, “well if that is lawyering for swamp, that’s what it is.”
Gotta love those lawyers
December 2, 2009, 3:53 pmBob_R says:
In the early ’90′s a young Russian emigre math professor I was writing a paper with told me that he was having trouble getting used to writing for western journals. He said that here the goal was to tell the reader how to do the proof. In Russia the object was to convince the reader that you could do the proof without telling them how to do it. It might have been a joke, but I thought it was a great story.
December 2, 2009, 4:09 pmDjDiverDan says:
There is a Bankruptcy Judge in Texas who publishes quite a few opinions, and I’ve often thought he was much more interested in displaying his erudition than in reaching the correct legal result. For obvious reasons (like I might appear in front of him again) he shall remain nameless.
December 2, 2009, 4:14 pmHugh says:
I remember reading George Orwell’s essay on political writing a few years ago. It addressed a similar issue: a lack of clarity in the use of language will result in poor thinking and poor analysis.
After reading that essay, I applied it to my work. I had several paragraphs of boilerplate that had been handed down to me. I thought it was not very clear. I spent a month rewriting it and I succeeded in making it much more understandable.
I think that a brilliant person is one who can take a complex idea and find a way to explain it to any audience in an understandable way.
December 2, 2009, 4:17 pmGeorge Orwell: Politics and the English Language
Mark Field says:
I always liked Lincoln’s description of someone who was verbose: “He can compress the most words into the fewest ideas of any man I ever met.”
December 2, 2009, 4:23 pmJRL says:
You mean like this one:
“As time went on, the comradery deteriorated in conjunction with the sobriety of the participants.”
December 2, 2009, 4:34 pmKirk Parker says:
I’m with Eric R.: I find the stuff about Dartmouth moderately interesting, partly in its own right, partly as Yet Another Example Of Lost Diversity.
December 2, 2009, 5:03 pmJoseph Slater says:
I want to thank Martinned for the Nabokov quote: a real LOL moment for me, at least.
I think part of it is that the humanities and social sciences suffer, to some degree, from envy of the technical language of the hard sciences. That language makes a subject “hard” which must mean you have to be “smart” to understand it. Of course it’s inevitable that various fields will develop some jargon of their own, and indeed to a point it’s actually good and necessary. But only to a point.
Second, I think academic writing really went off the rails with influence of the “post-modern” / deconstructionist / Derrida-and-Foucalt-influenced stuff in the 80s and 90s. This genre often featured writing that was intentionally frustratingly dense, obscure, and unclear, often to the point of seeming self-parody. And, IMHO, a lot of that functioned in part to hide ideas that were indeed either obvious or obviously wrong.
December 2, 2009, 5:16 pmTom from RI says:
Some of my law school classmates had a professor for a first year course who was reportedly brilliant in the area of commercial law. He said a number of things that my classmates said were noteworthy but puzzling including: “If the moon is blue like an orange you better tell the jury.” Yes, they swore he said that, and no, no one understood it.
December 2, 2009, 5:34 pmKirk Parker says:
Joseph Slater,
No doubt they do, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that (in most cases) technical subjects develop jargon to clarify, not to obscure.
December 2, 2009, 6:01 pmdrunkdriver says:
This goes on outside the academy too- we all see motions and court opinions which waste a page or two of the reader’s time “explaining” generic background legal principles (such as the standards for granting MSJ or no cause of action), when a sentence or two would’ve done the trick in the context of the case.
Sometimes it’s obvious it was done to make the writer look impressive. Other times it’s just filler when there is really very little of substance to say but people just can’t bring themselves to keep it simple- the equivalent of an “um” (except it would take 15 minutes to say it all out loud).
December 2, 2009, 6:03 pmrmd says:
I’ll take a stab at it. I think he was trying to say that if a fact is non-obvious, counter-intuitive or unexpected, don’t expect anyone to figure it out on their own; make sure they understand it. Having said that, yeah, it sounds like somebody watches too much Matlock. Too cute by half. Also, I’ve read this entire comment thread trying to think of some way to tie it to the one about educated women and arousal.
December 2, 2009, 6:21 pmCrunchy Frog says:
This is not a new phenomenon:
December 2, 2009, 6:22 pmAnon314 says:
Many of my law professors seem stuck on the teaching to impress rather than to inform rut. It’s very easy to tell when the subject matter itself is easy, but the way it’s presented makes it appear to be the most difficult and arbitrary nonsense in the world. It makes class an incredibly painful experience, and wastes my time and money.
December 2, 2009, 6:39 pmSebastian the Ibis says:
Complexity impresses, and it makes an idea difficult to attack. The converse is the most basic rule of negotiation/investment: If you don’t know who the sucker is at the table, it is you. I never understood this until I had to attend a road show promoting some fund developed by a Nobel Prize winner. The client needed to have a representative present but had no interest in investing in anything that he could not understand. Essentially it was a basic investment strategy with lots of extraneous overly complicated mathematics all based upon guessed inputs. However everyone in the room was too overwhelmed by the math to look seriously at the strategy, so they were just left with memories of the “brilliant” pitchmen.
I think many entrenched members of the “academy” are B.S. artists just like investment bankers. They do not know the law, see D. Marvin Jones, so they cover this up by writing needlessly complex papers. They then shun any “academic” or “scholarship” that is not similar B.S. While I was on the appointments committee at a law school I could swear that whoever used the word “normative” and all of its variations the most in their job-talk would get the offer.
December 2, 2009, 6:49 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
That’s pretty much of a non-sequitur: the most using ‘academese’ indicates is possession of a large but not necessarily accurate vocabulary; to wit, a professor I recall who wrote “abrogate” when he meant ‘arrogate’ and where ‘usurp’ would have served him better. So, no, the use academese indicates no more than slight intelligence: an IQ of 120 is perfectly adequate to amass a vocabulary of vaguely understood long words and string them together in a way that will pass muster with like intellects.
As for how the same thing can be said two ways, compare “immanentize the eschaton” with “trying to create heaven on Earth.”
December 2, 2009, 8:09 pmBlar says:
There was a study a few years ago that found that writing with bigger words in a way that was harder to understand led the author to be seen as less intelligent. There may be some situations where you get the opposite effect, though.
Daniel Oppenheimer (2005) – Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with using long words needlessly.
December 2, 2009, 8:23 pm(pdf)
Fub says:
The variant on this I’ve always heard is “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, then baffle ‘em with BS.”
December 2, 2009, 8:34 pmJohn Moore says:
I’m not sure I agree with that. Some of the most brilliant stuff is written without a lot of jargon. For example, read Claude Shannon’s seminal paper on Information Theory (PDF).
December 2, 2009, 8:51 pmfranking says:
Following up on the Geeorge Orwell comment, David Foster Wallace hammered this subject in his 2001 essay, “Tense Present” [also published as “Authority and American Usage”, first published in Harper’s, reprinted online here: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
Much more, all with the typical DFW terrifying clarity.
F
December 2, 2009, 8:58 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » “Writing to Impress Rather than Inform” -- Topsy.com says:
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December 2, 2009, 9:11 pmJon Rowe says:
The only time I think you should stray from the “inform” not “impress” rule is when a bigger word gives the prose a stylistic flair — in other words, to make your prose more interesting and compelling. Some of the small, clear, plain English terms make the prose come off a bit dry if that rule is stuck to religiously.
December 2, 2009, 9:56 pmRicardo says:
Jargon does have its benefits. In law, there are subtle differences between words like arrest v. detain, jail v. prison, ordinary v. gross negligence, confess v. plead guilty, etc. that I doubt the average member of the general public understands. For more complex ideas or more subtle distinctions, typically you need more complex vocabulary. Once the meaning of words is agreed upon members of a discipline, you can save a lot of space by not having to devote several paragraphs at the beginning of every article defining and explaining every concept you are going to use. And you don’t have to go through the exercise of inventing your own unique short-hand jargon for each concept. Malcolm Gladwell does this, for instance, by creating cutesy jargon terms — but then he often misapplies these concepts because he never really precisely defined (or maybe even understood) them.
December 2, 2009, 10:35 pmcubanbob says:
Sometimes the obvious is not so obvious to the over educated and to the sophisticates and common sense is not all that common.
December 2, 2009, 10:36 pmMark Field says:
Better would be “to bring about the Last Judgment”.
In general I agree that translation is possible; it’s just sometimes a little pithier one way.
December 2, 2009, 10:52 pmreadery says:
The joys of semifundamental sesquipedalianism.
December 3, 2009, 1:10 amJeff Walden says:
Count me as another person who found the Dartmouth post worth reading in its entirety. (I did skip the briefs, however, as I’m reading to understand the legal concepts at a very basic level, and the topic’s far afield enough from what really fascinates me that I couldn’t justify the time for that level of detail.)
December 3, 2009, 2:18 amhanmeng says:
Huh. Since Dan Rather got fired, no need to impress him anymore.
December 3, 2009, 6:28 amEric Rasmusen says:
John Moore points to Shannon’s info theory paper as an example of a big idea done nontechnically. But that is exactly my point. It was a good paper, and it did get published— but in the year 1948. Could it be published today? (and it was in the Bell Systems Technical Journal— which maybe was prestigious, but maybe not–I don’t know).
December 3, 2009, 8:30 am