A while back, a prominent law review asked me to review a book on a topic of interest to me. I readily agreed, on condition that the review be relatively short. When it came time to sit down and read the book, however, I found it extremely difficult to understand; the book was loaded with unnecessary jargon, long, run-on sentences, and big, obscure words where short, simple ones would do fine. I found myself sometimes reading a sentence five times to try to figure out what the author was trying to say.
After several hours of this, I gave up. I sent an email to the law review editors to the effect that while I was loath to go back on my commitment to review the book, I’d rather be boiled in hot oil than spend my time giving this book the attention it needed to be ready to start writing a review.
I won’t claim to be the best writer in the world, but I do try hard to make all of my academic writing readable, even by non-academics. I’m not sure that this is always a career benefit–some student law review editors, the basic scholarly gatekeepers of our profession, likely confuse turgid, elliptical, and jargon-filled prose with erudition. But, as my anecdote hopefully shows, going the opposite route also has its costs.
UPDATE: All this bring to mind the following from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience:
If you’re anxious for to shine, in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.
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 very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be.
Orin Kerr says:
I think you should have written a one-paragraph review explaining that you couldn’t make it through the book because of how poorly it was written. It would be memorable and helpful, and it would certainly meet your criteria of being “relatively short.”
January 21, 2010, 10:20 pmdrunkdriver says:
A review along the lines Orin suggests- “this book’s ideas are buried in unnecessary jargon that renders them incomprehensible, an all too common problem”- might have started a badly needed ripple effect throughout the academy.
January 21, 2010, 10:42 pmll says:
I think David is too nice for those choices. And he doesn’t want to become heretic, excommunicant, and PNG in “the academy.”
January 21, 2010, 10:46 pmMikhail Koulikov says:
Thing is, one person’s jargon is another’s ‘least complicated/confusing – or most accepted – way to say something.’ Especially when you get to areas like critical theory. The other thing being, just like post-modernist fiction, or futurist poetry, academic literature is *not* meant for someone who doesn’t know what to expect.
…then again, neither is the law review/legal brief/judicial opinion style.
January 21, 2010, 10:53 pmSandy MacHoots says:
I think it was Mark Tushnet who, in the waning days of the Critical Legal Studies movement, noted that CLS tended to rely on a dense and impenetrable jargon because if you put its principles into ordinary English (e.g., “everything is connected to everything else”) they just sounded banal.
January 21, 2010, 10:55 pmneurodoc says:
So tell us, did the law review editors assign it to someone else and publish a review of the book? If so, did that person give the book higher marks than you would have? Do you think a good book editor could have made something of it, or was there simply no there there to make anything out of?
January 21, 2010, 10:56 pmChrisTS says:
In an – admittedly perverse – way, I am happy to learn that scholarly works even in law are now laden with obfuscating jargon and turgid prose.
I have [tried to] review any number of articles/books in philosophy in recent years, only to be confounded by the current in-speak.
And, I note that philosophy is nowhere near as jargon laden as many other ‘humanities’ disciplines these days. It is one thing to develop a technical terminology for precision; it is quite another thing to either adopt the current lingo or simply indulge in turgidity in order to seem profound.
Meanwhile, my Lit Crit colleagues insist that ‘communicating’ is a regressive aim for student writing.
January 21, 2010, 11:00 pmcookiemonsta says:
“I readily agreed, on condition that”
Is “on condition that” preferable to “on the condition that”? I don’t really like articles, it makes me feel Russian when I leave them out.
January 21, 2010, 11:06 pmDave Hardy says:
A psychiatrist friend remarked, upon hearing a presentation worded in that manner, that it does not require intelligence to obscure and complicate things. It requires intelligence to make the obscure and complicated understandable.
January 21, 2010, 11:30 pmMalvolio says:
I disagree. I have zero legal training, but I find well-written briefs and opinions a joy to read (of course, that’s using the somewhat tendentious definition of “well-written” as “stuff even I can comprehend”, but many opinions seem to meet my criterion).
January 21, 2010, 11:31 pmCornellian says:
There isn’t really much of an incentive for law professors to write well. As you say, writing badly may make naive law review editors think you’re smart, in an emperor’s new clothes sort of way, and no one reads the vast majority of law review articles anyway.
January 21, 2010, 11:33 pmDavid McCourt says:
I think you are missing the point: in certain disciplines, at least, the jargon is what matters. There’s no other “there” there. That’s why, in conjunction with one of our country’s leading academic institutions, I am makintg this one-time offer available to Volokh Conspirators and readers alike:
Now you too can sound like an academic conjuror of the labyrinthine phrase, the architecture of the textural, the poetics of the aporetic. Get it?
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Haven’t picked up any chicks lately? Don’t waste your time dreaming about the what-if, when you can employ the mesmerizing power of the re-if. Why remain a hermit when, with with a little hermeneutics, you can reshape the contours of your experience, and the contours you’re experiencing? All you need do is blind them with pseudo-social science lit crit terminology, and recherché la femme.
Imagine yourself chatting up girls — er, persons — effortlessly, by unspooling a never-ending stream of these mind-benders at will:
A little of this ivy-clad dirty talk, accompanied by the occasional meaningful look, and you’ll be following her up the stairs to her studio apartment for some new modalities in transformative discourse in no time. Make the syntactical finally earn its keep as sin-tactical.
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January 21, 2010, 11:33 pmJ. Otto Pohl says:
I think Orin’s approach is the best. There is no reason for academics to write in a manner in which ordinary people can not understand them. Making complex ideas and events clear to people without a background in the subject is the mark of good academic writing. Unfortunately, a very large number of academics are not good writers.
January 22, 2010, 12:13 amRoger the Shrubber says:
That sentence isn’t exactly a model of clarity, either. :)
January 22, 2010, 12:36 amjosh bornstein says:
Roger,
January 22, 2010, 12:58 amI think that’s a bit unfair. While I might have used a full stop after “understand” and then started a 2nd sentence, I didn’t feel that the original was unclear in any way.
yankee says:
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! — Calvin
January 22, 2010, 1:03 amAnonsters says:
ChrisTS (and everyone else for that matter):
Read Jerry Fodor.
January 22, 2010, 1:31 amTRE says:
That was my biggest shock coming into law school, just how bad all the opinions, articles, and textbooks were. Judges are not chosen due to their compositional skills.
January 22, 2010, 2:09 amKirk Parker says:
Really, couldn’t you have borrowed the classic one-line review:
January 22, 2010, 2:20 amMike McDougal says:
Critical theory probably has the worst English-language academic writing.
January 22, 2010, 2:40 amVisitor Again says:
Briefs, opinions and law review articles ought to be understandable to nonlawyers who are of normal intelligence. If they aren’t, then something is wrong with the writing, the subject is one of the very few in the law that is beyond the comprehension of a person of normal intelligence or the reader lacks sufficient interest or patience.
I have sometimes tested my briefs for readability by giving them to my girlfriend to read. If she has difficulty with something, I work on it.
The brief that reads well, that is readily understandable, gets you in the door.
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January 22, 2010, 6:04 amFC says:
Why would we ever do that?
I prefer old-fashioned strategies of discourse. Critical Theory is too avant-garde for me. Theory, full stop, is all right I guess but nothing beats the quaint homeyness of post-Structuralism. Ah, those were the good old days.
January 22, 2010, 8:27 amhugh says:
I reread George Orwell’s essay on political writing on a regular basis. It identifies and condemns this kind of poor writing.
January 22, 2010, 10:33 amlgm says:
Agreed, in the first part. When I review a manuscript for a publisher, I tell them what I think if the writing. If the writing is so bad that I can’t follow the arguments, I just say: “Don’t publish.” It’s not the reviewer’s job to drill through layers of obscure writing.
How do you help a bad technical writer? I give my PhD students a copy of Strunk and White when they start writing their first paper. “Read it.” I tell them. Maybe they do, but it seems to have no impact. “Imagine how a reader would see this sentence.” I say. They can’t seem to put themselves in the reader’s place.
Disagreed in the last part: One should assume that the reader has the technical training to follow technical arguments. Sometimes sentences in technical writing don’t mean what the words would seem to mean taken out of context. For example, the “climategate” emails don’t say what they seem to outsiders to say — at least not the ones I read.
January 22, 2010, 11:21 amDavid McCourt says:
lgm,
Are you sure you should be judging other people’s writing? Your post contains numerous errors, including sentence fragments, misused prepositions, a capital letter after a colon, periods after quotes in the middle of sentences, and at least one misspelling. Physician, heal thyself.
January 22, 2010, 11:56 amDJR says:
Was the book written by Richard Posner, by any chance?
January 22, 2010, 12:26 pmbadlaw says:
Bernstein, I like your writing the best on this site (no offense to the other bloggers). You have a lilting sarcastic tone at times and that makes you interesting to read.
January 22, 2010, 1:51 pmarch1 says:
Kirk Parker says:
Straying off topic, here are two additional short, wittily merciless reviews:
-This book fills a much-needed gap in the literature.
January 22, 2010, 7:51 pm-This book is both good and original. The good parts are not original, however, and the original parts are not good.
lgm says:
Hey, it’s a frakkin’ (sp?) blog. `Nuff said. Yes?
January 22, 2010, 8:19 pmFC says:
I didn’t know that Joseph Adama taught legal writing.
January 23, 2010, 3:09 amDjDiverDan says:
Rule Number 1 of Writing Well — Eschew Obfuscation.
January 23, 2010, 11:22 amDavid McCourt says:
I think the complete fumblerule was: “eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation.”
January 23, 2010, 11:56 amChrisTS says:
I have read quite a bit of Fodor…but, I don’t get the point of your recommendation.
January 23, 2010, 5:01 pmJulie says:
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regards
January 30, 2010, 3:51 pmJulie