Everyone Hates Academic Writing. They’re Wrong.

There is no end to denunciations of academic writing. You’ve likely read one recently. They usually deride jargon and theory and despair over turgid and impenetrable prose. Most recently the British journalist James Marriott complained about “ostentatiously opaque language [that] was very often a showy substitute for the hard work of really thinking.” Or take a recent guide to academic writing, which suggests, “the revision goal should be that your intended readership will be able to follow your argument without referring to other works for help.” A prominent historian has recently claimed that “ideally … anyone should be able to pick up any history book, even an academic one, and understand its contents without the benefit of prior training.” Russell Jacoby, in a polemic against academic Marxism in the United States, laments the fact (as he sees it, at least) that now philosophy only can “prosper within departmental cultures” whereas in an earlier period, philosophers like William James and John Dewey “wrote for and were read by the educated public.”

Why do we so frequently lionize this kind of pseudopopulist orientation and just as frequently denounce the kind of writing most of our colleagues engage in in one way or another? Why do we reflexively believe that difficult writing, writing not oriented toward the mythical general public or educated general reader, writing deemed opaque or inaccessible, is an inherent problem?

A disclaimer: I love jargon, I love theory. I love the obscure, the opaque, the impenetrable. Three decades ago, as a wayward undergraduate, stumbling from major to major, attending class irregularly (at best) but reading frequently, I can still remember the moment that this world opened up to me. It was in a course on the cultural history of 20th-century America. For every reading or discussion of the Western as a film genre, or Babe Ruth as a national symbol, or the department store as consumer spectacle, there were words I’d never heard before (reification!) and a litany of proper names to hunt down (Gramsci, Lukács, Ferenczi, Marx, Freud, Du Bois). I was hooked.

I can still remember those exhilarating days: working a job all day in a warehouse, riding my bike to campus just in time to make it to class, barely able to keep my eyes open and then, by the end of class, being jolted awake by ideas — obscure, opaque, impenetrable, yet somehow captivating ideas. For a first-generation college student who had already almost failed out of college twice while dallying with what would come to be known as STEM disciplines, it was revelatory. I can think of little better in university life than a professor treating students seriously enough to share this intellectual world, half of which felt promisingly impenetrable. Academic writing was not an obstacle or a turn-off at all; it was, rather, a lure, to thinking, to not knowing, to a possible reconstitution of knowledge itself.

Why do so many, academics and nonacademics alike, feel so hostile toward academic writing? On the one hand, the denunciations of academic writing are mostly symptomatic of the writers’ own preferences; their imagination of the “educated general reader” is more projection than anything else. In short, while these writers find it easy to imagine this mythical figure, they find it quite difficult to imagine a reader who takes pleasure in the opaque and obscure, in the unsettling experience of not knowing. On the other hand, and perhaps more intellectually troubling and insidious, such denunciations, figured as pseudopopulist pleas for plain language, fundamentally misunderstand both academe and knowledge while obscuring the broader, material problems of higher education. The assumption seems to be that if the prose were less turgid and impenetrable, more easily digestible and thus easier to disseminate, more people would want to read it and want to engage in the courses of study associated with the humanities and social sciences. This is implicitly understood as an unalloyed good. While I imagine that most of us hope that someone reads what we publish, this seems fundamentally to misunderstand academic writing and the production of knowledge more broadly.

Jacoby’s example of William James and John Dewey inadvertently captures the problem. James and Dewey are long-lost exemplars precisely because, as Jacoby put it, they “wrote for and were read by the educated public.” This is certainly true, but are James and Dewey effective representatives for philosophy in the first half of the 20th century? How many hundreds of other philosophers, whose names most of us have likely forgotten, toiled away in the obscure and the impenetrable, the turgid and the mechanical? Indeed, how many essays by James and Dewey were simply not penned with that mythical educated reader in mind? And how many of their ideas came about while reading, thinking with, and thinking against, other academic writers whose gaze was inwards, who assumed not an educated reader, but a specialist, well-versed in the fundamental problems and ideas of the field? Indeed, one need not even look much further afield: James and Dewey’s fellow pragmatist and forebear, C.S. Peirce, was many things, but a beautiful writer for the educated public was not one of them.

All academic disciplines have a similar dynamic, where a set of canonical thinkers tend to organize the field, their names evoked talisman-like, from which arguments and interpretations proceed. Think of any body of work, and there are a set of names one can easily identify: “Theory” evokes Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva; for Queer Theory it’s Sedgwick, Bersani, Butler, Warner; for Postcolonialism there’s Spivak, Chakrabarty, Said, Guha; etc. These lists are not exhaustive, and we can reproduce them for any discipline or field. The point is this: We misrecognize fields when we reduce them, as Jacoby does, to the most prominent names. There are any number of reasons for their rise to canonical status, not least the force with which they made their interpretations and the institutional security that made it possible to devote themselves to writing. But our fascination with individual authors obscures a broader point: Academic knowledge production has always been a collective project.

Knowledge is not the product of individuals who then immediately disseminate it to the masses with nominally beautiful and easily digestible prose. Such a vision — common enough to be a mostly uninterrogated norm of much writing and writing advice — is the product of a still regnant liberal individualism. It is better to think of knowledge as a collective, iterative project that requires deep learning and a significant amount of time. What academe and its peculiar modes of writing do is sustain work that is not primarily oriented toward that general reader nor towards the metrics of market success. It can be obscure, dilating obsessively on some minor point in order to effect the subtlest shift in perception. It can sustain a series of internecine arguments that are often neither legible nor interesting to those outside of the field. The effects, though, are felt collectively, inside and outside of academe, not as the effect of one well-written, lucid, jargon- and theory-free text.

No matter the quality of the prose, the educated general reader (assuming he or she actually exists) is not going to exhibit sustained attention to one more social history of a local institution or town, one more ethnographic monograph, or one more literary interpretation of Moby-Dick. That is not because there is no need for more of this work. However, there are already thousands of each. Moreover, one individual study, no matter the quality of the prose, is not going to affect knowledge itself all that much. But collectively, these bodies of knowledge open up questions, proffer new possible interpretations, undo uninterrogated assumptions and norms, and, over time, produce new configurations of knowledge and, in turn, of the world itself.

To take my own discipline, history, as an example: It takes nothing away from E.P. Thompson’s monumental social history to say that the sea-change in historical imagination was an effect of the thousands upon thousands of social histories written in the wake of The Making of the English Working Class and that Thompson’s work, transformative as it was, was made possible by hundreds of other works, more obscure, less read by that educated reader. Indeed, many were probably turgid and impenetrable. These works, whatever their political motivations, were mostly written for and read by other academics, who had the time and inclination to read through the wider corpus, generate their own interpretations and critiques, and then produce another small contribution to that wider body of knowledge.

Which brings us to the problem obscured by the perpetual denunciations of academic writing: what has been lost is the material support for this kind of work, this kind of reading. We need not romanticize the golden age of the university in the United States — the postwar expansion of public higher education — to say that things are materially worse now. Full-time, tenure-track faculty positions in the humanities and much of the social sciences have dried up in the face of austerity and ideological maneuvering. As a result, the audience that existed for academic writing has become almost entirely precarious. With most faculty in contingent positions being paid poverty wages, there is certainly little to no time for the kind of reading that academic work requires, even though graduate programs still hold out the fantasy that it is possible. (This is not to minimize the remarkable work done by many contingent faculty but to note that it is more often than not done in spite of, not because of, higher education.)

At the same time, the metricization of higher education has left administrators as well as many faculty obsessed with citation counts, the implication being that the number of citations is indicative of the value and quality of an individual work. The collective understanding of academic work, which was never the dominant one in our hyperindividualizing culture, has mostly disappeared. This leads to essays claiming that academics have brought all these problems on themselves, or that a new attention to prose, a chasing of the elusive general public, will solve our problems. If only we were more relevant!

The historian and theorist Michel de Certeau once noted that historiography — and I would say by proxy any academic discipline — is the product of its institutional location. “All historiographical research,” Certeau wrote, “is articulated over a socioeconomic, political, and cultural place of production. It implies an area of elaboration that peculiar determinations circumscribe: a liberal profession, a position as an observer or a professor, a group of learned people, and so forth. It is therefore ruled by constraints, bound to privileges, and rooted in a particular situation. It is in terms of this place that its methods are established, its topography of interests can be specified, its dossiers and its interrogation of documents are organized.”

Certeau here marks out the field of academe itself, its inward assumptions and necessities, the institutional conditions of knowledge production. Without them, none of this happens. The ongoing denunciation of academic writing by academics and nonacademics alike, the fantasy that the educated reader and market success should be our ever-present object of desire, that this alone will save the humanities, is naïve, shortsighted, and a great contributor to the decline of academe itself. Maybe we should defend what we do a little more passionately.