Sometimes. I recently had an editorial consultant tell me that manuscripts come to publishers in much worse shape than they used to because the university secretaries who used to edit and format the professors’ work have disappeared.—Leila Salisbury
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I get frustrated when critics attack scholarly language and pull language out of a scholarly monograph with little context to make their point. It can at times even seem anti-intellectual. Scholars often change a field radically through a book that is intellectually complex, with complicated language, and those books are important to publish alongside those titles that are more accessible. —Brian Halley
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Publishers, press directors, editors, scholars, and other insiders share their views on the state and future of academic publishing.
Yes — and no. The academy is absolutely right to encourage the kinds of ideas that are most concisely expressed with a $12 word. But if those ideas can’t also be explained in clear, accessible language, you have to wonder whether there is a clear idea there at all. — Elizabeth Branch Dyson
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It doesn’t deserve the bad rap. Academics write about the most complicated subjects in the world. They have to use specialized language, draw on obscure bodies of knowledge, and convey their ideas with the sort of precision and attention to minor distinctions that would paralyze most journalists. Inevitably, much of what they write will not be accessible to nonspecialists or, for that matter, their editors. And many scholars do an extraordinary job of making incredibly complex ideas comprehensible. —Ian Malcolm
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It often is deserved. Why cannot more people who write about the arts write like Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus and Mary Gaitskill or Ingrid Rowland or John O’Malley, S.J.? —Lindsay Waters
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Probably. Not everyone can be Steven Pinker! Scholarly prose has improved, though, since the excesses of the 1980s. Few scholars today can afford to speak in language that does not carry across fields. —Gita Devi Manaktala
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We regularly talk with scholars in developmental stages who understand that their book may have a real market beyond the academy if written a certain way. And then they become beholden to the demands of their advisers who want things done as they always have been. Tenure committees, please allow scholars the latitude to write to the fullest potential of their material! —James McCoy
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All too often one finds a thicket of opaque prose and jargon that at best obfuscates meaning, at worst covers for the sad fact that there are no ideas. I have developed the five-page rule for proposals or manuscripts. If, by Page 5, I do not understand what the book is about, I reject it. —Beatrice Rehl
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An author has the obligation to seduce the reader, so that we’ll want to and, indeed, have to read the story being told. —Sandra Dijkstra
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I would like to see university presses publish fewer books but take more time to work with each author they do select.—Caitlin Zaloom
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Overly jargoned writing is the greatest barrier to impact. Length is the other. Readers are impatient with both.—Greg Britton
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Most scholars get a very bad and chronic case of dissertation-itis in grad school and never, ever get over it. Most scholars — all of us, in fact — have one “go to” sentence structure to which we default unconsciously. —Carey Newman
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The biggest question here is what audience we expect scholars to write for — one of peers in their own subdiscipline or a broader array of more-general readers? Of course, the answer may vary by project. I sometimes fear that scholars become so expert at writing to a comparatively narrow group of peers that they are less well positioned to do the ever more vital work of reaching a broader public. —Roger Schonfeld
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Alas, its reputation is deserved and is certainly responsible for part of the decline in sales. Too much jargon, too much posturing. —Wendy Strothman
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A good editor can fix that. —Joshua Gans
