Editor’s note: What follows is an excerpt adapted from a new book, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, out this month from Princeton University Press.
Most academic writers want a wide audience for their work, but they also respect the boundaries that separate fields and subfields. The carved-out areas within those borders aren’t exactly populous. A print run for a typical scholarly book is in the low hundreds these days, and circulation figures for scholarly journals are comparably low. We write for micro-audiences.
In using that phrase, I don’t mean to suggest that niche readerships are necessarily a bad thing or that every academic should aim to write for the mythically wide “general public.” The definition of successful scholarly writing need not, and should not, be tied to the size of its readership.
But neither should we seal ourselves inside our fields or subfields and settle for shrinking audiences of subspecialists. “Public writing” is not synonymous with “general public writing.” Facing outward doesn’t mean writing everything as though it were going to be submitted to The New Yorker. When you think “public,” in other words, you don’t need to imagine your audience as the whole educated world. You needn’t try to write a bestseller.
Instead, I have a more modest suggestion: Just reach out to the field next door. As a scholarly writer, your goal should be to reach your largest potential audience. It will be smaller than Stephen King’s, but it might be larger than you think.
If “seek your audience” seems like obvious advice, consider how few academic writers actually follow it. And look at what they do instead: They cite things like “J.L. Austin’s linguistic phenomenology” as though any reader would understand. The problem doesn’t lie with the concept; it lies in the insularity of the reference. It limits the audience to Austin readers and warns non-Austin readers against asking questions. Without even a few words of explanation, such writing erects barriers that block understanding.
This is bad writing of a particular — and all too familiar — sort.
Good academic writing should lower those barriers. It doesn’t have to cross every boundary, but how about the ones that lie closest? It’s more important to reach across nearby borders than it is to count heads in your audience. So don’t shrink back from the marked boundaries of your specialization.
Let me be clear: The problem with too much scholarly writing is not specialization but balkanization. Specialization organizes thoughts and the thinkers who think them. Balkanization isolates them in needlessly separate spaces. When academic writers split our audience into micro-communities, we lose sight of the larger enterprise and of the need to communicate what we do. When we write badly, our academic community — and our writing — loses its way intellectually and, more important, ethically.
When writers lose their awareness of the larger field in which they work, breakdown ensues.
The readership for scholarly writing did not fracture suddenly. The late Henry Rosovsky, when he was a dean at Harvard University, described the academic world as “a Tower of Babel in which we have lost the possibility of common discourse and shared values.” Rosovsky said that in 1976. So the need for a shared academic ethic has been with us for a while, and that ethic should start with generous, boundary-crossing writing.
When writers lose their awareness of the larger field in which they work, breakdown ensues — and we are living with that breakdown. George Orwell warned in 1946 that imprecise writing encourages likewise careless thinking, which invites political control by mendacious government leaders. Here is my academic version of Orwell’s warning: When academic writers write badly, they make all of academe vulnerable to derision and political attack.
The result? We are witnessing a slow-motion collapse of academic reputation in American society at large. Bad academic writing invites caricaturists to belittle a wide range of scholarship, usually without reading it. It invites legislators to defund colleges and universities and pass laws to erode academics’ authority over their own workplace. (Ellen Schrecker, a leading scholar of the Red Scare, describes these recent laws as the “new McCarthyism.”)
Bad academic writing invites parents and students to suspect the value of the education that colleges offer — and, in some cases, withhold their financial support for it. Bad academic writing also undermines scholarly authority, and blunts the influence of hard-won academic expertise in the making of social policy. In short, bad writing weakens higher education itself: research, teaching, and everything.
The problem starts with a failure to respect the reader. Bad scholarly writing disrespects the reader because it doesn’t privilege communication. Some readers don’t push back when a writer disrespects them. A graduate student might think, “I’m not getting this, so it must be my fault. I’ll just try harder.” Or a faculty member might think, “This isn’t very good, but I need to read it for my presentation tomorrow, so onward.”
Write to be understood. That’s how we can begin to save ourselves.
But other readers won’t accept being told, in effect, “You don’t matter.” Too much academic writing shows contempt: It implies that “if you don’t understand me, you must not be very smart.” That makes some readers (or would-be readers) angry — and justifiably so. When they encounter bad academic writing that disdains connection, many readers are apt to respond in kind.
Academic writers don’t need to pander to the general public. We just need to identify our audience and write so that they can comprehend what we’re saying. I’m not saying that you should avoid disagreement. By all means, court controversy if your ideas lead you that way. But if you want to goad your audience, let them be angry at what you say, not at how you say it. (They don’t have to agree with what we say, either. Informed disagreement has greater potential for resolution than uninformed and implacable opposition.) Write to be understood. That’s how we can begin to save ourselves.
How about the field next door? Which brings me back to the need for academic writers to cross nearby boundaries. The effort will help you to be understood. That academe and academic writing should be more public-facing isn’t exactly a new idea. Many observers (including me) have been calling for it for years. The call for public writing has become needlessly disputatious because for some, it has become synonymous with “dumbing down” in search of a “general reader” who is more phantom than human.
What would it mean to write for readers in an adjacent field along with the ones in your own? Anthropologists might write so that sociologists could understand. Political scientists could make their work reader-friendly for historians. Psychologists could write so that biologists might understand, or literary critics could envision philosophers among their readership.
We could call this practice “generous writing.” Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was cutting-edge science when he published it in 1859 — but it was read and discussed by scholars in almost every discipline. (It still is.) Yes, there are more recent examples. The writings about torture by David J. Luban, a professor of philosophy and law at Georgetown University, have been taken up by scholars from a variety of adjacent fields. When Ada Ferrer, a professor of history at New York University, writes about Cuba, she understands that her work will be of interest outside of the circle of historians of Latin America — and she writes accordingly. The ringingly clear historical analysis by Lennard Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, of the concept of “normal” extends outside of disability studies, where it could easily have remained.
We should be more generous to our audience, starting with one another.
Reaching out to the field next door is a public-intellectual move. Not all public intellectuals have the same public, after all. When you write to efface the boundary with an adjacent field and think about the readers who live there, you’re being a public intellectual. You’ll also write better because you’ll be thinking more about the needs of different kinds of readers.
If this goal sounds reachable — and it is! — we might ask why so few academic writers reach it. Right now there are even barriers within fields (such as economics or sociology) that have proved impregnable, so people in the same larger specialty see themselves as residents of different intellectual lands. We can do better, and it starts with writing better.
If more of us write to cross the boundary with the field next door, we can create more intellectual community, more connections, and bigger audiences. We’ll also write better when we try to reach our neighbors. Each result will reinforce the other.
My own unusually capacious field of English offers a good example. Writing to make yourself understood by colleagues who specialize in different periods, genres, national literatures — and also pedagogically centered fields such as composition and rhetoric and English language learning — is already a kind of outward-facing academic writing that more of us should practice.
That, finally, is the ethic that academic writing needs. We should be more generous to our audience, starting with one another. Actually, all of academe needs that ethic. And we need to teach it, too. Graduate students are academic writers too, and they shouldn’t be rewarded for emulating the poor role models that they see around them. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of English and director of digital humanities at Michigan State University, has called for educators to transform the academic workplace through community and collaboration. “We are all laborers in the same enterprise,” she writes in her book, Generous Thinking, and we have to build “a more generous public sphere.”
Fitzpatrick’s call for “generous thinking” should start with academic writing. Bad academic writing isn’t just the business of each individual writer. Like it or not, we’re in this together. Each academic writes for all academics. (And it’s not affiliation that defines an academic. If you’re doing academic writing, you’re an academic in my book. And you’re reading part of my book right now.) We are judged by our writing. If we write poorly, our reputation will continue to erode. But if we write well, we have a better chance of recovering public support.
By this measure, it’s fair to say that good academic writing can enrich the world. Bad academic writing can pull it down. We should write as though our professional lives depend on it — because they just might.
