I'm not a nut

Happens every year in 301. First essay of the year already, students look at the prof as if he's either a fool or demonic. I them that sentence fragments don't signal the apocalypse, that ordinary language might well be exactly what the doctor ordered, that use of the first person--as in "I"--may not lead to immediate expulsion. And they wonder where this guy came from.

The truth is, of course, we all write in different languages. What passes for grace in the MLA likely isn't energetic, gutsy prose in Wired or Rolling Stone. In fact, most of us monolinguals--like me--in truth still wield a variety of tongues. I write to my Mom in a voice that I don't use to write blog posts. I write stories--well, for goodness sake, every story's voice is different.

The "tongue" of the academy is the language of higher education, and it's often, well, higher, than the language we employ in ordinary conversation--and in blogs, Facebook, and a ton of other places where ordinary people ordinarily write, including most magazines and newspapers.

In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Gail A. Horstein, a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College--and a writer herself--takes a whack at the stodginess of academic prose.

A friend in mainstream trade publishing, who'd like nothing better than to buy books written by smart people on important topics, cringes when she spies an academic heading toward her at a party. For D and her editorial colleagues, "academic" is shorthand for "lifeless prose, cumbersome to read, filled with unnecessary complication, often disdainful and stridently obscure in style and tone." If by chance they do wind up wanting to acquire a manuscript by a faculty member, the first thing they say at the editorial meeting is: "But he doesn't write like an academic!"

But she doesn't stop there. She reverses the indignation, after a fashion, by asserting that academics often roll their eyes at the scribbles of ordinary people: "The contempt that academics have toward that kind of writing is, in essence, contempt for the ordinary reading public," she says. "We assume they're unable to grasp the subtlety of our thought. We think that writing for a broad audience requires "dumbing down" our arguments."

And then, "But that's wrong." She goes on to say that critics of non-academic writing are tougher than those in cap-and-gown. Having just finished the wholesale second draft of a novel that didn't catch on the first time around, I'm not only exhausted, but likely to let out a hearty "amen."

Prof. Horstein goes on tell her academic readers (The Chronicle of Higher Education, has lots of them, of course) to sharpen things up, to make them readable, to make the writing sing.

I think she's got a point. She ends by saying that we're in an era when higher educators don't sling much clout. She's right about that too. We might just be able to raise our profile if we learn to write with energy and zest. For everything there is a time and season--including academic writing, of course; but then there are times when it's not kosher either.

I intend to save some face. I'm sending the article around to my 301 students. I'm not a freak.

I don't think so anyway.
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You can read Ms. Hornstein's article at http://chronicle.com/article/Prune-That-Prose/48273/