Peripheral Vision: Why Most Academics Write So Badly

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So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

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Monday, December 22, 2025

Why Most Academics Write So Badly

I had wanted to say something positive about the beauty of the English language. Instead, I found myself having to wade through the inpenetrable prose of academics who seem to have the greatest difficulty in expressing themselves – the worst examples being -

Language and Power, Norman Fairclough (2019) being far too theoretical
Naming and Framing – the power of words across, disciplines, domains and modalities

Viktor Smith (2021) far too academic and features too many bibliographical references
The Politics of Language David Beaver and Jason Stanley (2023) too long-winded

– at 500 pp
Public policy writing that matters David Christinger (2017) as too simplistic
Beyond Public Policy – a public action language approach  Peter Spink (2019) is the only

text containing more acceptable language

The saving grace is a German trying to make sense of the language of the Nazi regime viz The Language of the Third Reich Victor Klemperer (1946)

I was reminded of Steven Pinker’s book - The Sense of Style – the thinking person’s guide to good writing (2014) which asks -

Why is so much writing so bad? Why is it so hard to understand a government form, or an academic article or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?

The most popular explanation is that opaque prose is a deliberate choice. Bureaucrats insist on gibberish to cover their anatomy. Plaid-clad tech writers get their revenge on the jocks who kicked sand in their faces and the girls who turned them down for dates. Pseudo-intellectuals spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook. But the bamboozlement theory makes it too easy to demonize other people while letting ourselves off the hook. In explaining any human shortcoming, the first tool I reach for is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

The kind of stupidity I have in mind has nothing to do with ignorance or low IQ; in fact, it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most from it. I once attended a lecture on biology addressed to a large general audience at a conference on technology, entertainment and design. The lecture was also being filmed for distribution over the Internet to millions of other laypeople. The speaker was an eminent biologist who had been invited to explain his recent breakthrough in the structure of DNA. He launched into a jargon-packed technical presentation that was geared to his fellow molecular biologists, and it was immediately apparent to everyone in the room that none of them understood a word and he was wasting their time. Apparent to everyone, that is, except the eminent biologist. When the host interrupted and asked him to explain the work more clearly, he seemed genuinely surprised and not a little annoyed. This is the kind of stupidity I am talking about.

The “curse of knowledge” is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn't occur to the writer that her readers don't know what she knows—that they haven't mastered the argot of her guild, can't divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn't bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail…….

This is good stuff and what follows echoes exactly what my own draft said all these years ago -

How can we lift the curse of knowledge? The traditional advice—always remember the reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. None of us has the power to see everyone else's private thoughts, so just trying harder to put yourself in someone else's shoes doesn't make you much more accurate in figuring out what that person knows. But it's a start. So for what it's worth: Hey, I'm talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don't, you are guaranteed to confuse them. A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience and find out whether they can follow it. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what's obvious to us isn't obvious to them.

The other way to escape the curse of knowledge is to show a draft to yourself,

ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar.

If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, "What did I mean by that?" or

"How does this follow?" or, all too often, "Who wrote this crap?" The form in

which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they

can be absorbed by a reader. Advice on writing is not so much advice on how to

write as on how to revise.

Steven Pinker is an eminent psychologist and has a good interview on the book in the current Slate Magazine. My only quibble is with his title – there are a lot of style books out there but I don’t think that’s what he’s actually talking about. He seems rather to be addressing the more crucial issue of how we structure our thinking and present it so clearly that the reader or listener understands and is actually motivated to do something with the insights…..

Once we stop thinking about the words we use, what exactly they mean and whether they fit our purpose, the words and metaphors (and the interests behind them) take over and reduce our powers of critical thinking. One of the best essays on this topic is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” Written in 1947, it exposes the way certain clichés and rhetoric are calculated to kill thinking – for example how the use of the passive tense undermines the notion that it is people who take decisions and should be held accountable for them.

Fifty years before Orwell, Ambrose Bierce was another (American) journalist whose pithy and tough definitions of everyday words, in his newspaper column, attracted sufficient attention to justify a book “The Devil’s Dictionary” whose fame continues unto this day. A dentist, for example, he defined as “a magician who puts metal into your mouth and pulls coins out of your pocket”. A robust scepticism about both business and politics infused his work – bit it did not amount to a coherent statement about power.

My own Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power looks at more than 100 words and phrases used by officials, politicians, consultants and academics in the course of government reform which have this effect and offers some definitions which at least will get us thinking more critically about our vocabulary – if not actually taking political actions.

And the Plain English website is the other source I would recommend. It contains their short but very useful manual; a list of alternative words; and lists of all the organisations which have received their awards. Academics do need to have a read of Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly – how to succeed in the social sciences (2013) or have a look at On Writing Well W Zinsser (1976)