Like most people, I find myself weary and bloated from the end-of-year and end-of-decade awards and appraisals. But I also find myself longing for one of the great awards that ceased operations more than a decade ago.
The Bad Writing Contest ran for only four years, from 1994 to 1998, but it seemed like a venerable tradition. I miss it, like, really bad.
Just as I used to look forward to Ellen Goodman’s hathotic annual musings on the slow summer days in Casco Bay, Maine, I loved the tortured and pretentious passages that Denis Dutton “honored” to highlight the professorial penchant for obfuscation. It’s all about Schadenfreude.
But rather than just smirk, I’d like to break these passages down — “deconstruct” them, to use the voguish term — to see why they fail. More important, I’d like to translate them into plain English. My point is simple. You don’t need to write tortured language to explain complex ideas. Even the simplest ideas can, and must, be explained with plain words.
If Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking can use plain language to express complex thoughts, a po-mo prof — even when writing about the ontological or teleological status of this or that — should be able to do the same.
Let’s look at the last three winners of the Bad Writing Contest to analyze how they went so wrong and see if we can make them a little bit right.
Judith Butler (1998)
Writing in Diacritics, the feminist scholar Judith Butler wrote an essay titled “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” which includes this passage:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
The biggest problem, of course, is the use of too many abstract words in too little space. It’s fine to use specialized terminology. If you cannot think of a better way to say “coming from the same source,” go ahead and say homologous. If you cannot think of a better way to say complete intellectual dominance, say hegemony. If you need to refer to the work of Louis Althusser, fine, go ahead. Use all the fancy vocabulary you want. But just don’t pile it up. Remember that even the most knowledgable specialist can better understand ideas in chunks. Use specialized terms only when you need ’em, then define ’em and spread ’em out.
Another problem is the sentence length. Long sentences, of course, are not necessarily bad. Sometimes you need a long sentence to create a mood or to connect several ideas. But sentences ought not overwhelm the reader. Butler uses 94 words in this passage. How does this happen? As Deep Throat would have told Woodward and Bernstein if they were investigating this scandal of a sentence: Follow the prepositions.
This passage contains 21 prepositions: from, in, in, to, of, in, of, into, of, from, of, as, to, in, into, of, of, as, with, and of.
Prepositions help to show the relations of words and phrases. So when you use 21 prepositions in one sentence, you show 21 different relations of words within that sentence.
Here’s one way to translate Butler:
Structuralists say capitalism operates as a powerful “top-down” system, making businesses, schools, and other institutions look and operate the same way. We now think of power as a series of smaller, decentralized interactions. Power does not come from some big force, but from countless interactions throughout society.
I understand that we may lose some ideas with this simple passage. But we don’t lose the reader. And if we keep the reader with us, we can develop the more complex concepts, one at a time.
Here’s the irony of the whole mess: Judith Butler is not only smart, but she can write well when she makes the effort. When she “won” the Bad Writing Award, she protested with an op-ed in The New York Times. She explained, cogently, why she needed to be so incoherent in her academic writing. By writing so well, she disproved her own point.
Fredric Jameson (1997)
Fredric Jameson, the only two-time winner of the Bad Writing Context, makes outrageous statements that need to be questioned (“interrogated,” in the academic argot) one by one.
In his book Signatures of the Visible, Fredric Jameson writes:
The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess (rather than from the more thankless effort to discipline the viewer).
This 63-word sentence also goes on too long for most readers. So he and Butler have that in common. But Butler’s major problem stemmed from too many modifiers, which we see with all those prepositional phrases. But Jameson uses only four prepositional phrases here: in, about, from, and from. So why is this passage so bad.
That’s easy. It’s nonsense. The visual is essentially pornographic? The visual “has its end” (someone should call the teleology cops on Jameson, an avowed skeptic of teleological thinking) in mindless fascination. Really? Does that mean that gazing at the works by Leonardo or Brueghel is pornographic? Or Chagal or Rodin? Does Jameson really mean, as he says later, that anything embedded in mass culture is porn? Really? So great photography and modern art and everything in newspapers and magazines and the web … it’s all just porn?
I like the point about austere films drawing their energy by “repress[ing] their own excess.” It’s an interesting idea. You create excess (like the scenes involving the horse head and car explosion in “The Godfather”) and then you draw it back with some kind of contrary idea (“A la famiglia!“). But is that really just modern? Sure, the modern era has multiplied images and ideas, and then broadcast them globally. But are visuals really new? Interesting idea, but debatable.
Anyway, let’s try to simplify Jameson’s passage:
When mass media focus on an object, they inevitably take away its basic integrity. Like pornography, media encourage rapt, mindless fascination. The most artful films, though, generate energy by pushing the subject to extremes and then pulling back.
If I lost or distorted any ideas here, sorry. Sometimes when you pull out deep weeds you also pull out benign plants.
Roy Bhaskar (1996)
The British philosopher Roy Bhaskar’s passage is easy to solve once you understand how he structures his sentence (X challenges a, b, c, d, e, f, g . . .). In Plato Etc., he writes:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.
OMG, I’m speechless. But let’s get to work.
First of all, we need to break down this 134-word monstrosity, with its 23 prepositional phrases, into pieces. We learned how to do that with Butler. So let’s move on to some special problems of Bhaskar.
The sentence has two main parts. In part 1 (from “Indeed” to the em-dash), he introduces the idea of the Foucauldian reversal. In part 2 (from “of the unholy” to the end), he says what gets reversed. You can state this idea with the simple SVO sentence:
Foucault’s approach (subject) reversed (verb) previous philosophical traditions (object).
Ah, simplicity! But hold on. Stated that way, the whole passage looks absurd. Roy, you really think all those characters you lump together — Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Comte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Baudrillard — would take the same side in a debate? While you’re at it, why not throw in the Marx Brothers too? (Note to self: Send movie idea to the makers of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”)
Look, I understand you want to say Michel Foucault did something consequential. Great. I agree. You also want to say that even competing traditions shared some underlying assumptions. Again, great.
I know I’m oversimplifying here, Roy, but you forced my hand. Your way out — the way you can make your stuff intelligible — is to slow down. Breathe in, breathe out. Now, step by step, tell us what you mean.
You suffer the “Whoa, Nellie!” problem. You think of so many related ideas, and you want to talk about all of them. So you start and it’s like you get taken over by a runaway horse.
Start by getting rid of the compound modifiers: Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean; Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian; and Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean. Just explain how these ideas relate to each other. Don’t try to do too much too soon. Avoid sardine writing, packing ideas densely into the tin.
Let’s look at all the philosophical traditions that Foucault et al. “reversed”:
• The Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean “unholy trinity.”
• The Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm.
• Foundationalisms.
• Irrationalisms.
• “The primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual.”
• Plato’s “problematic,” which “Hegel served only to replicate,” blah blah blah.
• Other stuff.
Whew. Did I get that right?
Whatever. Here’s what you do. Explain one of them in plain English, like this. Start like this:
Foucault’s approach undercut the ancient debates about idealism and materialism. Foucault also challenged the extensions of those debates– including Kant’s demand for rationality, Descartes’ separation of mind and body, and Nietzsche’s appeal to primal urges.
Or something like that. I’m sure I’m not precise enough here. Which is the point. You need to say what you mean rather than packing all so many sardines into such a small tin. Remember, you have a whole article to explain yourself. The rule: One at a time.
In summary . . .
Nobody said writing about complex matters — like the vast sweep of philosophy — would come easily. It’s hard enough to accumulate information about all these thinkers. To explain them, and then analyze them, poses a daunting challenge.
So what? You write not for yourself or your elite colleagues, but for a broader audience. You owe your readers clear prose. You must break it down, make relationships clear, define terms, and use simple words and sentences whenever possible. It reminds me of something a grad-school housemate once told me.
Tomas was a German literature student. When I was reading Marx’s Capital, he told me that German students read Hegel and Marx in the English translation. Why? Because the translators broke down the meter-long words and interminable sentences into manageable pieces.
Whenever you write about something complex or technical, put yourself in the position of a translator. Talk with the reader plainly. Sure, some discussions will hover beyond the reader’s reach. That’s OK. Sometimes understanding a text requires having some background. But when you read about complex subjects, you shouldn’t have to fight the writer along the way.
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