Matt Groening's advice to students and teachers.

Thirty years after everybody else, I've got round to reading the pre-Simpsons work of Matt Groening, Hell. It's a wonderful strip about an alienated, lonely and slightly eccentric rabbit, who bears some physical resemblance to the Simpson family.

The opening page of The Big Book of Hell features this advice, which I think will form the centrepiece of my next 'how to do your dissertation' talk - and could usefully be distributed to colleagues too!

He also provides a handy guide to university lecturers:

The question is, which one am I?

Lessons for academics from history

Here's Daniel Defoe, on why academics should be excluded from his proposed Society for reforming the English language:

The Work of this Society shou'd be to encourage Polite Learning, to polish and refine the English Tongue, and advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language…

Into this Society should be admitted none but Persons Eminent for Learning, and yet none, or very few, shoe Business or Trade was Learning: For I may be allow'd, I suppose, to say, We have seen many great Scholars, meer Learnèd Men, and Graduates in the last Degree of Study, whose English has been far from Polite, full of Stiffness and Affectation, hard Words, and long unusual Coupling of Syllables and Sentences, which sound harsh and untuneable to the Ear, and shock the Reader, both in Expression and Understanding'. 

Now I'm with those who say that languages are sprawling beasts which can't and shouldn't be tamed, but I can't help agreeing with Defoe here: some academic writers are needlessly convoluted as a performance of academia - it's particularly painful when students feel they have to mimic this to show that they're 'proper' members of the community.

One of the guiltiest parties is, alas, one of my inspirations, Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble. In the introduction to the tenth anniversary to the work, she takes up the critique of her particularly dense style:

…neither grammar nor style are particularly neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalised language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself… there is nothing radical about common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar… produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended… does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is naturalised through grammatical norms, as Monique Wittig has argued, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting the grammar in which gender is given.
The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly "clear" view… Who devises the protocols of "clarity" and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency… What does "transparency" keep obscure?

Hmm. For someone who believes that it is her mission to fundamentally alter grammar at an 'epistemic level' in pursuit of breaking down binary oppositions, Butler expresses herself rather well while remaining within the bounds of intelligibility in this introduction. Her point is that grammar is an exercise of power and exclusion, and that it should be ruptured - and yet there's a rather distasteful attack on the reader encoded here, one which labels all those within the inherited linguistic tradition as lazy consumerists who should be excluded if they can't be bothered to think carefully enough. Difficult ideas certainly require technical and subtle language - but I feel here that Butler's position is rather defensive. I don't think that intelligibility is so much of a constraint as Butler asserts - languages are flexible machines capable of intelligibly bearing a wider range of meaning than she appears to believe.

Obviously I'm not operating at the intellectual or public level Butler habitually works at, but I do think we have a responsibility to our readers and audiences - mostly undergraduate students - in my case. A new student isn't stupid, merely uninducted into the academic community as yet. As Butler points out, inducting someone into a community, linguistic or otherwise, is an exercise of power: they accept our paradigms to contribute, but at the same time, they have an opportunity to shape the paradigms to some extent. I don't, frankly, see how Butler expects to radically alter grammar and the social structures they reflect by making herself so formidably unintelligible. After all, she too grew up in these linguistic structures and - however unwillingly - bears the traces.

When I'm teaching, I raise the intellectual temperature gradually. I identify the points of interest/contention/complication and attempt to explain why they're important. At each step of the way, I try to get students to think their way around these points (this is the most important element of the educational process) and we gradually complicate the issues by raising further arguments. At no stage do I announce that any student who doesn't get it is a lazy, passive consumerist.

Advice to students

I'm deep into the marking - one dissertation left to do, then it's the forty-odd English Renaissance pile, then further mountains of various others. One of the things that have hugely annoyed me this year has been the erroneous use of quotation: either simply badly typed, or deliberately distorted so that an innocent academic is misused to support something s/he never wrote.

Here's a little advice from Ælfric, a West Saxon monkish scribe and author from the turn of the first millennium:

Now I desire and beseech, in God's name, if anyone will transcribe this book, that he carefully correct it by the copy, lest we be blamed through careless writers. He does great evil who writes carelessly, unless he correct it. It is as though he turn true doctrine into false error. Therefore everyone should make straight that which he before bent crooked, if he will be guiltless at God's doom.

Sadly I don't have eternal damnation in the fires of hell as a sanction for lazy or dishonest students… though it's certainly deserved in the case of the one who told me that 'Paradise Lost is a post-modern novel'.

Dorothy Parker said…

This is Dorothy Parker's telegram to her editor:

THIS IS INSTEAD OF TELEPHONING BECAUSE I CANT LOOK YOU IN THE VOICE. I SIMPLY CANNOT GET THAT THING DONE YET NEVER HAVE DONE SUCH HARD NIGHT AND DAY WORK NEVER HAVE SO WANTED ANYTHING TO BE GOOD AND ALL I HAVE IS A PILE OF PAPER COVERED WITH WRONG WORDS. CAN ONLY KEEP AT IT AND HOPE TO HEAVEN TO GET IT DONE. DONT KNOW WHY IT IS SO TERRIBLY DIFFICULT OR I SO TERRIBLY INCOMPETANT=

I can sympathise. I find it very difficult to get any serious writing done - paralysed by fear of ignorance, of not being able to find anything original to say, of putting ammunition into the hands of my peers - despite publication being the only way to thrive in academia.

It was the same for my PhD. Eventually desperation and shame provided the motivation to complete the thesis. Before that, I had long periods of reading massive amounts and never putting pen to paper. I stopped answering supervisors' emails. Then phone calls. Then letters. I'd go to the university if I had to teach, and sneaked in and out. All the time of course, questions about how the thesis was going were met with enthusiastic explanations of where it was going. Talking a good thesis is easy. Writing one isn't.

Blogging's different: it's just my stream of consciousness spewing out. As Ben says, if I wrote research at the rate I blogged, I'd have several books out by now. True: but academic texts require more than a neat turn of phrase and some hyperlinks.

And now I'm stuck again. I have two conference papers which need turning into articles, a chapter which needs rewriting for a journal and an abstract to write. Any advice?

KISS

Or, Keep It Simple, Stupid.

I'm talking about academic writing. There's a fetish for overlong sentences stuffed with elaborate, multisyllabic verbiage, designed as a performance of academic skills, rather than as a vehicle for them. Take, for instance, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, a ground-breaking work which (ironically) breaks down the gender binaries by exposing gender as a constant and stressful performance. 

In the introduction to the 1999 edition, she actually has to defend herself against accusations of incomprehensibility by explaining that her ideas are so radical that standard grammar and English are inadequate for her purposes. Which is nonsense. Judith thinks that she's the profoundest thinker on the planet, and that being impenetrable demonstrates that. 

I'm not saying that complex ideas don't demand complex and subtle expression - but plenty of academics revel in a learned style which privileges over-complication. It's even worse when students try to do it - they can't, because it takes years of being institutionalised. It's very helpful though: when a student uses a word like 'soteriological', my plagiarism klaxons go off very loudly indeed. 

Some academics have had some fun with this: there's the Gunning Fog Index of complexity, and Oppenheimer wrote a fine journal article on Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems With Using Long Words Needlessly. Oppenheimer got his reward and offered some wise advice:

For this he was awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in literature. At the Ig Nobel ceremony Oppenheimer gave what may be a perfect acceptance speech. Here it is in its entirety: "My research shows that conciseness is interpreted as intelligence. So, thank you".

Academically, I have the opposite problem: finding time to write anything substantial. Luckily, I'm not alone: this is an amazing (and witty) paper on the topic. Click that link or click to enlarge the complete version below: it's brilliant.