The discussion, after presenting a rough draft of a paper in class:
Professor: "This paper is beautifully written, Julia..."
Me: "Thank you."
Professor: "...but, the topic really isn't very good."
Me: "Oh."
And sadly enough, I had a TA in college tell me the exact same thing once. If you are ever in a position to dispense advice on papers, you should know that this comment is not helpful. It only causes the writer in question to wonder if academic papers are actually supposed to be written badly. After all, if no one can understand what the argument is, perhaps the argument is brilliant?
6 comments:
This probably won't be helpful, but I recently saw the movie The Wrestler. It was a fantastically well-made movie. Directing, acting, etc all great. The problem is that the story itself didn't need to be told.
Great craftsmanship. Poor choice of story.
I have no doubt that the paper I wrote did not need to be written, regardless of how pleasant it was to read. What bothers me, though, is when writing is implied to be merely a craft. The argument and the expression of that argument are necessarily related, I think. Tell me the paper is bad; don't tell me the paper is beautiful and bad.
To put it another way: no one ever says, "great topic...but really a chore to read...please learn to write better." And, in my view, they really should. When you separate the writing from the content, or vice versa, I think that maybe you're missing the point of writing.
I think people do get told that their idea is good, but the writing turgid, or more commonly for undergrads, awkward. I can think of at least one person to whom this regularly applies. Actually, it happened to me once too. Also, David Hume? Not a lovely writer. Heidegger? Incomprehensible. But I guess they had important ideas.
You're probably right about the connection between good writing and good argument at a certain level of public discourse and fiction, but I don't think it applies as much to academia, where awkward writing is much more common and tolerated, even among smart people, because the form is more formalized and constrained by professional convention. Just as there are few people who can raise the craft of the office memo to an art, probably the same applies to the academic paper.
Not that it isn't useful to write beautifully, especially if it's a skill everyone around you lacks.
And that is precisely my problem with academic writing. Maybe if academics acknowledged that the quality of prose can affect the salience of ideas, subjects like political theory wouldn't be thought of as mostly irrelevant. I mean, if ideas are important, shouldn't they also be comprehensible?
I don't think what we write in the academy should be incomprehensible; not to our fellow academics and also not to an educated reader. But maybe this means I should exit the academy as swiftly as possible?
No, I think it works out ok in the end. Academics who do write well tend to have greater success than those who don't. Like Louis Menand. Or Anthony Grafton. I just think it's easier in academic writing to separate quality of ideas from quality of prose than in other kinds of writing where form is a bigger component of content--poetry, essays, fiction, etc.
Besides, it's all way worse in science, so don't feel too bad.
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