On Writing Clearly

I'd like to commend The Montana Professor for the consistent quality of the articles it has published so far. In spite of my initial intention simply to flip through the pages of each issue, I find myself reading most of them with interest. In particular, I have admired both the writing and the reasoning of John Snider's "An Apology to Vincent" (Winter 1993, 3-7), Bill Plank's "The Reform of the Montana University System" (Spring 1993, 6-7), and any number of articles and book reviews by Paul Trout.

However, as a linguist and an instructor of composition, I feel compelled to point out that certain of The Montana Professor's articles are not as enjoyable to read as the ones mentioned above, for reasons having to do less with content than with writing fundaments. The clearest example of a potentially excellent article felled by writing problems is Michel Valentin and Paul Dixon's "Hate Speech and Censorship" (Winter 1993, 14-25), an article which I approached with considerable anticipation, given its topicality and my own interests in language issues, but which I struggled to read with growing disappointment. In fact, I never did finish reading it: after plowing doggedly through the first three pages, I gave up and turned to other articles likely to offer greater return on my investment of time and mental processing.

My objection to this article is not its use of lit-crit and philosophical jargon; every discipline has its own technical terms, and a well-educated cross-disciplinary audience should be able to handle a bit of judiciously chosen jargon from other fields. Rather, what I find objectionable here are failings that every freshman composition book warns writers about: wordiness and gobbledygook, in this case what appears to be the intentional bloating of sentences in order to make them (one assumes) more impressive. How else to explain a sentence like "That is to say, the creation-formation of future social forces, which used to be a by-product of the teaching goal of U.S. Universities (from the the sixties to the late seventies), is witnessing a weakening of its capacity for political struggle" (14)? Need I point out that "creation" and "formation" are essentially synonymous? Or that the prediction of the main clause, pared down to key content words, doesn't quite make sense (Can creation witness? Does creation have a capacity for political struggle?)?

In graduate school, I used to feel inadequate about my failure to fully grasp academic prose of this sort, often feeling as if I were in murky water with the bottom just out of reach of my toes, but there's nothing like several years of teaching composition to strengthen a reader's ability to recognize that the problem isn't hers, but the writer's (in other words, the emperor truly has no clothes on). It's clear to me that all faculty would personally benefit from teaching writing as part of their duties (and not just because they might come to recognize the special burden placed on composition instructors); not only should their own appreciation of good writing increase, but they might come to understand that simplicity in writing does not equal simple-mindedness, nor does verbosity legitimize any message whose meaning is not already worth sharing.

I certainly don't mean to paint a totally negative picture of Valentin and Dixon's article; I believe their position to be admirable, and I know that other readers found it sufficiently clear and informative. But when one compares it to the Snider or Trout articles in the same issue, the difference in the clarity and resulting effectiveness of each is blindingly evident. Given an understanding of this difference, would any writer fail to choose to write well (i.e., with clarity and precision)? I hope future contributors to The Montana Professor answer that question in the negative.

Deborah Schaffer
English
EMC [MSU-Billings]