Searching for Clarity (or When Did Academic Writing Come to Mean "Confusing as Hell?")

There are times when I don't think I deserve to be an English major.

I enjoy literature. I get insanely thrilled over nerdy things like composition pedagogy and rhetoric. And I love to write. I'm even crazy enough that I'm starting my doctorate (which is a completely different, terrifying topic). But, however much I love my subject, I can't stand "academic" writing.

I say "academic," because I'm not actually convinced that the writing I hate should even qualify...or that, if anything, it should be classified as "bad" academic writing. Yet it's the kind of writing that we all know to expect. Hell, it's even the kind of writing our students "aspire" to, because those are the signposts they've come to recognize in "intelligent" writing. It's that article that is jargon-heavy and vague. The one that's so complex and hard to understand that you can't quite tell whether you're too stupid to understand it or if the author never actually said anything at all.

This isn't the first time terrible writing has wound me up into a fury, but normally it's because--as a student--I'm being forced to read it. This time, though, it's the teacher in me that wants to scream.

I've been reading Robert Connor's Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy for an Independent Study class. I know. It sounds like a snoozer, but Connors actually does a masterful job of keeping a potentially dry subject interesting. He's funny, he's conversational, and he's clear...all while staying true to the rigor you'd want in a research textbook. As far as texts go, it's pretty great.

What isn't great are the writers he's talking about. Going through the history of writing instruction, it becomes increasingly obvious that Composition-Rhetoric methods have been forced into formulaic, prescriptive, boring frames because that's what was "easy" to teach. Because that's what's easy to write. And that's what's easy to understand.

Prescriptive, formulaic scholars like Alexander Bain weren't the only ones out there, though. There were innovative scholars. Conscientious scholars. Scholars who realized that the process and student interaction and non-linear lessons would get better writing than five paragraph essays. Except, time and again, Connors points out that their textbooks and articles just wouldn't catch on. And why not?

Because they were too difficult to understand.

Never mind torturing those poor graduate students who are forced to study onerous textbooks for hours on end. These are decades and decades of prospective writers and learning minds who wasted years of writing instruction on formulas because academics couldn't learn to be clear.

I get it. Theory is complex. And, sometimes, the only way to discuss theory is in abstractions. Not everything can be put into practical, layman's terms. But if you truly believe that you've found a valuable, useful way of teaching... why wouldn't you make it accessible?

Obviously, the history of composition-rhetoric is more complex and relies on more than the writing quality of a few theorists...but it's not a problem that is stuck in the past. THIS is what we call academic writing. And these, truly, are the consequences we face.

As a teacher, I'm not sure I can think of anything more depressing than the idea that the tools are out there...they're just not being shared.