{"id":2202,"date":"2014-09-29T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-09-29T14:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=2202"},"modified":"2014-09-29T12:55:12","modified_gmt":"2014-09-29T16:55:12","slug":"inaccessible-writing-in-both-senses-of-the-term","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2014\/09\/29\/inaccessible-writing-in-both-senses-of-the-term\/","title":{"rendered":"Inaccessible writing, in both senses of the term"},"content":{"rendered":"

My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> on \u201cWhy Academics Stink at Writing<\/a>\u201d, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person\u2019s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century<\/a><\/em>, which I\u2019m awaiting my pre-ordered copy of. The last sentence of the Chronicle<\/em> piece summarizes well:<\/p>\n

In writing badly, we are wasting each other\u2019s time, sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a laughingstock.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The essay provides a diagnosis of many of the common symptoms of fetid academic writing. He lists metadiscourse, professional narcissism, apologizing, shudder quotes, hedging, metaconcepts and nominalizations. It\u2019s not breaking new ground, but these problems well deserve review.<\/p>\n

I fall afoul of these myself, of course. (Nasty truth: I\u2019ve used \u201cinter alia<\/em>\u201d all too often, inter alia<\/em>.) But one issue I disagree with Pinker on is the particular style of metadiscourse he condemns that provides a roadmap of a paper. Here\u2019s an example from a recent paper of mine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After some preliminaries (Section 2), we present a set of known results relating context-free languages, tree homomorphisms, tree automata, and tree transducers to extend them for the tree-adjoining languages (Section 3), presenting these in terms of restricted kinds of functional programs over trees, using a simple grammatical notation for describing the programs. We review the definition of tree-substitution and tree-adjoining grammars (Section 4) and synchronous versions thereof (Section 5). We prove the equivalence between STSG and a variety of bimorphism (Section 6).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This certainly smacks of the first metadiscourse example Pinker provides:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe preceding discussion introduced the problem of academese, summarized the principle theories, and suggested a new analysis based on a theory of Turner and Thomas. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The first section consists of a review of the major shortcomings of academic prose. \u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who needs that sort\u00a0of signposting in a 6,000-word essay? But in the context of a 50-page article, giving a kind of table of contents such as this doesn\u2019t seem out of line. Much of the metadiscourse that Pinker excoriates is<\/em> unneeded, but appropriate advance signposting can ease the job of the reader considerably. Sometimes, as in the other examples Pinker gives, \u201cmeta\u00addiscourse is there to help the writer, not the reader, since she has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to.\u201d But anything that helps the reader to understand the high-level structure of an object as complex as a long article seems like a good thing to me.<\/p>\n

The penultimate sentence of Pinker’s piece places poor academic writing in context:<\/p>\n

Our indifference to how we share the fruits of our intellectual labors is a betrayal of our calling to enhance the spread of knowledge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That sentiment applies equally well \u2013 arguably more so \u2013 to the venues where we publish. By placing our articles in journals that lock up access tightly we are also betraying our calling. And it doesn\u2019t matter how good the writing is if it can\u2019t be read in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on \u201cWhy Academics Stink at Writing\u201d, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person\u2019s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which I\u2019m awaiting my pre-ordered copy of. The last sentence of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6027,618,68,1903],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linguistics","category-open-access","category-scholarly-communication","category-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5pLfN-zw","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2009\/05\/22\/why-this-blog\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":0},"title":"Why this blog?","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Friday, May 22, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This blog presents occasional writings on whatever I'm interested in at the moment, which currently includes topics such as: scholarly communications and open access, and other university matters computer science topics of various sorts language, linguistics, and computational linguistics pedagogy and writing I expect that in the near term, I'll\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Lewis Carroll"","block_context":{"text":"Lewis Carroll","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/other\/lewis-carroll\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2151,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2014\/08\/29\/switching-to-markdown-for-scholarly-article-production\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":1},"title":"Switching to Markdown for scholarly article production","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Friday, August 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"With few exceptions, scholars would be better off writing their papers in a lightweight markup format called Markdown, rather than using a word-processing program like Microsoft Word. This post explains why, and reveals a hidden agenda as well.1 Microsoft Word is not appropriate for scholarly article production \u2026lightweight\u2026 \u201cOld two\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "computer science"","block_context":{"text":"computer science","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/computer-science\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1631,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2013\/01\/22\/guest-post-on-lance-armstrong\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":2},"title":"Guest Post: On Lance Armstrong","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Tuesday, January 22, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"[I am pleased to present a guest post from my friend Ann Velenchik, professor of economics at Wellesley College, director of their writing program, and expert monologist. This post is reproduced from her private blog, which I am privileged to have access to, in which she has chronicled her experience\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "guest post"","block_context":{"text":"guest post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/guest-post\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2445,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2022\/07\/25\/moderating-principles\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":3},"title":"Moderating principles","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Monday, July 25, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Some time around April 1994, I founded the Computation and Language E-Print Archive, the first preprint repository for a subfield of computer science. It was hosted on Paul Ginsparg\u2019s arXiv platform, which at the time had been hosting only physics papers, built out from the original arXiv repository for high-energy\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "computational linguistics"","block_context":{"text":"computational linguistics","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/linguistics\/computational-linguistics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":842,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2011\/06\/04\/the-benefits-of-copyediting\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":4},"title":"The benefits of copyediting","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Saturday, June 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Dictionary and red pencil, photo by novii, on Flickr Sanford Thatcher has written a valuable, if anecdotal, analysis of some papers residing on Harvard\u2019s DASH repository (Copyediting\u2019s Role in an Open-Access World,\u00a0Against the Grain, volume 23, number 2, April 2011, pages 30-34), in an effort to get at the differences\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"dictionary and red pencil","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2454\/3559286242_a6decdc7d2_m.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1561,"url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/11\/06\/how-not-to-entice-an-author\/","url_meta":{"origin":2202,"position":5},"title":"How not to entice an author","author":"Stuart Shieber","date":"Tuesday, November 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"...There's a \"tree\" in it... \"Fall New England\" image by flickr user BrtinBoston. Used by permission. I received the attached email, inviting a contribution to a journal called\u00a0Advances in Forestry Letter. Yes, that's \"Letter\" in the singular, which is even still optimistic given the number of papers they've published so\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "open access"","block_context":{"text":"open access","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/category\/scholarly-communication\/open-access\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2207,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions\/2207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}