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Each year, the journal Philosophy
and Literature conducts a bad writing
contest. It invites readers to send in examples
of "the ugliest, most stylistically
awful" sentences in academic writing. Here
is one of two recent winners:
The move from a
structuralist account in which capital is
understood to structure social elations in
relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony
in which power relations are subject to
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation
brought the question of temporality into the
thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a
form of Althusserian theory that takes
structural totalities as theoretical objects to
one in which the insights into the contingent
possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed
conception of hegemony as bound up with the
contingent sites and strategies of the
rearticulation of power.
The reading score of this
94-word gem is exactly 0 percent. The same is
true of this 55-word masterpiece of obfuscation:
If, for a while, the ruse
of desire is calculable for the uses of
discipline soon the repetition of guilt,
justification, pseudo-scientific theories,
superstition, spurious authorities, and
classifications can be seen as the desperate
effort to "normalize" formally the
disturbance of a discourse of splitting that
violates the rational, enlightened claims of its
enunciatory modality.
The first excerpt is from
someone who is a full professor at Stanford,
while the second was written by a full professor
at the University of Chicago.
And lest you think these
contest winners are isolated examples, I perused
online some other "scholarly" writing.
As with legal writing, bad examples are not hard
to find.
This brings me back to
the question of close reading, which I don't see
as a matter of fidelity to texts but rather as
an attempt to surface the contradictions and
struggles with which they are marked - in this
case, again, the long and still ongoing struggle
that today's liberalistic discourses conduct
against historical materialism and scientific
socialism.
This example is a 55-word
sentence, but it gets a readability score of 10
percent. Wow! Amazon.com tells us that the
worthy author is an adjunct English instructor
at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, N.Y.
But with the publication of this book of
indecipherable writing, he will surely be
promoted - perhaps to Stanford or Chicago.
Another random example brings
us back to 0 percent readability:
In its reference to the
historical images that circulate as floating
signifiers in the condition of postmodernity,
this story suggests that we attend to the
consumption of commodified culture and recognize
the signifying politics that embrace mass-media
forms - concerns that are central to any
analysis of the cultural characteristics of
postmodernism.
When compared to the academic
sophists above, even this mess of legalese
doesn't seem too bad:
Based on the findings and
conclusions set forth with respect to each of
the four areas of primary concern discussed
above, the facts disclosed through our
preliminary investigation do not, in our
judgment, warrant a further widespread
investigation by independent counsel and
auditors.
But it is - it is an
unreadable 43 words and scores 11 percent
readability. And remember what a legislature is
capable of:
If the agency determined
that the petitioner is an adopted person, if the
department of health informed the agency either
that the file of releases does not contain a
release or releases filed by one or both of the
petitioner's biological parents that authorize
the release of identifying information to him
and does not contain a release or releases filed
by any biological sibling that authorizes the
release of specified information to him or that
the file of releases contains at least one such
release but a withdrawal of release has been
filed that negates each such release, if the
agency did not inform the court that it had
determined that one or both of the petitioner's
biological parents as indicated on the
petitioner's original birth record were
deceased, and if the court did not determine
that one or both of the petitioner's biological
parents as indicated on that record were
deceased, the judge
shall order that the petition remain pending
until withdrawn by the petitioner and order the
department of health to note its pendency in the
file of releases according to the surname of the
petitioner as set forth in his original birth
record; shall inform the petitioner that he is
an adopted person and, if known, of the county
in which the adoption proceedings occurred;
shall inform the petitioner that information
regarding his name by birth and the identity of
his biological parents and biological siblings
may not be released at that time because the
file of releases at that time does not contain
an effective release that authorizes the release
of any such information to him; and shall inform
the petitioner that, upon the subsequent filing
of a release by or the death of either of his
biological parents, or the subsequent filing of
a release by any of his biological siblings, the
petition will be acted upon within thirty days
of the filing in accordance with division (E) of
this section.
That's a 326-word sentence -
and we're back to 0 percent readability.
Remember, sentences of more than 35 words are
not readable (the exception - lists). Keep your
sentences to an average of 18 words. Of course,
even that wouldn't save the readability of these
academic writing examples. They are not written
to be read - they are written to glorify the
writer. And they are willfully obscure. At least
when we lawyers are obscure, it's not usually
willful.
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