On Fast and Slow Writing

At Collin vs. Blog, Collin Brooke has posted a critique of Lindsay Waters’ March 10 article in Inside Higher Ed, "A Call for Slow Writing," which in turn is a written version of a talk he gave to the Council of Editors of Scholarly Journals meeting at the 2007 MLA convention in Chicago. Waters is executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, and author of the 100-page pamphlet Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (2004), which also makes the case he makes in IHE: that the widespread trend of requiring a book for promotion and tenure is destroying the academic scene, and that instead of rushing to get a book into print, junior scholars should be striving to write a single wonderfully written essay.

His most radical (and not entirely serious) suggestion: "I am tempted to say — in order to be maximally provocative — that anyone who publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D. should be denied tenure. The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely."

What junior scholars need to do instead of rushing their dissertations into some kind of publishable form, Waters argues, is to slow down, take their time, linger over their sentences as over fine food, polish and planish, make every sentence a work of art. The result of not allowing them to do this--the result, obviously, of the book-for-tenure requirement--is a world of execrable prose, in which mediocre and unoriginal thinking is obscured by convoluted sentences clogged with jargon.

What bothers me about Waters’ article (to postpone engagement with Brooke’s blog post for another minute or two) is that it is so shoddily written. If you were writing a piece on careless, sloppy, substandard academic writing, wouldn’t you be extra-careful with your sentences? Wouldn’t you linger over them as over fine food? Not Waters. Look at that second sentence in the quotation above: "The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely." The chances is? And doesn't he mean "the chances are small," or "that a person at that stage can have published anything worthwhile is unlikely"? And isn’t something worth chopping down trees for?

Or this: "In his Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly lambasted Joseph Addison, co-founder of the journal The Spectator because he was 'an apologist for the New Bourgeoisie.'" Okay, it’s petty to insist on the comma after that parenthetical item--"In his Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly lambasted Joseph Addison, co-founder of the journal The Spectator, because he was 'an apologist for the New Bourgeoisie'"--but the way Waters writes it, the sentence means that Addison’s status as "an apologist for the New Bourgeoisie" was his reason for cofounding The Spectator.

Or this: "In fact, where I hear people talk the most about journals edited according to international standards for refereeing, it often attached to mediocre publications and is a reason for excluding from counting towards one’s record publication in essays it is almost impossible to get into because they have their own, very high standards, like Critical Inquiry." "Publication in essays" is a typo for "publication in journals," obviously. But what does "it often attached" mean? Is there an "is" missing there ("it is often attached")? Or is "attached" a typo for "attaches"? Worse, what is the antecedent of "it"? The most obvious noun that "it" could be referring to is "talk," but "talk" there isn’t a noun; it's a verb. Does he mean "where I hear people talk ..., their talk is often attached"? Do we "attach" talk? And try as I might, I cannot figure out what Waters thinks is a reason not to count publications in the most exclusive journals "towards one's record." The sentence seems to be saying that talk about mediocre publications is that reason; but that makes no sense at all. And what exactly is the relation among "journals edited according to international standards for refereeing," "mediocre publications," and publications with very high standards? It's the relationship marked by the "attachment of talk," obviously, but that's a very loose kind of talk. Waters seems to be saying that the publications people usually praise as edited with very high standards are in fact mediocre; but somehow he gets from there to the recommendation that we not count articles published in exclusive journals like Critical Inquiry toward promotion and tenure. What's the connection? Is he saying that Critical Inquiry is a mediocre publication? It's hard to imagine he means that, but the sentence is so shoddily written that I cannot for the life of me come up with anything else that it might mean. And is "it ... is a reason for excluding from counting towards one’s record publication in essays it is almost impossible to get into because they have their own, very high standards" a good model sentence in a jeremiad against unnecessarily convoluted academic prose? Sure, Waters avoids jargon, and the sentence does parse, sort of, if you read it slowly and carefully and analytically enough. But "insisting upon clearer language set forth in rhythmical sentence," in his terms, would have involved breaking that multiply embedded phrase up into smaller pieces: "there are journals that it is almost impossible to get into because they have their own, very high standards; publishing in them should not count toward one’s record," or some such. And I don’t know about you, but Waters' sentence doesn’t seem particularly rhythmical to me. I don't feel like I'm eating curry as I read it. I feel more like I'm tripping down stairs. Maybe it's the missing words?

Again, it would seem nitpicky to draw your attention to these errors in Waters' article, if it were not the burden of his argument that we are requiring junior scholars to write too fast, with the result that they write badly. Who is requiring Lindsay Waters to write this fast, and this sloppily?

Collin Brooke mostly dislikes Waters' writing, and has attacked him in the past; but he finds some things to praise in this IHE piece. He likes Waters’ critique of the book requirement for promotion and tenure, and says he felt the pressure to write faster when he got a tenure-track job. Strangely, though, one of the things he likes about it is how well written it is: "First, it's a well-wrought piece, showing off Waters' own skills at prose." Really! It's certainly lively and provocative, and some of Waters’ sentences do work nicely; but it only seems "well-wrought" and "skillful" to me at the macrolevel, at the level of general impressions. A close look at any paragraph reveals deeper problems.

Brooke also finds a lot to pick at in the article, and specifically things that I frankly find even stranger than his praise:

To imagine that an entire profession sits around thinking, "hmmm, how can I write a really crappy sentence here?" is beyond laughable to me. Is there writing in the humanities that is largely indefensible from a stylistic point of view? Almost certainly. Are there writers in the humanities who consciously set out to produce inelegant prose? I seriously doubt it. So the notion that an entire tenure system is going to be changed by our conviction about the quality of our prose just sounds cranky to me, to be honest, and not serious at all.

Where exactly does Waters even imply this? His argument is not at all that humanists set out to write badly, but that they end up writing badly, due first of all to time constraints--they have to publish that book or perish--and then, secondarily, to a whole culture of shoddy writing, a widespread acceptance of "bad styling of sentences":

It seems to me that when bad styling of sentences became accepted, we got used to it. We compensated for the lack of quality and impact of the sentences that people wrote as evidence of their scholarly abilities by asking them for more of them in the hopes we could get the same buzz going that we used to get from fewer sentences.

When Edward Said predicted the decline of writing by professors in the early 1980s, I did not believe him; but he was right and I was wrong. A lot of bad habits developed, and now they are protected by power by those who write poorly who have now risen in rank as a result of what I called "social passing" in educational levels above the primary and secondary schools.

The problem Waters is attacking here is not a deliberate, conscious attempt on the part of academic writers to "produce inelegant prose," but a culture of gobbledy-gook, bad writing that was originally generated by fast writing--writing under pressure of the tenure clock--and eventually became entrenched as acceptable writing: "The reason for the persistence of gobbledy-gook is that it's a lot easier to hide mediocre thinking under the cloak of gobbledy-gook."

(This is once again not, I would note, a particularly elegant sentence. The rhythms are off, which undermines the stylistic impact of the repetition of "gobbledy-gook"; burying the rheme of the sentence, "mediocre thinking," in the middle of the repetition of its theme weakens its force. A slower writer would have studied that cliched word "cloak," whose single syllable and plosive k’s have such a deleterious effect on the sentence’s rhythm, and considered alternatives: "the garment of gobbledy-gook"? "the tattered rags of gobbledy-gook"? But no: Waters grabs the first obvious cliche and throws it in. He's a man in a hurry.)

Should we conclude that fast writing is even more endemic than Waters says? Is the proper response to his article a "physician, heal thyself"? Or is he, as an editor at Harvard UP, exempt from the strictures he places on us academic writers? Is it all right for executive editors at university presses to write op-ed pieces and 100-page pamphlets decrying bad academic writing, and in doing so not worry overmuch about their own prose styles?

Or should we conclude instead that writing well is harder than it looks, even for an expert like Lindsay Waters--and give academic writers a break?

4 numbered afterthoughts:

1. Is five years really that overwhelmingly short a time to revise a dissertation into a book? Say a dissertation is 500 paragraphs long, and that's a bit on the short side, so you're going to revise those 500 and expand them with another 300. That's 100 paragraphs a year to revise and another 60 a year to write. Is that a killer pace? Do you really have to rush your writing to get through that load? Can we really explain bad writing by reference to the superhuman speed required to revise a dissertation in five years?

2. Does Waters really believe that junior faculty members are too stupid, or too young, or too inexperienced (which is it?), to write a worthwhile book? Or, since he admits that he's being deliberately provocative, is he actually making the more elitist argument that the number of professors who have a good book in them is extremely small, and we'd all be better off if the one-book wonders in our departments were not forced by P&T requirements to crank out that one sucky monster?

3. Or, since we currently believe that professors should be engaged in research--studying things and writing up the results--and in most humanistic disciplines the measure of that research is the publication of books in university presses and scholarly articles in refereed journals, does his suggestion that we should require junior faculty members to write essays rather than scholarly books and articles actually constitute an attack on the research ideal? Does he really want to repopulate universities with faculty members who write well rather than doing research?

4. As things are set up now, people like Lindsay Waters serve as gatekeepers for P&T decisions, and that puts enormous pressure on him to read and edit vast quantities of crappy writing. Changing the current P&T requirements in most humanities departments along the lines he suggests--requiring a single essay rather than a book--would relieve him of a lot of that apparently quite unpleasant work. Should we feel sorry for him? Should we wish an easier professional life for acquisitions editors? Is that what this is about?