How Not to Write

As anyone can see, I’ve been away for a while.  The main reason is course work; I’m taking two classes for my certification in mediation and organizational conflict.  Unlike last semester, I’ve fallen into the land of the pure social scientist.  My courses require formal submissions in APA style, and I’ve done six papers in that genre.  The experience has been so traumatic that I fear I’ve forgotten how to write like a normal human being, so aside from the time it’s taken to produce 34,000 words in this dialect, I’ve been reluctant to risk confusing real writing with what’s done in social science courses.
    But the last paper is in, and it’s time to start recovering.  I thought the best way to do that would be to contrast what’s been required for the past four months with the way people normally write.
    Now I know every field has its jargon.  But some fields are worse than others.  English and history, I would say, except when contaminated by dogmas like semiotics, can actually produce something approaching real communication.  There are peculiarities, of course.  Mike Rose, in his wonderful Lives on the Boundary, said that when you write an English paper about a play or a novel, you’re not supposed to do what any normal person does when they’re talking about plays or novels: tell what happens and tell if it was any good.  Instead you’re supposed to delve deeper into matters of style, theme, archetype, ambiguity, etc. that prove you can read more carefully than the average best-seller consumer.  But you’re still connecting your reader to the book, often with extensive quotations.  You may also take issue in English and history with other prior writers, whose case you describe in more or less detail before demolishing it.
    The key here is that you’re writing about things that have been written, whether imaginatively or historically.  Often you’re actually reading excellent writing, which may improve your own.
    But in the world of social psychology and the like, none of the above applies.  You don’t follow most of the rules of ordinary discourse, and you almost seem to avoid illuminating your reader.  Take the mention of Mike Rose, above.  This might be re-written as: “Rose (Year) has analyzed the narrative-evaluative paradigm and its inapplicability to the academic setting.”  You would then have to supply the full reference to Rose in a list of references, like “Rose, M. (Year). Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin.”  That, of course, is an oversimplification.  To do the job right, you might have to put “Rose, 1995/2005)” to distinguish when the book came out from the edition you consulted.  But you aren’t giving a page number or even a chapter number, so if anyone wanted to find out if Rose really said what you say he said, they would have to read the whole book.  Even more complex, if you bought the book while traveling, you might feel you should cite the country (out of 8) where Penguin has offices; or maybe you should say “London,” because that’s where their registered office is.  This often means interrupting the flow of your thoughts to track down all the data, or else facing hours and hours of citation management just when you’re done and would like a walk, a beer, or some other distraction, like reading a real book.
    The wisest among the professors I’ve had in this program explained to me that my problem is I’m not the intended reader of the article.  The authors are writing for the select group of people working in the same field or sub-field, who know Rose inside out, and they’re just trying to tell the readers that they’re filling in a hole left by Rose and whoever else they cite, so that the others can see whether it’s a hole they need to know about while they’re filling in whatever hole they’ve staked out.
    Question 1, then, is why are we reading people who are not writing for us, and whom we can’t understand until we’ve read everyone else?  Question 2 is, really?  One article I read had 77 references for seven pages.  What are the odds that reader X or Y has read all 77 things that writer A has read, and remembers them in such detail that a single word and a last name brings it all back?  (One of the interesting tricks played is that these writers also cite everything they’ve ever written that is remotely germane to the current piece.  Are they just showing off, or are they listing 8 other articles so that a research engine will tick off 8 more citations of their work for “mine is bigger than yours” judgments by the powers that be?   They also play the Alphonse-Gaston game: if Larry, Curley and Moe do three pieces of work together, they evidently negotiate whose name goes first, so each of them, or at least each with clout, can get “lead author” props.)
    Believe me, I do not exaggerate the time and energy spent citing.  I have counted paragraphs where 66 words are actual text and 61 are citations in parentheses.  My own long papers have consisted of 80% writing and 20% references, not counting the parentheses in the text that lead you to the 20% at the back of the paper.  This proportion is required by the demand, articulated by one of my teachers, that you need to cite everything that is not your own opinion or observation.  Mention D-Day and you’d better have evidence that it happened on June 6, 1944.  Quote the phrase “the rest is silence” and you’d better credit Shakespeare.  I’m not kidding.  For a sentence that said Lord of the Flies and The Fountainhead reflected views of their era about human nature, I was told to give full citations: last name of author, first initial, date of publication, and city, with details if the city isn’t a famous one.  Do I have a copy of either book nearby?  What edition should I cite?  Will any of my readers go to New York to buy Lord of the Flies and read it to see if I’m right?
    Now it’s easy to play this game.  Think of an idea you want to include, state it in a word or two (Oedipus complex, cognitive dissonance, conditioned response), go look on your shelf or in Google, and you’ve got another citation.  My 14-page paper had 102 citations; my 347-page doctoral thesis 112. 
    What I find worse than the tedium and the impenetrability, the cliqueishness and the petty point-scoring, is the impersonality. No one gets a first name, no one’s argument is given any scope. (A teacher even said it’s bad writing to quote other people: just paraphrase them.)  Everyone else’s work is simply one more pebble piled on the mound that will get you to the top of tenure hill.
    To paraphrase Edgar Lee Masters: Tick, tick, tick.  Such little citations. While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines.  (“Petit the Poet,” Spoon River Anthology, written for all time.  Read it.)