While today’s research style may be “RAEable”, it has become so unreadable it risks losing its audience, argues Les Back
The piles of books, papers and reports have been dispatched to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) panels from universities throughout Britain, but the effects on the quality of scholarly writing linger.
The exercise is narrowing the audience for scholarly books and limiting the kinds of writing that academics produce. It’s not that academics write too much; it’s just that they do it in a highly specific voice.
Single-authored books are prized above all else, particularly if they are from high-profile preferably United States university presses. Next are single-authored pieces in high-status professional journals.
This produces a feverish atmosphere in which we are desperate to have articles in the “right places”. It also means that other options and other styles of writing are not considered because they register little on the meter of RAE value.
Many younger academics simply don’t have a choice. Their futures are dependent on achieving the requisite number of publications to make them “RAEable”, in other words to be put forward as “research active”. An article in The Guardian, for example, is viewed as literary decoration and certainly not part of the academic cake.
Scholarly writing has become self-referential and full of convoluted argot. It seems that we are writing too often to impress our peers. This produces a surfeit of meta-language that passes largely unread from the desktop to the university library. But to be published in the right places, work has to conform to conventions that value academic technique over accessible prose.
Even writing academic books for students is viewed as little more than second-division output. Originality becomes blurred with a particular form of literary encryption.
Russell Jacoby, author of The Last Intellectuals, suggests this fosters a fetish for difficulty and “the belief that fractured English, name dropping and abstractions guarantee profundity, professionalisation and subversion”. Clarity, on the other hand, is conflated with simplicity.
There are exceptions. In sociology, the wordcraft of Richard Sennett provides the best example of someone who writes with clarity without compromising either the elegance of argument or the complexity of analysis. Feminist literary critic Germaine Greer similarly possesses the capacity to develop complex arguments in lucid prose. In the field of cultural studies, Stuart Hall is perhaps the most accomplished written and verbal communicator of the cultural legacy of empire.
Of course, some of the most beastly tracts have been written in perspicuous prose. Equally, there has to be a place for difficult ideas to be expressed in a difficult fashion. There is real beauty in what might be called the poetry of implied meaning. Yet academic writing is too often laced with exclusive language that operates like an entry ticket, only admitting those who have paid the price.
Sociologist C Wright Mills wrote in the late 1950s that “to overcome academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose”. Mills’s career he died in 1962 aged just 45 was committed to challenging the intellectual status quo and is worth revisiting in the current climate.
He was a prolific writer, but struggled with wordcraft. A collection of his letters, recently edited by his daughters, shows a desperate pursuit of the right language. In a communiqu to his friend William Miller he expresses his dissatisfaction with the early drafts of what was to become his classic book White Collar. “I can’t write it right. I can’t get what I want to say about America in it. What I want to say is what you say to an intimate friend when you are discouraged about how it all is … “
We have stopped trying to make public issues resonate with the kind of private troubles to which Mills refers.
The great Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi wrote: “He who does not know how to communicate, or communicates badly, in a code that belongs only to him or a few others, is unhappy, and spreads unhappiness around him.”
And he concludes: “If he communicates badly deliberately, he is wicked or at least discourteous, because he imposes labour, anguish, or boredom on his readers.”
It is high time to relieve the torture and tedium for students and readers before they stop bothering to turn the page at all.
Les Back is acting head of the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College, London