A friend of mine is taking some summer classes at Minnesota State University Moorhead.  As a sort of boot camp for graduate school and a bit of a brain exercise, I’ve availed myself of some of the texts she bought.  I’m an avid reader but my tastes are fairly specific, so I haven’t read a lot of academic texts (which nobody reads for recreation anyway).  If I get accepted into graduate school, I’m going to be reading pretty much nothing but that kind of stuff, so I thought I’d dip my face in the pond and see what the water’s like.

And all I can say is:  Hoo boy.  The water is very, very murky.

Every profession has its jargon, its way of talking.  One of the reasons I find it so fascinating to watch home-improvement shows is the way the hosts talk.  They mention the most obscure tools and procedures with an easy familiarity that often makes me chuckle.  And how many times have you heard people from the same occupation talk shop and walked away feeling like you’ve just heard a conversation in a dead language that only they speak?

But academic writing occupies a special circle of hell.  Considering that a teacher’s first job is to make sure somebody learns something, it’s always baffled me that when they talk to each other – at least at the college level – they do so in a language that consists of layers of impenetrable syllables.

That’s a particular problem if they have a weak point to begin with.  One of the readings really tripped my crap detector.  It was, of all things, the analysis of a kung fu movie.  Somehow, the guy managed to shoehorn into the article a pet theory of his, that white men have a homoerotic attraction to black men.  It had the aroma of a guy trying to promote his pet theory no matter what and he did it by piling on not just words, but words that were so complicated and obscure that even if you agreed with the guy you wouldn’t really be sure.

It was a prime example of what philosophers call “begging the question.”  Ninety-nine percent of the time, when you hear people say that something “begs the question” they’re using it wrong; what it actually means is to argue that something is true by arguing your conclusion.  When your kid says he doesn’t feel like cleaning his room, you ask him why and he says “I just don’t feel like it,” he’s begging the question.  (Try that on him next time:  “Junior, stop begging the question and clean your room.”)

But even if academic writing has a good argument to make, often it’s done in such an overstuffed, bloated way that it’s nearly impossible to figure out what the writer is saying.

That offends me professionally.  I’ve made a living writing and teaching writing for well over half my life and I know one thing:  If you write something and nobody understands it it’s a lousy piece of work.

One of the reasons I’ve so enjoyed teaching writing is that it’s given me a chance to trumpet (I almost wrote “promulgate,” which is just the kind of word an academic would use) a pet theory of mine.  Writing, I tell my students, is nothing more than an exercise in clarity.   You need clarity in three areas, purpose, thought and word.

Purpose is, of course, the most basic.  You’ve got to know exactly what you want to say.  I’ve actually had editors who have pulled a story out of their ear, or some other orifice, and assigned it to me without actually knowing what the story really is.  And if you literally don’t know what you’re talking about, believe me, it’s hard to talk about it.  It’s like nailing Jello-O to a tree.

Once you know what you’re talking about, the next step is to be clear about how you’re going to talk about it.  That’s clarity of thought. It boils down to how you’re going to organize what you’re saying.

And the final step is clarity of word.  That just means choosing your words carefully, paying attention as much to how a word feels as to what it says.

There’s a lot more to all this, but if you really want to know that, you either need to get out more or you need to take my media writing class at MSUM.

But it astonishes me, reading what passes for people trying to pass on knowledge, that so many people can lose sight of clarity.  I suspect the guy that was analyzing the kung fu movie knew he had a relatively weak point, so he was going to dazzle his readers with bullshit.  It probably works in a lot of places, but I’ve been snowed by the best and it was pretty obvious to me what he was doing.

I realize that justified or not, writing scares the hell out of most people.  I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody has told me that the thought of writing terrifies them.  In reality, it’s not as hard as it looks.  It’s brain work of a specific kind and you can train your brain to do it.  That’s why my class is all about.  If you can talk, you can write.  They’re not the same thing, but they’re not really all that different.

Once you realize that, it reveals a dirty little secret that many academics, and all writers, know.  If you read something and you don’t understand it, most of the time the problem isn’t you.  It’s the writer.  Feeling stupid because you don’t understand a piece of writing is like feeling like a failure because a mechanic couldn’t fix your car.  It’s the writer’s job to make you understand whatever it is he’s talking about.  If you don’t get it, the fault isn’t yours.