C. Wright Mills on why academics write the way they do

Something I stumbled upon while looking for articles on writing: On Intellectual Craftsmanship, the appendix to C. Wright Mills' book The Sociological Imagination. (It's a jpeg file not easily turned into text, while this version is a pdf file, but, judging just from a quick skimming, changed Wright's divisions, deleted several useful footnotes, and dishonestly changed Mills' generic "he" to a generic "she.")

I didn't find it all that helpful, and not something I could easily use with my own writing students, but I did enjoy the section beginning on page 7-13 (the first full paragraph) in which he discusses academic writing.

"Desire for status," he says, "is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility." This, some of you may protest, is a stereotype. I might agree, had I not spent many years editing academics and had a surprisingly large number tell me that yes, my suggested version was perfectly lucid and said exactly what they meant, but they wanted to use the unreadable version because if they published the lucid version someone, usually their peers, would think ill of them.

This used to surprise me, but after awhile it didn't. The purpose of much academic publishing, I eventually realized, had nothing to do with advancing learning or sharing one's scholarly discoveries. It had to do with submitting to the rules of the guild, one of which was: You shall use the currently popular jargon, and lots of it. The writer was being evaluated not for his insight and learning but for his willingness to play the game, and play by the rules set by its masters.

And in the humanities, of course, the masters could set any rules they wanted. If the physicist doesn't write clearly, some dim college junior blows up the lab and incinerates sixteen of his fellows. If the English professor doesn't write clearly, the four people who start his article flip to the next one and the one student who finds it in an academic database just assumes that it's way way over his head, but he can quote it anyway.

I know there are exceptions, exemplified by the academics on our masthead (George, McClay, Gardiner, Tighe, Esolen, Young, Hart, Hunter, etc.). But there are a lot of not exceptions too.

But back to the article. Mills (no relation, as far as I know) goes on to argue that writing well isn't all that hard. "To overcome the academic prose," he declares, "you have first to overcome the academic pose." He goes on to give some helpful suggestions for doing so.