Why Academic Writing Sounds Like Hell

Words that mean things sound dumb to a room full of critical theorists.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Many years ago, I worked as an editor (but really a ghostwriter) for a publication that ran articles by academics and scientists, and the sort of people with important-sounding positions in the NGO sector. There was a part of the job I dreaded: editing the copy of somebody who put a “Dr.” in front of their name.

Many academics are brilliant, some devoting their lives to exploring a tiny sliver of reality to the exclusion of all else. It’s the quantum physicist, the computational neuroscientist, the zoologist who spent two decades studying the nocturnal habits of the giant African land snail. I was always glad to work with people like this, who happily gave up their time to talk about their work in a way the rest of us could understand.

Oh, but the other ones, the sociologists and literary theorists, the “critical” people. The sort who replied to my brief for a 1500-word article with a 14-page Word doc of cut-and-paste bits from their PhD dissertation on why gardening is racist.

“Thanks”, I lied in my reply email before explaining that this would “need some work”.

A lot of work, as it turned out. The first draft looked fine at a glance. No major grammar errors, maybe a dangling modifier here and there, but the sentences had subjects and verbs; the paragraphing made sense.

The problem was something else, something not getting through to me as though the meaning couldn’t quite travel from the page to my mind. So I’d print it out in the hope that a tangible document would help me grasp what the writer was trying to say. It didn’t work. I squinted at it like a baffled simpleton, mouthing the words, trying to make them mean something. Perhaps I traced my finger along the lines like a child learning to read, I can’t remember.

What is the writer trying to say?

The words were doing something, but the something wasn’t communicating anything other than its own unintelligibility. There was a lot of “problematizing” and “interrogating” going on. The prose was peppered with “praxis” and loaded with “liminality”. Everything was a “discourse” or a “narrative” trailing “problematic signifiers”. But these were mere baubles decorating what was underneath – or rather, what was not underneath. Because this was writing that had spent years marinating in institutional cadence, now served up like the university’s own canteen slop, nutrients processed out, artificial flavouring folded in.

Worse, though, was the flash of recognition. I had studied continental philosophy at university – Heidegger, Derrida and others. Their texts are impenetrable to anyone who hasn’t put in the work, but once you have, you’re through the looking glass. It’s beguiling. Heidegger, especially, is a philosopher doing something novel, pushing at the limits of rational thinking in trying to get at the meaning of being itself. Derrida is another matter. He takes the idea that language is slippery and unreliable, that meaning can never quite be pinned down – then tries to pin this down in a language that’s slippery and unreliable. The effect is to make nonsense sound profound. This might explain why it seeped out of the philosophy seminar into every other department, picking up a bit of Marx along the way – critical theory supplying the moral mission, postmodernism the affectations.

It’s attractive because it makes abstraction feel like intelligence. Moreover, nobody is quite immune to it. I left the academy speaking and writing in ways undoubtedly influenced by this vernacular. It took a couple of years and George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language to relearn how to write clearly – an essay, by the way, that did more for my prose than a university education could hope to achieve in half a decade.

What Orwell understood, and what the academy has spent decades trying to forget, is that unclear writing is almost never an accident. It’s a technique. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” he wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

His six rules of writing are justly famous and pop up in every other essay about writing, but let’s briefly revisit them here:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Flip these on their head, and you get what we have now: needless complexity, sprawling sentences, passive verbs, and jargon. And in the margins, the creep of barbarism.

That said, not all “difficult” prose is difficult in the same way. I’ve already mentioned Heidegger, but I could add Kant and Wittgenstein. These are unusual and highly original thinkers (geniuses, in short) trying to stretch language to its limits to express ideas nobody had thought before. Reading them is agony, but I never had the slightest doubt that every sentence was in search of the truth. It’s highly technical language, but not in an effort to sound sophisticated. Likewise, a quantum physicist’s paper means nothing to me, but I know it uses jargon in the service of precision. The terms point to something real.

Literary writing is another matter as well. James Joyce is difficult, but nobody reads Finnegans Wake for clarity on political matters. The writer Will Self sounds like a thesaurus left out in the rain, but nobody reads that sort of fiction to illuminate real-world concerns, if they read it at all.

But the other difficult stuff, the prose I was grappling with at the start of an edit – this is the kind that borrows the appearance of technical density without referring to anything tangible. It’s hard to understand, not because the ideas are hard, but because you’re trying to extract meaning where there is none, or not enough to fill an article. That’s why, if a draft didn’t survive an edit, it was because there was nothing there to begin with.

Still, other drafts, after various rewrites and additional research, did yield something valuable. Only years later did I understand why my efforts didn’t get much in the way of a thank-you from the “author”. It’s obvious now. The person whose work I’d made readable couldn’t forgive me for proving it was unreadable to begin with.

I mention all this because the language of the academy, specifically its register, long ago spread into the public realm. If you want to see the infection in its purest form, look at the mission statement of any university in the Western world. Here’s the opening of SOAS – the School of Oriental and African Studies:

“To be an excellent research-intensive university that responds to the learning needs of our diverse students. We will enable an equitably grounded global academy as a means to challenge hierarchies of knowledge and assist in the building of a socially just future.”

“Enable an equitably grounded global academy.” What does that mean, really? “Challenge hierarchies of knowledge.” Which hierarchies? What knowledge? A sentence or two later: “Inherently inter-disciplinary, we value deep partnerships with scholars from the regions and diasporas of SOAS’ focus.” That’s the cuttlefish reaching a climax.

It’s everywhere; you’ve probably read something like it this week. It’s the kind of writing that makes very particular noises like a mating call in pursuit of suitable candidates and like-minded sponsors. It’s the language of the NGO fundraising deck and corporate DEI policy, both of which have their origins in the same university departments. It persists because the incentive structures of academic life reward it. Grant applications and hiring committees expect the song and dance of theoretical sophistication. Language that cleanly maps to reality doesn’t get you the job because the job requirement is talking in riddles, which will eventually earn you tenure if you do it for long enough.

The real cost is that the same dialect gets used by those arguing against the terrible ideas it produced. I keep stumbling on intelligent young writers I broadly agree with who reject trans ideology (for example), yet bring the same linguistic tools to the fight. They’ll make a perfectly sound argument about the failures of gender medicine, but in a sentence like:

“The framework underpinning affirmative care models has not sufficiently accounted for the role of social contagion in identity formation among adolescent cohorts.”¹

What they mean is:

“Teenagers copy each other. The doctors ignored it.”

Somewhere along the way, the writer picked up the idea that complexity is what makes an argument sound serious; that convoluted sentences and tortured syntax reveal the truth of something rather than hide it. But you cannot argue against postmodernist drivel in the language of postmodernist drivel. If your critique of institutional capture reads like Judith Butler, you’ve already lost the argument because the language is the ideology.

It’s understandable in a way. Using clear, concise language feels like showing up to a debate with a haiku while your opponent readies a 50-slide PowerPoint. It’s that scene where Indiana Jones meets the Cairo swordsman, slicing the air with his scimitar in the warm-up to a fight. The dissident thinker feels compelled to use the same elaborate moves, conscious that words that mean things sound dumb to a room full of critical theorists. They end up arguing in the vernacular of the ideology they’re trying to overcome, whether it’s trans ideology, critical social justice or antisemitism disguised as postcolonial theory.

There’s another way, and we can learn from the trans debate. The women who turned the tide on gender ideology didn’t show up to the fight flourishing abstractions like scimitars. They won it with the simple question: “What is a woman?” That’s Indiana Jones pulling out his pistol and shooting the other guy dead.

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1. This is a composite of things I have read, and I could use real examples, but I don't want to target individuals here, especially where their intentions are good.