Although I have been a professional writer for more than fifty years, I still have some things to learn about academic writing. Here are five lessons I’ve picked up so far:
- Don’t use bullets or make lists (like this one). A professor told me that explicitly, and once I began to read more journal articles, I saw the rule at work. Bullets are a useful tool in, say, policy papers, although they are undoubtedly overused in the Internet era (with automatic bulleting). Why aren’t they right for academia? Maybe they make things look too simple. Ideas and facts need to be interwoven in history; trying to separate them into single phrases may oversimplify. Or it may just be a matter of style.
- Don’t use short paragraphs. I discovered this on my own. My journalistic three- or four-sentence paragraphs just don’t fly. Again, I don’t exactly know the reason. But combining paragraphs in my papers has given them (and me) a more serious image; very good for a future academic. And topic sentences help.
- The first paragraph, especially, should be long. Forget about the Wall Street Journal’s “anecdotal lede” (yes, that’s the way editors spell it), which was invented to attract the reader’s attention. Don’t use Business Week’s “back when, but now” lede, which creates in a few sentences the story’s context for a busy reader. By the way, quotations to enliven the piece are also on the edge of propriety. Be serious.
- Now and then, use long words but not too many. I’m not being pejorative or sarcastic here. I just see a lot of words that would never show up in journalistic prose, which is designed to break ideas into their component parts. Maybe I should try to elevate my ideas. Academia does have complicated concepts that stem from Greek and Latin scholarship, and academic writers (including historians) may really need to write in terms of the “episteme”; things may be “heuristic.” “dialectic,” or “exiguous,” and, of course, we could not do without “historiographical” and “historicism.”
- Use footnotes. Popular writing rarely uses footnotes or end notes. There isn’t room for them or a desire for them. But historical writing does. I mean footnotes that don’t just cite sources but ones that add explanations and other references. Such as: “For a discussion of this dynamic sense of community, see. . . . ” Or, “In praise of the scribbling engine, one correspondent of the Leeds Mercury wrote, ‘a clothier may as he did formerly spend a fortnight or more in doing that which he may now get done in one day.'” (Both from Adrian Randall’s Before the Luddites.)” Footnotes are fun.
Those are lessons absorbed so far as a graduate student. I’m sure I’ll learn more.
I note you wrote most of that post in your “journalistic three- or four-sentence paragraphs” and they fly just fine.
As Gertrude Stein might have said, A paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph. Why should historians want long paragraphs as opposed to paragraphs with lexical logic? The logic is the introduction of a topic, elaboration, and conclusion, with the conclusion possibly being a transitional thought.
I suppose for academics having long paragraphs and long sentences makes their prose seem more important and serious, but suppose the content isn’t important or serious, and suppose the long block of prose makes for more tedious reading, and suppose the long block of prose makes finding something more difficult? (How’s that for a long sentence?)
Am I simple minded to think that what’s best in any discipline is what works to make communication clear and precise? (Okay, in poetry we often want to stimulate with ambiguity, but has anyone written history in verse since Benet’s “John Brown’s Body”?)
Is humor also shunned?
The folly of such rules is well illustrated by the numerous spoof papers published by academic journals, papers written with lots of long words and jargon, dense and long paragraphs, and no humor until the joke on the editors is revealed.
Jane,
I have to admit that I shuddered when I read several of these rules for good academic writing. Coming off a three decade business career, and teaching business courses, I schooled the students on much the opposite — short paragraphs (especially the first one that had to encompass the entire value statement), bulleted lists when examining several facets of an issue, etc.
Footnotes are fine, and show the quality of the research. Occasional long words are ok, but I stressed the use of “business” words — deciding to remain with a supplier, rather than to “stick with” a suppler, that sort of thing.
Of course, I was trying to accustom my students to how they should write in the business world — obviously different from the academic writing style.
Which causes me to wonder — why are they so different? Another topic, I guess!
Jane, I am enjoying your reports. I read all of them, even if I don’t comment. Best. Bill Dennis
Jane, your footnote about that hard-working clothier is just priceless. Footnotes can be fun indeed!
Jane, your webpage is getting more and more interesting. Keep it up. You are still the best editor I have ever worked with. Academic writing can be a chore, but I assume you will still make it lively. Here is a link to Eugene Volokh’s book on legal writing. It is very good, but it probably differs a lot from academic history writing: https://www.amazon.com/Academic-Legal-Writing-andGetting-University/dp/1599417502
Randy: Your comments are much too generous–but deeply appreciated. Many thanks. Thanks, too, for telling me about Eugene Volokh’s book.
Jane, I especially like your new found love of footnotes, a point we have discussed over the years. Best. Bill Dennis
Bill: I almost wrote you to alert you to this post, because I knew you would love my concession. But your writing is too interesting to need footnotes to break up the tedium!