Message-Id: <3.0.2.32.19970610004219.0070db40@email.rci.rutgers.edu>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 1997 00:42:19 -0400
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: wayne brekhus <brekhus@rci.rutgers.edu>
Subject: RE: bad writing redux
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	Keep in mind that the bad writing contest was sponsored by PHILOSOPHY AND
LITERATURE and a philosophy listserv.  To me that's a better explanation
for why the contest singled out literary criticism and not academic
sociology for its bad writing.  True there are canon defenders who attack
postmodernism's jargon to disguise other ideological reasons, but attacks
on much of postmodernism's turgid prose don't necessarily come from
conservative upholders of the status quo.
	Still your point that mainstream sociology is also guilty of plenty of bad
writing is a good one. James Davis (Sociological Forum, June 1994
9:pp.182-183) makes an interesting argument about why so much sociological
writing is bad.  According to Davis sociology places high value on
empirical truth, perhaps too high a value.  As a consequence sociologists
like to write in passive voice, use tons of qualifiers rather than say
anything directly, and talk more about their methods, past research, need
for more research etc. than actually make straight forward declarations
about what they found.  Much safer to say little or nothing of substance
than to definitevely say something that could be wrong! I have a hard time
finding journal articles where the author writes in an active rather than
passive voice.  And journal reviewers are more likely to accept a multitude
of hemming qualifications that inhibit clarity, than to reward a direct
clear unqualified statement that is almost always but not necessarily
always true. 
	I think fear of being wrong is only one of two reasons for bad writing.
The other reason is fear of being obviously right! I'm always annoyed when
I dig through some intensely sophisticated quantitative study where they
spend pages explaining all the statistical techniques and have a big lit
review with tons of citations of past research and when it's all said and
done the article's findings say something like "social actors who exhibit
low degrees of faith in life and high degrees of ambivalence toward death
were found to be at significantly greater risk for suicidal behavior." I
think there's plenty of articles where once you wade through the language
and the statistical procedures they really don't say anything that is new
or interesting.  As a social science we pay lip service to replication, but
in reality most people are much more interested in modestly documented
surprising findings than obvious findings, no matter how well documented.
Murray Davis has a great piece called "That's Interesting" (1971 1:
pp.309-344 in Philosophy of the Social Sciences) where he says many
sociological researchers make the mistake of taking the scientific method
too seriously and thus, carefully document obvious but completely
uninteresting theories. Freud and Marx, after all, aren't famous because
their theories are necessarily right, they're famous because their theories
are interesting. To grossly oversimplify Murray Davis he refers to three
types of theories.  They are "What appears to be X is really X" to which
people will respond "So what! That's obvious!"; "What appears to be X is
really Y" to which they'll respond "That's interesting."; and "Everything
that appears to be real is not.  Ontology has no connection to
Phenomenology" to which people will respond "That's Absurd!".  
	 I think authors sometimes mask either the absurdity (as in the bad
writing sample about everything visual being pornography) or the
obviousness (the bigger problem for mainstream sociology) of their
statements through unnecessarily turgid prose.  Of course there is
occasionally really interesting stuff in turgidly written pieces, but
that's all the more reason to demand that they be more clearly written.
Just my thoughts on the whole bad writing thing.  I recommend Howard
Becker's (1986) Writing for Social Scientists and Sistrunk and White's
Elements of Style (don't have the year with me) for sources on writing
clearly.

Wayne Brekhus
Rutgers
brekhus@rci.rutgers.edu