6 Principles For Writing Needlessly Complicated Prose Like A Professor
By: Gavin Lamb
Tags: Writing, Academia, Philosophy, Books, Writing Tips

6 Principles For Writing Needlessly Complicated Prose Like A Professor

Photo by Kourosh Qaffari on Unsplash

Opaque-style writing

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of advice on how to fill a page with words. Some strategies I use: write stream-of-consciousness for 15 minutes, set a daily goal of 500 words, create an outline, use the slip-box writing method.

These strategies help me produce large amounts of bad writing. This is followed by hours and hours of editing (when I’m trying to produce academic writing that is).

Basically, my writing mantra comes in two-parts:

“show up, show up, show up,” (thanks Isabel Allende) “revise, revise, revise”

But when does bad writing stop being about pruning down overgrowth in my writing to clarify my ideas, and more about letting my half-baked ideas grow wild on the page?

In Style: An Anti-Textbook, author Richard A Lanham describes this wild overgrowth of ideas, involving lots of words but not much content, ‘opaque-style writing’:

“all prose cherishes an object outside itself, a concept it must embody. When the language starts to cloud, it goes bad. But on the opaque-style spectrum, which does not render attitudinizing verdicts, it does not. It simply shifts its loyalty elsewhere, shifts it increasingly to the words themselves. Style becomes subject.”

Needlessly complex writing

In a fascinating essay in the Atlantic, “The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing,” journalist Victoria Clayton writes about the proliferation ofopaque-style writing in academia: “… in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition.”

One example she gives of this opaque-style of ‘needlessly complex writing’ is Barbara Vinken’s Flaubert Postsecular: Modernity Crossed Out. Vinken writes,

“The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter, dismantling the ideal as an idol. In this literalization, the idolatrous deception of the first moment becomes readable. The ideal will reveal itself to be an idol. Step by step, the ideal is pursued by a devouring doppelganger, tearing apart all transcendence. This de-idealization follows the path of reification, or, to invoke Augustine, the path of carnalization of the spiritual. Rhetorically, this is effected through literalization. A Sentimental Education does little more than elaborate the progressive literalization of the Annunciation.”

Clayton points to a growing number of blog posts and articles by academics calling each other out for ‘needlessly complex’ language. Like this one by Steven Pinker, who has positioned himself in recent years as a zealot of clear academic writing (even though his clear writing is not a cure for his simplistic narratives about science and data).

But why write in a needlessly complex way? There is some evidence, Clayton points out, that opaque-style writing makes the writer appear more intellegent. This is what the authors of a 2006 study found, in their research article entitled: Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly.

Another example of why opaque-style writing persists in academia, and despite it being awful to read is Brian Martin article, Why academic jargon thrives. Martin writes,