Can Sociologists Write?

Abstract

Can sociologists write? Michael Billig, Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed, in the Social Sciences, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 215pp.In my first years as editor of a small intellectual magazine I commissioned a lot of articles from academics. This tactic had several advantages: academics are accessible (they advertise their expertise and e-mail addresses online); willing (it's part of their job to get their ideas into the public sphere); and cheap (they often would not expect to be paid at all, unless they were Americans, who did). I was also enamoured of the idea that I might be able to make a modest contribution to the building of a bridge between the academy and the world of ideas beyond.It wasn't long before I abandoned this presumptuous notion. The theory was fine, and I continue to believe that good ideas should be shared as widely as possible, but in practice it was a failure. While, with a bit of jiggling, I could usually get useable, sometimes brilliant, contributions from journalists, non-professionals, students, bloggers, and activists, the submissions from academics which had seemed in embryo so promising proved time and again to be, well, rubbish. At first I thought this was because of a difference in terminology, and if I only worked diligently on translating the academese into everyday English - and believe me I tried - all would be well. In fact there was an inverse relation between effort and outcome: the more hours spent scrubbing the long words, jargon and qualifications from the text the more likely it was that the whole thing would fall to tatters in the end. It is only now, in hindsight, that I can bring myself to admit the terrible truth: academics can't write.Having read Michael Billig's wonderful new book, Learn to Write Badly: How to succeed, in, the Social Sciences, I think I now know why. It is not that academia necessarily attracts bad writers, or merely fails to teach academics how to write better. It's worse. It is precisely the way academics are trained and told what is expected of them if they wish to succeed, Billig argues, that teaches them rigorously and specifically the art of bad writing. As Billig puts it in his introduction, 'You have to study long and hard to write this badly' (pi 1).Billig, a Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough for more than 25 years, marshals a compelling case. He analyses in detail texts from several social science disciplines, including, devastatingly, his home discipline of social psychology, but the case applies much more broadly to the social sciences as a whole and far beyond.The main charge is that academia teaches a series of styles and habits which move the researcher as far as possible from the dynamism, clarity and specificity that good writing requires. Among these are the overuse of nouns, especially those ending with '-isation or -ification' - the bigger the better; overreliance on the passive voice, which avoids the tricky task of saying who did what; a tendency both to conceal and exaggerate research findings and, despite claims that a technical vocabulary avoids the indeterminacy of everyday speech and the ideological pitfalls of 'common sense', an almost complete lack of specificity.His numerous examples are not used to name and shame individuals but to indict the system as a whole. In this looking-glass world, the very brightest, the most garlanded, are the ones who assimilate the bad writing rules most completely; and precious few, and certainly not Billig himself, as he admits, are able to resist the professional pressures that lead to hasty jargon-heavy publication. The failings are not individual but institutional.Those whose taste runs to irony will especially enjoy the passages on the linguists, 'unable to learn their own lessons', who critically analyse the practice of turning verbs into nouns yet deliver their findings in papers peppered with verbs-turned-nouns like 'de-agentialisation', 'nominalisation' and 'passivization'. …