Why Michael Ellsberg Wouldn’t Pass My English 101
It’s not unusual to find vapid arguments about higher education on ” journalists’” web articles and blogs these days. But they’re becoming more frequent, which means they have to push the envelope to get attention. That means making even less-informed, more incendiary claims about what teachers in the Humanities do or don’t do. In the latest and greatest such piece, entitled “Why Trying to Learn Clear Writing in College is Like Trying to Learn Sobriety in a Bar,” Michael Ellsberg claims that college students can’t possibly learn clear writing in their classes because their professors themselves write hopelessly tangled prose. No responsible journalist would make such a bold claim without evidence, right? Of course, I use the term “journalist” loosely with Michael Ellsberg. Judging from his recent column in Forbes, I’m not sure he is one (not even in that wacky Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson sense). In fact, I’m not even sure he’d pass my English 101 class based on this kind of writing. Let me explain why.
Point #1: My English 101 class expects students (by the end of the semester) not only to write clearly but to support claims with relevant evidence. We spend a fair deal of time on this point. But take Ellsberg, who claims it’s impossible to learn writing in college based on an excerpt from a sociologist who died 30 years ago. Houston, do we have a problem in reasoning here? How does Ellsberg get away with advising us to “stay a thousand miles away from most university professors” if his only source is a single piece of bad prose?
Point #2: My English 101 class also teaches sound argument as part of writing. But take Ellsberg, who praises a book written by a university professor and then later tells us that university professors don’t know how to write. Imagine if I said that I never go to clinics or hospitals anymore because my doctor once said that sometimes radiologists are slow. We rhetoricians call this argument the “hasty generalization” fallacy.
Point #3: Another logical fallacy in argument I teach students is the ”straw man.” When politicians or celebrities have nothing of original value to say, they fabricate an issue or a problem that doesn’t actually exist and then complain about it. In Ellsberg’s case, he doesn’t seem to realize that the Talcott Parsons of the academic world would never stray within a thousand miles of a writing classroom to begin with. So Ellsberg’s problem doesn’t actually exist.
Conclusion: So don’t worry, Michael. Writing might be taught by under-appreciated faculty, but most of us know what we’re doing and we don’t write like dear Talcott. It would be nice if more “journalists” would actually live up to their old reputations and do some research before they run their mouths.
February 12, 2012 at 8:19 am
Is not Judith Butler, several-time winner of the worst sentence of the year award, the director of a writing program?
The example from Parsons is a quotation found in Richard Lanham’s book on style that was published in the 70s (though it was revised for a second edition more recently), so the outdated example makes a bit more sense in that context. Ellsberg is just parroting Lanham throughout the article, and I happen to agree with both of them. There are plenty of examples today of the same kind of writing Lanham and Ellsberg describe. Judith Butler, of course, come to mind, but so do most PhD students (myself included) and professors and scholars. I was tainted by that kind of writing early on in my education, and I’m still trying to overcome it.
I read this sentence in a textbook for a class the other day and then chucked the book in the floor: “Resituating the Gramsci-Williams concept of hegemony within the structural framework of the Habermasian public sphere allows us to honor the power of domestic ideology’s ‘intimate discipline’ while still making room for agency and change.” I refused to read any more of this text after reading this sentence. Life is too short to mess around with this kind of thoughtless academese. Vonnegut says, in an essay I frequently assign to my 101 students, “Pity the reader.” This writer couldn’t care less about the reader; I’m not even sure that she gives much of a thought to herself. In fact, the problem to me seems to be a general trend of thoughtlessness. It’s not that the ideas are thoughtless, but that the presentation is thoughtless. I once described one student’s writing as five-star food slopped into drive-thru containers. The ideas were there, but the presentation made me either miss them, struggle to find them, or not care whether I found them at all.
I tell my students writing like this isn’t smart–it’s a mad lib. All you need to know is a little academic jargon (you don’t even really need to know what it means), and imitate away. Orwell remains the most insightful commentator on this phenomenon when he writes in “Politics and the English Language,” “By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.”
The sign of a good writer is the ability (and use of that ability) to make difficult ideas come across simply, clearly, and interestingly. (The value of entertainment in academic writing seems to have been lost as well. I laugh at points when reading Lanham and Orwell, and that’s a positive quality.) There is no knack or skill involved in presenting difficult ideas difficultly. That’s easy. The hard work is making difficult things accessible. Dense prose does not equate to lofty ideas necessarily (though it may happen that way on occasion); rather, dense prose reflects a lack of thought or skill or both on the part of the writer.
It seems to me that Richard Lanham, George Orwell, and Kurt Vonnegut might also fail your 101 course. That would put you in a strange position, I should think.
One final note, though. I understand the desire to (a) defend your profession and (b) distance a thoughtful concept of what makes good writing from the basic mechanics and usage issues that the author of “MBA Recruiters’ No. 1 Pet Peeve” focuses on. However, you don’t need to pressure yourself to defend those in our profession who make us look bad. We know that good writing is more than grammar (and, in fact, has relatively little to do with grammar), and we know that a lot of academic writing is really really bad. We don’t need to defend bad writers. We can instead say, Yes, Ellsberg, you’re right that a lot of academic writers are not very good, but that doesn’t mean that all academic writing is bad. You know, Ellsberg, you even quote from an academic writer (Lanham) when you criticize academic writing instruction. I suppose you wouldn’t have a problem if students took writing classes with him? There are others like Lanham out there; we’re not all Judith Butler or Talcott Parsons. (And please excuse my picking on Butler; she’s just one particularly famous example of the kind of writing Ellsberg condemns.)
There’s a lot more that could be said, but Lanham says most of it in his many books and articles on the topic. Because he has more space to say it in, he’s far more balanced than Ellsberg. He even spends a chapter defending dense prose in “Style: An Anti-Textbook,” and he also attacks the textbooks’ focus on clarity, which he sees as too vague of a word to really mean anything helpful to students. When we tell students to “be clear,” what we really mean, he says, is “be better,” which is a pretty useless injunction if we don’t give them specific tips on how to be better.
February 12, 2012 at 3:54 pm
I’m not defending “those in our profession who make us look bad.” Read my post again if you don’t believe me, especially point #2. Also, Judith Butler doesn’t direct any writing program that I know of. Her bio on Berkeley’s website says she co-directs the Program of Critical Theory. In fact, you’ll find that most scholarship written by writing program administrators is pretty easy to understand. My main problem with Ellsberg–if you’ve read his piece–is that he steers people away from universities altogether based on the stereotype of professors who can’t write. It’s a dangerous and irresponsible argument, and part of a larger assault on higher education that needs answering.
February 12, 2012 at 6:36 pm
It seems you’re right about Butler. I don’t know where I read (or thought I read) that she was a WPA. However, she is a Rhetoric professor.
So, I was in Winston-Salem the other day at a neat little bookstore that specialized in independent publishers when I saw two books on the shelf by one Brian Ray, who apparently writes fiction (which I didn’t know). I picked up a copy of Unknown Female and have been enjoying it since.