I hope it sounds rather odd to stand up in defense of elegance—not because elegance is unworthy of defense, of course, but because it should be a near-universal value in writing. And yet, it is rare.
It disturbs me how often, when I read a serious book, I must kick my way through piles of clichés and dead expressions. I reviewed one book that eventually earned the Pulitzer Prize, and for very good reason: It was deeply researched, keenly astute in psychological perception, and vivid in its depiction of not only the main character's life but the secondary characters who surrounded him. Yet it was spattered with such phrases as "cool his heels" and "stacked the deck against him." There is no excuse.
My complaint is not with metaphor itself. It can make writing more evocative, probably because there's something in the human brain that leads us to reason by analogy. (Listen to almost any Supreme Court hearing, for example, in which the justices constantly discuss legal points through analogies.) But metaphors are nothing more than the mules that pull the wagon. Overwork them, and they die, at which point they do nothing to draw forward the real meaning. Worse than that, they get in the way.
When you find yourself resorting to clichés, it's better to drop metaphor entirely, and get at the meaning as directly as possible, simply and precisely—that is, elegantly. George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is cited by virtually everyone on the question of word selection, and I'm one of them. Orwell notes that, if we write in pre-existing phrases, the phrases do our thinking for us. Good writing must be like a window pane, he tells us, a transparent revelation of thought. This can only be achieved by carefully choosing each word.
Academic writing has its own particular set of clichés, which we call jargon—more generously, professional terminology. Its purpose, I believe, is not to convey meaning, but to demonstrate that the writer belongs to a group, which we might call Serious Scholars. Jargon is a rather lazy method of distinguishing scholarly writing from the popular; it's also a means of signaling that the writer is aware of the latest trends in a particular discipline. Such writing may be necessary to advance one's career within the world of academia, but I argue that there is no meaning that can be expressed only through jargon. There is always a more elegant way to say the same thing. Those more elegant choices convince the reader that the writer actually knows what she or he is saying. Jargon raises doubt.
Academics sometimes overreact to their own constricted writing style by indulging in colloquial expressions, including lame puns and jokes. (Many scholarly titles are now of this type.) Colloquial writing is hardly wrong, in and of itself; but it must be true to the work, emerging naturally from the subject and genre. A novel, a personal essay, a letter, an e-mail message—in these places, casual speech sounds right. But it sounds painfully false in a piece of scholarship.
Elegance is not only a matter of clear, evocative style. It also comes from honesty and authenticity.
It disturbs me how often, when I read a serious book, I must kick my way through piles of clichés and dead expressions. I reviewed one book that eventually earned the Pulitzer Prize, and for very good reason: It was deeply researched, keenly astute in psychological perception, and vivid in its depiction of not only the main character's life but the secondary characters who surrounded him. Yet it was spattered with such phrases as "cool his heels" and "stacked the deck against him." There is no excuse.
My complaint is not with metaphor itself. It can make writing more evocative, probably because there's something in the human brain that leads us to reason by analogy. (Listen to almost any Supreme Court hearing, for example, in which the justices constantly discuss legal points through analogies.) But metaphors are nothing more than the mules that pull the wagon. Overwork them, and they die, at which point they do nothing to draw forward the real meaning. Worse than that, they get in the way.
When you find yourself resorting to clichés, it's better to drop metaphor entirely, and get at the meaning as directly as possible, simply and precisely—that is, elegantly. George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" is cited by virtually everyone on the question of word selection, and I'm one of them. Orwell notes that, if we write in pre-existing phrases, the phrases do our thinking for us. Good writing must be like a window pane, he tells us, a transparent revelation of thought. This can only be achieved by carefully choosing each word.
Academic writing has its own particular set of clichés, which we call jargon—more generously, professional terminology. Its purpose, I believe, is not to convey meaning, but to demonstrate that the writer belongs to a group, which we might call Serious Scholars. Jargon is a rather lazy method of distinguishing scholarly writing from the popular; it's also a means of signaling that the writer is aware of the latest trends in a particular discipline. Such writing may be necessary to advance one's career within the world of academia, but I argue that there is no meaning that can be expressed only through jargon. There is always a more elegant way to say the same thing. Those more elegant choices convince the reader that the writer actually knows what she or he is saying. Jargon raises doubt.
Academics sometimes overreact to their own constricted writing style by indulging in colloquial expressions, including lame puns and jokes. (Many scholarly titles are now of this type.) Colloquial writing is hardly wrong, in and of itself; but it must be true to the work, emerging naturally from the subject and genre. A novel, a personal essay, a letter, an e-mail message—in these places, casual speech sounds right. But it sounds painfully false in a piece of scholarship.
Elegance is not only a matter of clear, evocative style. It also comes from honesty and authenticity.
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