Attention Historians: Do You Want to Be a Stylish Writer?

Rachel Toor, a creative writing instructor at Eastern Washington University, compares listening to creative writers with listening to academics.? Creative writers, she suggests, are narcissists (my word, not hers).? When they speak about their work they want to look attractive. Academics, on the other hand, are more concerned in their talks with whether or not they are making a "compelling case."? They want to show everyone how smart they are by dropping names and showing how much they have read.? (I guess they are narcissistic as well).? Creative writers expect "flowers and panties" after they speak.? Academic writers do not.

This may not be the case for long.? If academics want to survive amidst the terrible job market, poor economy, and changes in the profession, they better shape up.? This means that they will need to tells stories, speak in a way that is accessible to the general public (do not use terms like "contingency" and "agency"),? and write less "humpy" and "frumpy" prose.? It might even help to dress in clothes that fit and shave once in awhile.

Toor introduces us to Helen Sword's Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard).? Here are some of Sword's suggestions for writing stylishly from her reading of 1000 scholarly articles:

• Use first person anecdotes
• Avoid jargon
• Tell compelling stories
• Provide the reader with "aesthetic and intellectual pleasure"
• Be original and imaginative
• Use concrete nouns and active verbs

Here is a taste of Toor's piece:

And so we get a whole lot of academic essays that seem to be written neither by nor for humans, that lack a sense of narrative, and that use an impersonal voice to brandish fancy concepts. Sometimes, as Sword shows, name-dropping is no more than that. She looks at a bunch of articles that use the word "Foucauldian" and finds many of them have only a tenuous connection to anything Michel Foucault?himself a jiggy stylist?ever wrote. Pretension wins out over clarity, originality, or even meaning.

Sword gives lots of examples of good academic stylists, and she provides an even bigger buffet of the kind of writing all too familiar to most of us?prose that comes across as unintentionally hilarious when read out of context, if you can force yourself to plow through it. She also has a Web site, The Writer's Diet, where you can paste in a sample of prose, of 100 to 1,000 words long, and the program will diagnose it from fit to flabby, pointing out the robustness of verbs, noun density, long strings of prepositions, needless modifiers, and those Cheez-Its of nutritionally bankrupt words like "that," "there," and "this."

In his book On Writing Well, William Zinsser mentions warmth and humanity as important parts of nonfiction. Blaise Pascal wrote, "When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person."

Sure, as professors we are supposed to be intelligent, and sometimes it feels like we have to keep proving that. Remember, though, it's not either/or. Attractive writing?brave, personal, narrative, zingy, imaginative, funny?will not make you appear any less smart.

Source: http://www.philipvickersfithian.com/2012/07/attention-historians-do-you-want-to-be.html

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