Wishin' and hopin'

Pamela Hewitt

The blog has been quiet for a couple of weeks. Among other distractions, I'm putting the finishing touches on the third issue of The Fine Print and, with Shelley Kenigsberg, preparing for a night of wine, women and song titled 'The Editor, the Writer, the Book and Their Covers', coming soon to the Society of Editors (Victoria, Inc.)

Here's a taste of things to come. (Singing along is recommended.)

Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreamin’ of book sales that soar
That won’t get you in the bookstore
So if you’re lookin’ to write books that sell
All you gotta do is draft and redraft and redraft
The path to writing well

You’ve gotta find an editor, it’s no sin
Do the things she recommends
Purple prose? In the bin, ’cause
You won’t get there
Thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’

’cause wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreamin’ ’bout winning the Vogel Prize
Creativity plus editing is wise
So if you’re plannin’ to be the next JK Rowling

What you gotta do is structure, restructure, read widely, write clearly
Yeah, just do it
And after you do, your book might win

You’ve gotta find an editor, it’s no sin
Do the things she recommends
Purple prose? In the bin, ’cause
You won’t get there
Thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’

’cause wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’
Plannin’ and dreamin’, those contracts you’ll miss
That won’t get you on the shortlist
So if you’re thinkin’ of how great the writing life is

Don’t you worry ’bout the Nobel, the Vogel, the Booker, just cook ’er
Yeah, just do it
And if you do well, your book might sell
your book might sell
your book might sell

revised lyrics by Pamela Hewitt, with apologies to Hal David
'Wishin' and hopin' was written by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David, sung by Dusty Springfield, 1964 (Dionne Warwick released an earlier version in 1963).

The perils of publish or perish

Pamela Hewitt

This is the article I mentioned in 'Lost in globalisation', an earlier blog piece. It was published in the January issue of Vocabula Review, and is presented here with the phrases dogsbody and argue the toss reinstated for Australian readers.

Academic English is in a class of its own: last refuge of the intact infinitive, nursing home for Latin plurals. Where else do you find foci and fora gallivanting about in documents? Do people anywhere else follow the mid-eighteenth-century habit of using the indefinite article an before the word historical? Ah, the groves of academe.

It would all be quite quaint, if it weren't for the problem that writing like this excludes some readers, and irritates others. Worse, young scholars are trained to churn out tired language and stale forms. Academics, like any other writers, need to ask who their audience is. It wouldn't be a bad idea to take this further, asking who the audience should be, or could be. If an idea is worthwhile, it is worth expressing in a clear, uncluttered, logical way, preferably in the language of the reader. The silliest convention that lingers in much (although not all) academic writing is the use of Latin words, dropped into the text on the assumption that absolutely everybody understands them. Instead of for example, we read e.g. (sometimes, unfortunately, eg). Instead of that is, it's i.e. And let's not forget ibid., op. cit., loc. cit., passim, and all those Latin terms so often misused in academic citations. For the sad truth is that hardly any scholars know how to use these terms properly. Meaning is often confused, and much of the time of the academic editor is spent fixing up the errors in Latin usage, putting full stops after the al. in et al., to highlight a common culprit.

French and, more rarely, German and Italian terms are still used without explanation in many humanities texts. If it's a long time since Latin was routinely taught in our schools, it's also true that academic writers can no longer assume a working knowledge of modern European languages among their readership. In Australia, a smattering of Indonesian or Chinese is a more probable byproduct of a sound general education these days, yet dropping Asian terms into non-specialist texts has not caught on. It was never a good idea for academic writers to restrict understanding of their work to the graduates of private schools and elite public schools. If writers in the twenty-first century wish to write for an audience consisting largely of an over-40 elite, then they should by all means use Latin terms and pepper their scholarly prose with foreign terms. But wouldn't it be simpler to use English, or at least offer translations of foreign words?

Good scholarly writing is lucid and accessible without compromising its academic integrity. While there are times when academic language needs to use specialist terminology, obfuscation usually indicates that authors don't know what they mean. If a reasonably intelligent non-specialist reader has no idea what a text is saying, it's a sign that something's wrong with the way it's expressed.

Alongside this tendency to hide meaning behind a thicket of unhelpful words is the tradition of excessive signposting in academic writing. With some brave exceptions, university departments teach some of the best minds of each generation to write formulaically, especially when producing theses. At the beginning of each chapter, the scholar-in-training tells readers what they are about to read, then goes ahead and presents the information. Not content with this level of repetition, the argument is summarised at the end of the chapter, and despairing readers are then reminded of what they read at the beginning of the next. As any editor knows, this degree of clutter and repetition is counterproductive. It is the scaffolding good writers dispense with if it survives the first draft.

A related virus infecting scholarly prose is an inability to make an unqualified statement. It would appear that and there is evidence to suggest that or there is some support for the argument that are mealy-mouthed excuses for presenting original analysis.

There are signs of change. Contemporary scientific scholarship now accepts first-person reports. With the acknowledgment that people conduct experiments in laboratories and the field, the tortuous passive language of science is disappearing. It's a relief to read we conducted the experiment rather than the experiment was conducted.

The first editing world I found myself in was academic editing. There were no editing courses, or none that I knew of, so I searched for guiding principles in the workplace. It wasn't long before I noticed that the desire to argue the toss with the editor was in inverse proportion to the quality of the writer's style and the intellectual contribution of the work.
I also discovered that in scholarly manuscripts there were always discrepancies between the dates listed in the text and those in the bibliography. This is an ironclad rule, in my experience. I understand how it happens — tiny details like this are difficult to get right, a paper is circulated in one year, then printed as part of the conference proceedings in another — but I still find it a puzzling contradiction that a working environment that prizes accuracy and consistency and that attracts more than its fair share of pedants should throw up so many trivial errors, so consistently.

For fun, I kept a running list of words and phrases that caught my eye in the texts that crossed my desk. Some memorable examples were the workingclassisation of the North Korean people and the news that China's scientific modernisation was occurring in a somewhat headlong rush. An endearing typo that was picked up before it went to the printer was Gunadong for Guangdong. The mistake lent a delightfully Australian flavour to the name for the southern Chinese province. But the best example of a scholarly typo from that era must remain the famous one from the university's annual report featuring the Department of Hymen Paleontology. No copies survived, or so the story went, because the entire run was pulped.

Universities are profoundly divided institutions, and this may be one of the reasons for the lack of style in scholarly writing. The chasm between academic and administrative staff remains wide and deep. Editors are often classified as research assistants and occupy a precarious position somewhere between dogsbody and apprentice academic. Could this be why the views of editors on language are not taken seriously? In my experience, an editor's advice is generally taken with the same degree of serious consideration as any specialist recommendation in a government department or a business organisation — but not in universities.

None of this would matter if the work done in universities were unimportant. If there is nothing much worth communicating, then there is no problem about academics talking only to themselves. Yet if we are to have scholars who influence community debate — more than the familiar public intellectuals who are wheeled out for their opinion piece in the metropolitan dailies or their five minutes on current-affairs radio and TV — it would be helpful if the quality of academic writing improved.

© Pamela Hewitt
www.emendediting.com