Wooden

 "We should instead examine the cultural and social conditions of the translation, considering whether its interpretants initiate an event, creating new knowledges and values by supplying a lack that they indicate in those that are currently dominant in the receiving situation. The lack may be an interpretant that a poet’s version can or cannot supply, for instance, a concept of equivalence that involves a semantic correspondence or even close adherence to the source text. The most authoritative and widely circulated translations may themselves not apply such an interpretant, or, if they do, a new edition of the source text or a new, independently articulated interpretation of it may require that the concept of equivalence applied in previous translations be revised in a retranslation (cf. chapter 5). Nonetheless, no interpretant can be regarded as inherently valuable, apart from its situation in a specific culture at a specific historical moment."

Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything : Theory and Practice, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ku/detail.action?docID=1101392.
Created from ku on 2025-08-25 21:11:33.

 

What is it about this writing style?  It aims to be careful in definitions, but it ends up being confusing and a bit wooden. I guess what he's saying is that a translation should alter the target language / culture by supplying something previously missing. The one example he supplies is confusing, since "semantic correspondence" is the definition of translation itself. 

The style can alert the reader that something is amiss in the thinking itself. Why be so ponderous if your point is actually a valid one? 

Wooden

"Providing people with tools and strategies to help them bring into alignment how they act both inside and outside of the gaze is key to freeing individuals from the fear of external condemnation or disapproval. There is a need to embed curriculum and processes within educational systems that will support the inner development of people to fortify themselves against the growing influence of negative side effects of the gaze. This will help to build up a refusal of people to be bounded by the limitations that others or the broader society try to thrust on them."

This is an article with commendable sentiments, but it suffers from a wooden style. It's all abstractions. I cannot envision what it means to "embed curriculum and processes within educational systems." What does that even mean? The basic idea, here, is that a black student won't think of him or herself as an attorney or physician because society doesn't see him or her that way [the gaze]. That's a profound insight. But the article never manages to say that. It's all  "tools and strategies" or "the growing influence of negative side effects." Sheesh.  

El Pais Strikes again...

 "Como casi todos los madrileños, Trapiello no nació en Madrid, sino en León."

What the sentence is meant to say is that many people who live in Madrid were born elsewhere in Spain. What it says on the literal level is that almost all people living in Madrid were born in León. 

If almost everyone in Madrid was born somewhere else, that must mean that almost all the babies born in Madrid go somewhere else to live, which I seriously doubt.  

Prose

This is the prose of the contemporary academy:

A situation that took place in a sociology classroom earlier this week has been brought to my attention and I felt the need to communicate to you about it, particularly as it pertains to our value of inclusivity.

A professor is reported to have presented materials and made comments about which some students have expressed concern. We are taking the matter very seriously and are gathering the facts to determine if and what action is warranted.

The classroom is an environment in which students and faculty can and should discuss challenging topics and ideas, which makes it all the more important that we gather and fully review the facts in this case.  

As we review this situation, let me say unequivocally that SUNY Geneseo has a steadfast and uncompromising commitment to diversity and inclusivity. We work diligently to sustain an inviting and supportive environment for people of all gender identities, gender expressions, sexual orientations, races, religions and other identities.   

I use this opportunity to remind you that our Interim Chief Diversity Officer robbie routenberg (capitalization style intentional) is available as a resource to the campus community. I would also encourage any students who have support needs to contact Lenny Sancilio, dean of students, and Dillon Federici, coordinator of LGBTQ Programs and Services.

Sincerely,

....

Who will edit the editor?

Not plagiarism, but simply bad writing:

Her lines are clear and concise, distinguished by rhyme, sound, punctuated with her signature dash and exclamation marks, half-rhymes and surprising line-breaks. She accepted her private isolation and agoraphobia and chose to commune with humanity through her poems.  

I don't know if Dickinson's lines are "clear." To say they are "distinguished by rhyme, sound" is to say very little, since almost all lyric poetry rhymed in the 19th century. That is not a "distinguishing" characteristic. And sound?  What can this possibly mean?

"dash and exclamation marks"--why switch between singular and plural instead of saying "dashes and exclamation marks"?

Then we get "half-rhymes." That is fine, but are they meant to be punctuation too? Why repeat "rhyme" twice in the same sentence? Isn't the use of half-rhyme more distinctive? And Dickinson is not particularly known for surprising line breaks or enjambement. Shouldn't we just say it concisely--that she mostly uses the ballad stanza, defamiliarizing it through slant-rhymes and eccentric punctuation?  

And "commune with humanity."  I don't like that. And "private isolation"--as opposed to public isolation I suppose?

A page later, she is talking about how Dickinson is "relatable," as though she (Bialosky I mean) were a 17-year old.  Her writing is extremely dumbed down.

We find clichés like "limp as a rag doll" and "the black cloud of depression." Seriously?  Could no-one have edited the editor a bit?

New aestheticism?

I guess the new aestheticism is not that exiting:  It tends toward a Kantian / Adornian approach and a clunky prose style.  I've underlined some verbiage that a graceful writer might have avoided.  

The works of Wyndham Lewis provide us with a case study for the application of this view of criticism to the understanding of artistic productions. Lewis’s work has been subjected to the same range of assessments as most other authors, from the classic description of it in terms of certain types of basic writing patterns to the relation of it to psychoanalytic or Marxist categories.  If we turn to the novels of Lewis from a Kantian direction, however, we can see the vital character of his work as consisting precisely in its negotiation with the characteristics of life itself.  

DON'T WRITE LIKE THIS, PLEASE! The pay-off after these three sentences is the striking idea that Lewis's work is about life.  Imagine that!  Does it add anything to say the "characteristics of life itself"?

I find it interesting that "aestheticism" does not seems to have anything to do with the aesthetics of critical prose.  I imagine the "description ... in terms of certain types of basic writing patterns" to be the analysis of narrative and stylistic techniques, so why not say so.  I imagine the relation between this work and psychoanalytic and Marxist categories to be just ...  Marxist and Freudian readings.  

Some more bad writing

Our aspirations were supported and informed by the particular structures of our institutional environment. While the tensions between the fields of Writing Studies and IL have been well documented (see Ivey, 2103; Meulemans & Carr, 2013; Kotter, 1999; among others), our work benefitted from an institutional “Kairos” (Baker & Gladis; Chapter 16, this collection; Norgaard, 2004) afforded by the fact that our library, our writing program, and our far-reaching teaching and learning center were aligned in their commitment to developing pedagogies that positioned writing as inquiry and research as rhetorical.

From

APPROXIMATING THE
UNIVERSITY: THE INFORMATION
LITERACY PRACTICES OF NOVICE
RESEARCHERS
Karen Gocsik
University of California-San Diego
Laura R. Braunstein and Cynthia E. Tobery
Dartmouth College

It is very abstract and wordy, full of passive voice where there is no need; bureaucratic sounding. The word "Kairos" pretends to be a technical term, but it simply appears to mean an alignment of aims and aspirations. IL is apparently "information literacy." It sounds really cool for research to be rhetorical, but it is not, really. As it typical of such writing, there is proliferation of entities and actions. Afforded by the fact that ... were aligned in their commitment to develop ... pedagogies that positioned writing as... etc... Whey not say: everyone agreed that writing was inquiry and research was rhetorical?

Anyone can fill space with writing like that: "As Dean, I will prioritize strategies that ensure a commitment to developing a culture that fosters an awareness of the structural problems caused by the pressures of institutional demands amid the shifting climate of ..."

Here's some bad writing

I came across this recently. I've redacted it a bit and changed some words to anonymize it sufficiently, but you get the idea:

"One interesting feature of this work is yet another example of intertextuality – the reference to [proper name deleted]. This, among other recognizably postmodernist aspects of the text, have also been previously studied."

That was an entire paragraph.

L'enfer, c'est l'écriture des autres

I swear, reviewing articles is a fool's errand. Having to read articles with a very naive hermeneutical position, after having refined my own so much in the past month, can be tortuous.

I have revised Jean-Paul Sartre's aphorism, "hell is other people" to say that hell is other people's writing. Not the best position for a professor to take, I understand!

Verbiage

I recently came across a paragraph that included phrases like the following:

To the foregoing roster of the transformative implications ...

... I now want to add, and devote the rest of this essay to unpacking, one last matter, the question of ...

What follows wishes to bear out the claim that ...

And thus from here—counter-intuitively enough, from the ...

I wish this kind of writing were absent from academic prose, but it is very common. The problem is that people who begin sentences with "what follows wishes to bear out the claim" are those charged with teaching others how to write and think clearly. I advise against including strings of words that don't say anything. Signposting is one thing, but doing it with so little grace is inexcusable.

People!

People, have a native speaker of English check over your prose. Even if you are a native speaker of English. For reasons I cannot disclose, I have had to read a lot of sentences recently about how "my project portrays the adumbrations of residences of ethical disport in the work of the the prize-winning author, XXX, who is a personal friend of mine." Maybe you are native speaker, but you somehow believe that to be Taken Seriously As An Academic, you have to write like that. You don't. Nobody is impressed by your pretentious verbiage and your meaningless concatenations of noun-phrases. Not only am I not impressed, but I think you should not even be a college professor. How can you be in the position of teaching students to express their ideas clearly if you cannot do it yourself?

Favorite Words

We all have words that we favor, that we rely on consciously or unconsciously or overuse. I notice myself using certain words too much sometimes. This gives me useful information about how I am thinking. Suppose it is nuance. In that case I am probably in a mode of thought where I am wanting to be especially attentive to nuance. Or the word attentive, or vicissitude or fraught. These words function as barometers of my attitude toward my subject matter.

Other words are merely stylistic tics. When I notice those overwhelming my prose, I do a word search in my document and change or eliminate them. I have have stylistic tics that are not words but constructions. "Not only... but also" is one example. You wouldn't want to write three paragraphs in a row with "not only... but also." Nothing wrong with the construction itself, but the reader doesn't want to think you are a one-trick pony.

***

To many words in -tion, fy, or, -ize can also give your prose a heavy feeling. Problematize, realize, actualize, reify, deify. You don't want too much rhyme or jingle, as the composition teachers used to call it (maybe still do).

More bad prose

This is the typical bad prose one gets from a reviewer on the internet:

I think the worst element of reading this book was realizing that despite being a third person narrative, and despite the fact that this is an autobiography, Lin never uses either method of storytelling to let us into Sam’s mind. A flat character in a first person narrative would be unable to explain himself, but a third person narration could have analyzed Sam in some manner that makes him relevant. We never see why the hell Sam is a useless sack of crap and again, even if it is deliberate, it is a shitty way to tell a story. Of course, Lin could not use a third person narration to plunge Sam’s soul because he doesn’t have one. He’s just a ridiculous creature that eats stuff, exercises an empty ego and and periodically goes to jail and none of that is enough to justify telling a story.

Wordy ("...the worst element of reading this book was realizing that despite being....") Run-on sentences. Confusing. Is it a third-person narrative or is it not? What are the two methods of story-telling not used. If it is, in fact, a third-person narrative, then why isn't it? The writer confuses the verb "plunge" with "plumb." What the writer probably meant to say was something more like this:

The use of third-person narration in this ostensibly autobiographical novel is ineffective, especially since the story is not even focalized through the perspective of the unsympathetic protagonist, and the third person narrator refrains from interpreting the character's life. Thus the reader gains no insight into the motives behind Sam's seemingly meaningless existence, devoted to petty crime and the consumption of vegan smoothies.

I have nothing against obscenities, but used together with the fifth-grade style they bespeak immaturity. A little understatement would have been much more effective.

Bloated Prose

This article is an example of bloated prose. Instead of saying "Poor black and latino kids can have success in higher education, even in difficult fields like science and engineering. Here's how to do it," we get this:

American higher education has an extraordinary record of accomplishment in preparing students for leadership, in serving as a wellspring of research and creative endeavor, and in providing sustained public service. Despite this success, we are facing an unprecedented set of challenges. To maintain America's global pre-eminence, we must substantially expand the number of students we educate, increase the proportion of students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and address the pervasive and longstanding underrepresentation of minorities who earn college degrees, including in those STEM fields.

Clichés like "unprecedented set of challenges" don't really mean much. I believe there is actually a precedent for these challenges for example. This is unfortunate because the article actually makes good, concrete points once you wade through the verbiage and find them. The authors of this article probably lose a lot of readers with "wellspring of research and creative endeavor" and "unprecedented challenges." When I hear pompous phrases like that I immediately think some university administrator is thinking up new ways to waste my time. To revise this article I'd boil is down to the plain style first by isolating certain claims, like:

--American universities are good at producing doctors, lawyers, and business executives, but not so hot at educating blacks and latinos.

--More American highs-school students need to be going to college and majoring in hard sciences and technologies once they get there.

--We've found concrete methods that work to get minorities into these majors and make them successful. This is what works...

Then I'd re-write these points using "classic prose."

Detecting BS

I was delighted when Professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University published On Bullshit, because that book gave me cover to teach a module on the subject to my university students. My short definition of bullshit: language a person uses to hide that person’s real intention. Bullshit can be a lie, or the truth, or something else all together.

A scenario to explain what I mean: A teenage son has been out smoking pot with his friends. His mother confronts him when he comes home: “Have you been smoking pot, son?” The son has many options to BS and thus hide is real intention, which is to make it up to his room without getting busted.

The (incomplete) truth: “Nothing to worry about. I was in a car that some of my friends had been smoking pot in.”

The lie: “Of course not. I always listen to my Mom.”

Changing the subject: “How could you ask me that question, when you know how important your belief in me is to my fragile self esteem?”

I have seen each of these options work nicely.

I love Jonathan’s dissections of bad scholarly prose. Sometimes the badness is the consequence of an attempt to bullshit. The intention that the authors of this prose often wish to hide: “I don’t want my reader to see that I haven’t thought through this argument or idea thoroughly.”

As a professional editor and a former communications consultant for publicly traded companies, I believe I'm a nifty bullshit-spotter, but only when I’m reading it – more specifically, when I am reading prose written by people who are not me. (Face to face, I’m hopeless. Why? A person’s physical confidence usually wins me over.)

I was a good deal older than I should have been when I finally figured out how to detect bullshit, if only sometimes, in my own prose. I’ll try to address that in a later post.