Fussy writing, pretentious writing, fancy writing

 

Fussy writing is done with an eye to not make a mistake. A fussy writer might distinguish between continual and continuous, maybe. There is nothing wrong with a little bit of fussiness, but some writers think in terms of shibboleths.  "I will never use the word thus or hence," they might think. I don't use these words very much, but I don't want to mostly be on the defensive when I'm writing.  Most of the customary shibboleths are kind of stupid. Avoiding them won't make me a good writer; they are more like talismans that I think might offer some protection against the accusations of not being a careful writer.  We were taught to write "Lorca, however...." instead of "However, Lorca...."  What's important is being able to choose, though. 

Pretentious writing: I am adopting a pose, "interrogating the conditions of ..."  The jargon itself is the point: it me you in the club with others who share that vocabulary. It's not even fussy, doesn't rise to that level, because it isn't attuned to fine distinctions or the avoidance of mistakes. 

What I like right now is fancy writing. What I mean is that each word is the right one, the sentences are balanced and flowing.  I don't repeat that many words, because each paragraph brings me something new where the words will be different. I can avoid pretentiousness, not worry about fussiness. 

Setting your own standard

 I like to begin with things that I can control; things that I don't have to ask permission to do. Now that I am Professor Emeritus my degree of freedom is complete. There is no job review any more. 

The first freedom in academic research is in the choice of topic. I can choose any topic that I want, and take any possible approach. I cannot control how interested other people are, or how my work will be received. I can think about things outside of my control, but I cannot change them. My topic happens to be "Lorca and Music," and I am studying the poet's musical activities and posthumous legacy. 

After that, one thing under my control is the standards I set for myself. How clear do I want my writing to be? How tightly organized? What amount of knowledge of the raw subject matter is necessary? How granular is my approach? How interesting or original do I want my scholarship to be? 

I can also ask more specific questions. Do I want sign-posting, jargon? How do I balance granularity of knowledge with the capacity to communicate to audience who doesn't have that degree of interest in minutiae, while at the same time being rigorously accurate? 

Most people will say they want all of this! This is great, but there is a usefulness also in making all of this explicit and intentional. Write it out as a list. Prioritize your goals. For example, some papers will not be as original: they will present interesting synthesis of knowledge already available.  

(Probably if your standard is high, then you will get further in the review process for publishing articles. If a journal has a 5% acceptance rate, you want to be in top 10% in quality to give yourself a good chance of getting a "revise and resubmit." You don't hear people complaining about papers because the language is not vague enough, or the organization is too coherent. Usually, reviewers will respond warmly to competence.)  

The next freedom is the freedom to live up to your own standards. For example, at one point I taught myself to write better. At another stage, I taught myself to write better again. I did research to improve my granular knowledge of the subject matter. Articles I wrote that were not up to my own standard were rejected. Some were up the standard of the field, in that they were published, but possibly mediocre from my own perspective. 

Envisioning the standard is the main step. That will allow you to figure out how to achieve it.  Without the standards in place in your mind, though, you will be lost.  

1-liners

 

Is a callous part of me? I lose some dry skin yet feel none the less. 

***

I feel less Angst than Bronk that things have no meaning. 

***

I was a scholar not a poet. The decision was made for me. 

***

Who made the comedians the experts on your town? 

Degrees of confidence

 Surrounding the Jason Arday case, there are huge areas of deception, inconsistency, fraud, plagiarism, exaggeration, embellishment. It is not just a question of plagiarism, but of an entire back story that kept changing shape. This not a question of one or two lies, but of a pattern of shifting narratives. 

The result is that it is impossible to have any degree of confidence in any claim made by Arday, or claim made on his behalf by others. Some things in his memoir may be true, but why would anyone have any confidence in any of it? Even a seemingly innocuous detail could be false.  

It would take a rigorous forensic process to sort out the lies and deceptions. At the same time, we're told that Arday was subject to far too much scrutiny! 

Mediocrity

The first point is that half the people are going to be below average, in any given endeavor.  There will be a lot of people clustered in the middle, on any bell curve, as well. If your definition of mediocre is below average, then that will be half. If your defintion is "middling," then you will get a substantial number. 

The second point is that mediocrity is defined contextually, by people already engaged in doing something. So a mediocre second-baseman will look mediocre compared to others in the same league, but still be better than anyone who couldn't play in the league in the first place. He had to have risen to that major league level even to achieve "mediocrity."  

Mediocre is pejorative adjective, that seems to mean "middling," but has come to mean "bad" instead. The connotation has usurped the denotation. This is because it is only used when something doesn't meet expectations for excellence. On a tenure committee I was on everyone was judged excellent by their departments, to the point that calling them "very good" was almost insulting, and caused heated debates. That is because rhetorically speaking nobody can be below average, even though we know honestly that there is a middle and a bottom to the curve, not just a top.  

When I hear the phrase "mediocre white man" I don't think of myself. Nobody does. Only other people are mediocre. If I object to the phrase, then I sound defensive.  

Jason Arday

 I have been reading some of the takes on the Arday case. 

1) Andrew Gelman is a statistician and expert on scientific fraud and malfeasance. He has no problem with the obvious fact that Arday is a fraud:  

"Actually, it’s worse than that. Cambridge was informed about Arday’s research fraud three years ago, but the university first refused to investigate the problem, then last year when a news story was about to come out on it, they sicced lawyers on the newspaper to suppress it.

So, here we go again. Jason Arday, like David Agus, did not live up to his part of the bargain. Society gave him status and he returned the favor by lying all over the place."

2) Jason Stanley is a philosopher and purported expert on fascism and propaganda. He doesn't look closely at Arday's actual research, but concludes that since Arday's articles have some citations, that Arday must be a legitimate scholar after all. But of course, if they were plagiarized and fraudulent, then the number of citations wouldn't matter. 

3) Henry Giroux blames big factors. Systemic colonialism, systems of power:  

"Arday’s death must be understood against a wider culture of cruelty and dehumanization, one nourished by systemic racism and by a social order organized around greed, dispossession, hierarchy, and profound inequality. This is a system in which the legacies of colonialism have not disappeared but have been absorbed into institutions, cultural assumptions, and structures of privilege that continue to determine who belongs, who is protected, whose failures are forgiven, and who is subjected to relentless scrutiny."

Every thing's to blame except actual humans taking actions. It's all structures and systems doing the work, the bigger and more pervasive, the more explanatory power.   

4) John McWhorter views the problem as one of assuming that black intellectuals are mediocre anyway. If you accept that, then you will hire a black professor as a token and not care about the quality:

" Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue."  

Every one of these responses is completely predictable by the commenter's particular vantage point.  Gelman is an expert on fraud in academia, especially in the social sciences. McWhorter is black linguist who has come out against wokeness, Stanley is a philosopher who has branched out into rather superficial political commentary, Giroux is an expert on critical pedagogy.  

Maybe my response is predictable as well. My reaction to each of these takes is a foregone conclusion. I will have more to say about Giroux later. How can an academic culture so cruel and hierarchical also align itself so perfectly with Giroux's own ideological position? 

How I made it in academia

 I had a successful academic career. I retired recently as a full professor at a flagship state school, published a number of books and numerous articles. I won the major research award in my university. I was nominated a few times by my department to be a Distinguished Professor, but I was not selected. I applied for other jobs once in a while at more prestigious universities, but I did not get them. I probably rose as high as I was meant to. Salaries stagnated in my institution while I was a tenured faculty member there, so I never made the same amount as other full professors made in my same department the year I was promoted. When I complained about my small salary bump, a prominent "feminist philosopher" who was associate dean at the time told me I was lucky to have a job at all. 

This is how I did it: 

I had long been fascinated by poetry. I was a voracious reader and wanted to be a poet. But my actual aptitude was for figuring out how poetry worked. I became a good student of literature simply because I had read more than most people had, even most people going into the field, and because I thought about literature more analytically than most people.  I essentially trained myself. Of course, I also studied for my courses, but I tended to learn more from my own reading and study than what others could teach me.  

I was also a second generation academic, so I had started to think like a college professor when I was a teenager. This is what we would call privilege, now.  Let's say, though, that starting early is an advantage, as in almost every other human endeavor. 

I switched my major from English to Comp Lit. and studied a year abroad in Madrid. I pursued a comp lit degree at Stanford, with the goal of being a specialist in Spanish and/or Latin American poetry. I realized that the Latin American field was too politicized for my taste, and that I could leverage my knowledge of Spanish poetry to become an expert. I read the secondary literature in my field, and assessed its quality. I saw that I could do at least as well as some of the experts in this field. 

My interest, for better or for worse, is how poetry works on its terms, a kind of poetry engineering, as it were. This could still be done in the 1980s, when I began. I am not opposed to politically driven research into literature and culture, but it is simply not my thing, not what I am good at.  

I wasn't interested in studying Spanish fiction. A lot of people did this, and the field was crowded while also being prone to plot summaries. It would be easy to distinguish myself in a smaller field. 

I realized that a lot of people going into Spanish were not literature nerds like me. Those people were going into English. I had an automatic advantage over people who were going into the field for other reasons. I could leverage my greater understanding and knowledge of literature and the privilege that came with being a second generation academic. 

I wrote a dissertation on major, but still only half-recognized poet, whose work had been ill-served by the critics, in my view. I wrote the dissertation to be my first book, with few revisions. I know people tell students now that the only important thing is finishing the dissertation, not how good it is, and that the first book project can be something different from the dissertation, but I thought I needed to start my career on a solid foundation.

Looking back on it, the dissertation and first book does not seem as intellectually deep as some of my later work. But if still stands up well in my own biased opinion. 

I determined what the top journals in my field were, and submitted articles to them, with success. I hedged my bets by also publishing in some second-tier journals. My first university, another flagship university in the midwest, was on a quarter system. I learned that you could teach a summer quarter, of shorter duration, and take one of the three other quarters off. I did this a lot and had time to write a second book, which is still one of my most cited works. 

I was recruited to another flagship university and got the job. There was a fallow period, in which I began projects without being able to finish them. I still published enough, so that there are not significant gaps in my cv unless you look very closely. 

Then I got an idea to write about the most canonical Spanish poetry, Federico García Lorca, in American literature and culture. Lorca was well-studied, but not from this angle. In a way, it was having the idea to right this book that was the most significant moment of my career. 

At around the same time, I completed work on another book on contemporary Spanish poetry. Two books appeared during, and I was promoted to Professor. I needed four books to accomplish this promotion, not the normal two, because I had not produced at a steady rhythm, and had not excelled in my service obligations to the university. (Later, I was able to figure out how to contribute to the department more productively.) I am also not a natural born teacher, and had difficulties until I was able to figure out how to do better there.  

The Lorca book brought me a lot of attention, since it was of interest to readers of American poetry as well. Also, working on a canonical author brings more rewards. People talk about the value of non-canonical authors, but their actions speak louder. When dealing with a canonical author, the interest of the audience is simply assumed: you don't have to argue for the importance of Lorca. The audience is automatically larger and more engaged. 

Through continued work on contemporary Spanish poetry, I became known in Spain as well, and was invited to lecture there with some frequency. I continued to work on Lorca, and became known and respected in this subfield. I began to specialize in musical settings of Lorca's work, another well-known but at the same time ill-studied subject. I have now retired, but still work on my research projects. 

This essay is not meant to be advice, because I don't know if my trajectory could be reproduced in today's academic climate. What I had going for me was an educated family background, a strong intellectual interest, set when I was very young, vast amounts of reading and thinking about literature, a strong competitive drive to be one of the best scholars in my own field, and the luck to be able to leverage these advantages in environments favorable to my scholarly temperament. I've only received two job offers in my entire career, at two flagships where I worked. If I hadn't been hired, then I would have had no academic career at all.