Sam - Comment on your GOOD WRITING Post
Sam, I certainly agree with you - and you make your points excellently. Too many academics write turgidly, or as if uninspired. What happened to the days of Margaret Mead, who communicated to both scholars and the wider public? You’re so right: you also have to know WHO the readers are you wish to target.
I do this myself for example, for example in my popular trade book, SOPHIE SCHOLL AND THE WHITE ROSE; in song lyrics, poetry, journalism - or an academic audience.
I do face challenges though: my most important work is a dissertation, “WORK MAKES FREE”: THE HIDDEN GERMAN CULTURAL MEANINGS OF THE HOLOCAUST. It is a hybrid: one half is written in a compelling cross-over voice - for both academia and the general intelligent reader. To do this, I thought, who’d be my ideal ‘reader”? Susan Sontag, I decided
But the other ‘half’ got bogged down in complex theory - illustrate however with fascinating images I analyze. But since this comes at the beginning of the work, many would-be readers found the going too demanding, and never got to the ‘great’ chapters they’d surely have found hard to put down.
I’ve actually had colleagues who swore to help edit it, asking me to give them each $60 apiece hardbound versions - and then never a reply.
Any suggestions? It’s not just about editing ruthlessly, though it’s that too. It’s also about boiling down that first part, which i’ve thought is needed to understand the rest - or somehow get into the meat faster. Anyway, I’m stuck. Would like some advice from you, a widely recognized expert as both an academic, a professor who inspires his students, and a writer.
Judd — A few suggestions to your query.
(1) Notify non-specialist readers already in the preface the option to skip pages touching on theory.
(2) In the tradition of the oral defense at Chicago, begin with a captivating anecdote that will lead to a series of theoretical issues that you wish to engage your scholarly readers (e.g., professors and advanced students).
(3) Break down the theoretical section into sub-sections with clearly formulated headings. Furthermore, avoid sub-headings. Cluttering the page with indentations tires the eye fast. (Academic writing in the modern era unfortunately followed the German legal traditions; see Anthony Grafton’s class The Footnote: A curious history, 1997.)
(4) In the theoretical section, write in two linguistic registers. Sentence type a is for the five experts you had in mind to engage in an academic conversation. Sentence type b reinforces the gist of Sentence type a in a reader friendly language and is geared to the undergraduate student. Any Sentence type a that requires an educated reader to reread one or more times needs to be relegated to a footnote or deleted.
(5) If you opt to use social sciences quotation style (which means references in the body of the text), use footnotes judiciously and sparingly.
(6) As the main topic of your book is not theory, your empirical descriptions and illustrations will captivate your readers.
(7) Fee free to use the delete button with respect to any turgid prose that prevents readers from continuing on to the next sentence.
(8) A far from perfect exemplification of the above 7 points can be found in the introductory chapter of The Pedagogical State: Education and the Politics of National Education in Post-1980 Turkey.
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