Let me second Chris's recommendation of John Holbo's posts (one two) on bad writing. Despite their brilliance, I don't want to take up the thankless task John offers me. In part that's because at this time of year I have quite enough thankless tasks on my plate. And in part it's for an amusing theoretical reason.
The task, if a labour of Hercules can be called a task, John sets is to count the errors in a particularly error-ridden passage. The problem is that the number of errors a passage contains is not obviously determinate. For example, assume the passage contained the following argument.
All philosophers are positivists
So, all philosophers are bad people
At first glance it looks easy to say how many errors that contains. Two. False premise and invalid reasoning, right? But that's not obviously charitable. It's often wrong to regard arguments that are invalid on their face as thereby defective, for they may be enthymemes. The question then becomes what the hidden premises might be. Perhaps the following two premises are intended to be the hidden premises.
Being a positivist is a mark of bad character
Anyone who has a bad character in one respect is a bad person
Now the argument is valid, so one of the errors is gone. But now the argument contains three errors, not two, for all three premises are false. But maybe that's uncharitable, for the hidden premise might instead have been
Being a positivist is a mark of bad character and anyone who has a bad character in one respect is a bad person
And now we're back to two mistakes. But even that might be excessive, because maybe the hidden premise was intended to be
Either some philosophers are not positivists, or all philosophers are bad people
And now the argument is valid and only has one false premise. So it only contains one mistake. So heaven knows how many mistakes it really had.
Now for the special holiday touch. By a rather tendentious interpretation of Quine's "No entity without identity" dogma, and the fact that mistakes in arguments do not have determinate identity conditions, I conclude there are no mistakes in arguments. And if there are no mistakes in arguments, there are no mistaken arguments.
If I was going for the post-Thanksgiving Day snark award I'd say this was the best bit of news blogger X had received all decade. But any award Brian Leiter can't win is an award I don't want.
Returning to John's post, I think he's at one point a little too charitable towards the bad writers. In general, I think he's a little too accepting of the idea that difficult ideas will require difficult writing. I don't think this is true. Indeed, I don't really see much reason to believe it. To take an extreme case, some of the ideas involved in Godel's incompleteness theorems are as difficult to grasp as anything in any branch of philosophy. But that doesn't mean writing about them has to be difficult - indeed the discussion of the theorems in Godel, Escher, Bach, while by necessity somewhat incomplete, is splendidly clear. Now to be sure Hofstadter had a slightly easier task here than some because he was writing an exposition of Godel's ideas (among other things) rather than writing the ideas out anew. But there is little reason I think that a first presentation must be more difficult than a later exposition.
(Maybe I've got the wrong idea of 'difficult' here, and difficult ideas are meant to be revolutionary in the political rather than the Kuhnian sense. Different example then. Whatever its faults, you can't attack The Communist Manifesto for difficult writing.)
Finally, a little anecdote about Judith Butler, who is something of a target in these debates. (I do hope this isn't meant to be confidential - in any case it isn't meant to reflect badly on anyone.) Butler, famously, is remarkably clear in person despite being so obtuse in print. This is one reason why many people outside Theory have a higher opinion of Butler than her fellow-travellers. Anyway, since she is so clear in person, it seems she could easily be clear in print. All she'd have to do is talk for a while and release the transcript. (Isn't that how most of Chomsky's books for the last 25 years have been written?)
So Butler was asked recently why she didn't just write like she talks, and she replied, reasonably enough, that very few people in any field do just that. Everyone, or at least almost everyone, has mannerisms they adopt in print. (She just has more of them than everyone else combined.) Which got me thinking, who does write like they talk? I seem to recall reading that Moore's writing sounded a lot like he sounded in person.
Obviously no one writes just like they talk in ordinary settings. But I think some people do write a lot like they talk when, say, asking questions at colloquia. (Not coincidentally, these people tend to be among my preferred philosophical writers.) The examples that spring most immediately to mind are Frank Jackson and Ted Sider, but I'm sure there are plenty more.
A favorite professor of mine, who studied at Harvard, says that Stanley Cavell’s writing style is very similar to his speaking style. I’ve only read a couple of books by Cavell, but, based on the style of those books, it strikes me as a plausible claim.
Josh Cohen talks and writes remarkably clearly, whether in conversations, an audience or in prepared lectures. However he is a little more willing to joke in speech (all three sorts) than print.
Rumor has it that his near-namesake G.A. Cohen does as well - can any of you confirm this?
Nice to know that Butler can be clear, though, great story.
Talking is talking; writing is writing. (And never the twain, etc…)
While time was when everything read would be read aloud (back in the Middle Ages I think) silent reading is now the norm. Which is why written discourse can and should be definitely different from spoken.
First, one can go back and look at a text once or several times, so the amount of repetition that gets your idea across in speech is pointless on paper.
Second, there’s less need for an academic writer to keep the attention of the audience moment by moment. In a book you can put in the unexciting but strictly necessary bits of the argument, safe in the knowledge that those liable to be bored will skim over them.
Of course, this doesn’t explain huge discrepancies between writing style and speaking style. But the psychology of the two are also very different.
Um, this post isn’t about bad writing. Bad reasoning, maybe. Bad logic. Possibly bad thinking.
But it’s not about writing, at all. Which disappoints me, having troubled to open it, since, as someone with a lot of experience, the subject interests me. Wheras I have considerably less interest in technical questions of philosophy.
So, in other words, this post is an example of bad writing.
I can confirm that when he supervised some of my graduate work, Jerry Cohen spoke in complete, elegantly-turned paragraphs for most of the time, complete with nifty gags. In fact, he came straight to my mind as an example of someone who writes pretty much as he speaks, and how that can (sometimes) be very cool indeed.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review