…Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric;…
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Sonnets, CXL
“Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.” Gustav Flaubert
“The more I practice, the luckier I get.” Arnold Palmer
I have long appreciated the privilege of teaching at a university whose students have such excellent talents in written expression. However, many of you in this course are neither anthropology majors nor East Asian Studies majors, and you may never have written an anthropology or even a social science essay. Because of this, each year some of you express to me anxiety about how to write for my assignments in this course and about my criteria for evaluating your writing.
This is an understandable concern. There are in fact conventions and stylistics of writing anthropology that make it distinct from writing history papers or physics lab reports or psychology experiment results. For assignments in this course, however, I don’t hold you to such discipline particularities. What I expect in this course and what I and the TAs promote in all of our comments and evaluations of your writing is more general academic writing. Direct and expressive phrasing, logical paragraphing, a coherent voice, and a clear argument are all the elements you need to write successfully here.
General academic writing (or let’s call it general professional writing because it will serve you in later life well beyond the academy) combines critical thinking and careful expression.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearcehr at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Nnoehtleses, it is rsaebnloae to epxcept pporer seplinlg, creaufl tpynig, and porofearndig.
As you will see in my responses to your writing assignments, unlike the Cmabrigde rscheearcehr, I do notice and I do care about and I will correct your syntactical mistakes, misspellings, and misprints. This is not because I am a stickler for proper grammar and spelling for their own sake. I do not intend to be the ghost of your most compulsive high school English teacher; my course is not the English Department’s “Daily Themes.” Rather, I notice such “mechanics” because I am interested in what you have to say, and syntactical errors interrupt my concentrating on what you are telling me. Remember: if you let readers start muttering about extraneous matters like punctuation or spelling, then you’ve lost them, at least momentarily. You’re going to have work that much harder to get their attention back and to get it back on the track of your important points.
Beyond such infelicities, however, much of my advice about your writing boils down to the admonition to be active and direct in expressing your ideas and in making your argument. I will constantly be encouraging you towards concise expression. This is really important, no matter what you are saying and to whom you are saying it. Readers are not your parents or your best friends. They must be won over. They are busy; they want to be stimulated, but there is much competition for their time and stimulation. They want you to be interesting and instructive, and their patience will wear thin if you are not.
BUT: Being straightforward is not the same as being simple-minded, and I am not preaching that the shortest sentence is always the best sentence. Ernest Hemingway was a novelist, not an academic, and he is not the standard that I hold before you. As analysts of the social, we use concepts; we deal in nuances and qualifying conditions and exceptions and relationships. We can and must use the full resources of our language in presenting our thoughts, and that includes the passive voice, clauses of all sorts, expressive adverbs, and compound sentences. But our training is constantly leading us in the direction of verbosity, towards the Sirens’s songs of elaborated and encrusted prose. Indeed, all of us who engage in professional writing must fight the steady drift towards ornate expression. Overly complex sentences, phrase-laden and heavily punctuated, are the bane of serious writing.
Much of what you can do to streamline your prose is simple–deceptively simple. Small changes make big differences in flow and momentum and clarity. Here are some examples from student essays of previous years, with my suggestions for how to phrase them more concisely:
X focuses exclusively on –> X focuses on
hinge largely on–> hinge on
highlighting some of the differences between A and B –> highlighting differences between A and B
that is the reason why –> that is why
while it is true that X may have wanted to do Y –> while X may have wanted to do Y
X is correct in her description of Japanese Y –> X correctly describes Japanese Y
X paints the picture that somehow all this confusion is somehow a characteristic of the Japanese people –> X portrays all of this confusion as a characteristic of the Japanese people
Japanese baseball is not the same thing as American baseball –> Japanese baseball is not the same as American baseball
Neither X nor Y succeeds in portraying an accurate picture of the Z –> Neither X nor Y accurately portrays Z
X’s misinterpretation comes from the ethnocentric stance from which he makes his remarks on the Japanese language –> X’s misinterpretation comes from his ethnocentrism about the Japanese language.
…that he makes assumptions through extrapolation that simply do not hold up upon greater analysis or when placed in a larger context –> that his assumptions simply do not hold up to serious analysis.
Though Sanger’s likening of Aoki to a samurai is incorrect, I do find that he brings up another point, which may be more convincing –> Although Sanger incorrectly likens Aoki to a samurai, another of his points is more convincing
They are trying to make use of a language that they think sounds cool… –> They are trying to use a language that sounds cool…
The article is inaccurate on a fundamental level, because it fails to make an important distinction: that between actual and imagined history –> The article is fundamentally inaccurate because it fails to distinguish between actual and imagined history
The representations Shapiro uses in characterizing the Japanese are also in contradiction with each other –> Shapiro’s characterizations of the Japanese also contradict each other
The article “Japan’s Schools” by Edward B. Fiske would lead some to believe that in Japan school children and college students have completely different lives than those in the US and other parts of the world. Quite to the contrary, in the main categories discussed in the Fiske article–college entrance exams, role of school name, and pressure on the student and family–there are several parallels from Japanese to the American educational system —> Edward Fiske’s article on “Japan’s Schools” leads readers to believe that Japanese students lead completely different lives from those in the rest of the world. Quite to the contrary, all of the issues he discusses–college entrance exams, the role of school name, and pressures on students and families–have parallels in the American education system.
There are at least two reasons why straightforward writing is hard for students (and professors) who are thoughtful and talented. First is the natural tendency to assume that complex ideas require complicated expressions. We come to believe that the depth of our thoughts must be reflected in the length of our sentences. But this confuses “thinking through” a problem with “writing about” our having thought through the problem.
Second, we seldom give ourselves or are given by others the time to revise. “Writing” sounds like a single act, but we all know that the word disguises a multi-stage process. To me, writing at its simplest requires four stages: sketching, drafting, revising, and polishing.
The first draft is an act of creating words, developing your ideas, and discovering your argument. You cannot expect yourself to accomplish even more than this–i.e., shaping those words, ideas, and argument into persuasive and expressive prose. That is what you aim for in a second pass. In the first draft, you are the author of your ideas; in the second, you become the editor of your prose.
Now for an important coda to all of this preaching. By virtue of our training, our interest, and our responsibility to hold you to high standards, we professors are always in the role of correcting and instructing and evaluating your writing. It is easy for you to forget that we too write as a vocation and that others (colleagues, editors, and reviewers) correct and instruct and evaluate our writing. After years of writing, many of us consider ourselves to be rather proficient, and advice and criticism are sometimes difficult and embarrassing. But they are always necessary and usually helpful.
As a demonstration of the fact that professors too suffer your fate, I invite you to look at three versions of an essay of mine, “At the Limits of New Middle Class Japan.” After three conferences and three separate drafts of this essay, I submitted what I thought was a rather polished version of the manuscript to the volume editor, Olivier Zunz, and to the Russell Sage Foundation, which was publishing the volume. Zunz, a fellow academic, was satisfied. Cynthia Buck, a professional editor working for Russell Sage, was clearly not happy. She was a specialist in writing, not in Japan anthropology, and as you can see from her editing of my manuscript, she found many passive constructions, prolix sentences, and awkward phrasing that had escaped my own multiple revisions. I was happy to accept almost all of her suggestions, which I incorporated into the final published version, and I think it’s much better for her work. I only hope that our suggestions for your own course writing will be as helpful.