... The Plain English Campaign.
C.S. Lewis comments somewhere on the utility of jargon as a necessary shorthand for scholars. He then goes on to suggest that no one should be granted a Ph.D. unless he (or she) could translate a jargon-filled passage into plain English. His argument was that if you could not do that, the rest of us could not be sure that you really understood it yourself. He also estimated that the result would be about a third longer than the original.
I think the result would be much shorter. I have read long, turgid, jargon-stuffed books of literary theory that could be boiled down to a sentence: "Shakespeare was an exuberant transvestite." Or, "Charlotte Bronte was sex-starved." Or, my favorite distillation, of Fredric Jameson's _The Political Unconscious_: "Clear writing is bad because it makes you believe the ideology underpinning what you're reading."
ReplyDeleteJargon should provide a shorthand code for those experienced in a specific field to communicate rapidly. Unfortunately, all too often, jargon becomes a refuge for the inept and a substitute for actual thought.
ReplyDeleteHere's an example: A friend was gettng a PH. D. in Mathematics Education; when she submitted her dissertation to her committee, it was sent back with one instruction for change: To rewrite her conclusion into standard educational language. Her conclusion was originally worded as one sentence which read approximately "This study demonstrates that students who perform homework assignments on a daily basis improve faster than those who don't." She was unsure how to render this into educationese, so she asked myself and another English teacher to help her. We spent about 30 minutes and turned her one sentence into 350 words (about 1.6 pages) of educationese with no increase in content or meaning. Not only did her committee accept her new jargonistic conclusion, but she found out several years later that that conclusion was being given to all other Ph. D. candidates in Education at that graduate school as a model of how a conclusion should be worded.
In other words, jargon as become an end, not a means. Sad.
ReplyDeleteOh, I love that cuttlefish image. I read the Orwell long, long ago, but I've forgotten. And, Hedgie, what happened with your friend is just pathetic. Yet, in grad school, we all did the same thing: Don't write "book" if you can say "text," and so forth!
ReplyDeleteI remember something interesting I read by a woman named Mina Shaughnessy who pioneered a writing program for inner-city kids in New York. Strangely, those kids' greatest writing problems parallel the problem with the jargon-filled prose; she noted they were trying to "make meaning at the same time they were trying to convey meaning." Just as Arthur said, above -- bad writing is writing "not even knowing what you mean to say."
Think before you write. Indeed, think before you do anything. That's a lesson for the ages and one that Americans, in particular, seem to have a hard time learning!