Category Archives: clarity

“a disemboweling guard llama raised by nuns”

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I would have given up my first cup of Raging Sage coffee in the morning to have written this line.

But I had the pleasure of hearing this line by Luke Runyon on NPR’s Morning Edition. Runyon’s piece, “Nuns on the Ranch Give a Heavenly Twist to Beef,” offers a clear example of how effective writing makes or breaks the information we sift through, the entertainment we consume, and the education we seek. Writing hangs out all over the place: in the texts we receive and send, in the blogs and tweets we read and post, in the scripts of our favorite movies and TV shows, and in the news feeds we subscribe to.

Journalistic writing is its own genre, and Runyon’s piece follows that genre as applied to a radio story. A radio news story is put together differently than a news story produced only in print. The sound collage that fits together the interviewed voices and the narrator’s voice requires attention to voice and rhythm in different ways from print-only voice and rhythm. But the radio piece is anchored in effective writing, skilled craft, which is easy to recognize in the title of Runyon’s piece, in the structure, in his choice of facts and quotes. I heard Runyon’s piece first in the car and held onto that “disembowelling guard llama raised by nuns” phrase as one that I wanted to write about. OK–I guffawed in the car when I heard that phrase. Then, when I read the piece online when I got home, I missed the sound. Even though the voices are absent from the print piece, I heard their echoes as I read. I heard Sister Maria Walburger-Schortemeyer’s laugh as she explained that praying is like a cow chewing a cud and that the Lord is not only a shepherd but also a cowboy. These are fantastic lines. And we get to hear and read those lines because Runyon knows his craft: he knows how to select the right quotes and how to place those quotes for the effect he wants. He entertains and informs.

Good writing almost disappears. Listeners tuned into Runyon’s piece may not notice the writing, but they will laugh and smile, nod their heads, and finish out the piece with a sense of satisfaction–of having learned something and having enjoyed the process of learning. Runyon’s craft makes that difference.

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when do precision and complex vocabulary become jargon?

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Spoiler alert. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have an answer for this one.

Week one of the Graduate Writing Institute hosted by the Writing Skills Improvement Program at the University of Arizona is just over, and someone stated at the end of my presentation on style that she really liked complex, multisyllabic words. I do, too.

I had just read Helen Sword’s “Zombie Nouns,” in which she states the following:

At their best, nominalizations help us express complex ideas: perception, intelligence, epistemology. At their worst, they impede clear communication. I have seen academic colleagues become so enchanted by zombie nouns like heteronormativity and interpellation that they forget how ordinary people speak. Their students, in turn, absorb the dangerous message that people who use big words are smarter – or at least appear to be – than those who don’t.

There’s a lot I applaud in this paragraph: Sword’s attention to a continuum–that nominalizations can both facilitate and obstruct communication–and her concern that academic elitism can derail students.

But I take umbrage at Sword’s dismissal of “heteronormativity” and “interpellation” as zombie nouns. As for heteronormativity–there’s no other word that works here. If you want to talk about how culture normalizes heterosexuality and marginalizes LGBTQ folk, that’s heteronormativity. A complex concept in one word. And if you’re a scholar in gender or queer studies, you better be able to say this word in your sleep.

As for interpellation, just browse through the web for some explanation, and you won’t find an easy one. That’s because interpellation describes complex social moments involving ideology. Think 20th-century French philosophers. Think theorists of power and culture. Think film studies. Better yet, check out the blog posting on interpellation at The Chicago School of Media Theory for a non-jargony and careful discussion. And if you’re a scholar in cultural studies, or film studies, or contemporary continental philosophers, you will need to cultivate an explanation for interpellation that pirouettes off your tongue.

The point is, academics must learn and employ specialized vocabulary. Are they going to go to a neighbor’s house for dinner and proffer a mini-lecture on their scholarly passions? Likely not. At least not using the specialized vocabulary required in seminars and in their disciplines’ publications.

Words do work. Long words often do a lot of work. Just because an academic writer uses those long words does not mean his or her writing obfuscates. I think it’s all the stuff around those long words that makes the difference between clarity and jargon.