One of the great pleasures of working in the Writing Center is having the opportunity to experience how students approach academic writing for the first time. Watching talented students stumble over comparatively easy rules—et al for et al., “Quotatation”. for “Quotation.”—reminds me every day how arbitrarily academics have settled questions of style.
Incidentally, why do we continue to write et al. in Latin? Is and others somehow demeaning—do collaborators feel fancier in an abbreviation from a dead language? Why not reduce the Latin to its typographic equivalent—(Jones& 2004)—or simply to a +?
In a perverse way, these students’ struggles have convinced me to write my current chapter not in my usual belletristic prose (in my advisor’s generous characterization), but in a prose accessible to any slob unlucky enough to pick it up.
There is a feeling of risk to this exercise.
From what I have been able to discern, the rule is that you should be tenured at Harvard or Columbia before you dare write for an audience outside your field. There is clearly a sense of pretention here: some journeyman grad student at UW–Madison should not write under the delusion that he has anything to say that would interest a general reader, and so should write in the language of his profession.
This would make sense to me were I convinced that our profession had an efficient language. An accountant can explain to another accountant in 200 words something it might take her 1,000 words to explain to a lay reader—something else I have learned in the Writing Center—but since our field has none of the lingual standardization of other fields I am not persuaded that the jargon of literary analysis contributes much to my writing other than a general sense that I am out of my depth.
