Organizations and Markets

Stylish Academic Writing

10 April 2012 at 9:05 am Peter G. Klein 2 comments

| Peter Klein |

Helen Sword’s recent WSJ piece — “Yes, Even Professors Can Write Stylishly” — takes me back to an early O&M entry on academic writing. Sword offers some great pairwise comparisons:

Stodgy: The human capacity to synthesize linguistic complexity is exemplified by the grammatical phenomenon of verb irregularity.

Stylish: “This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student.” (Steven Pinker)

and

Stodgy: A significant variability in nutrient-gathering behaviors has been observed in various insect species.

Stylish: “Insects suck, chew, parasitize, bore, store, and even cultivate their foods to a highly sophisticated degree of specialization.” (Richard Leschen and Thomas Buckley)

Plenty more are in her new book, Stylish Academic Writing. As I noted in the earlier post, economics and management scholarship has been blessed with some terrific prose stylists, but plenty of awful ones too.

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