Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 2; March 02

You say 'tomato', I say "lypersicon"

Or Bullshit in EFL MA Writing

Abigail Acton, Belgium

Now, which of the following sits comfortably with you?

From a conversation between me and another woman

or:

From a conversation ocurring within same sex dyad of which the researcher was one.

Let me guess - the former. But this was just one of the many corrections I was required to make when writing up my MA. Why? Having made your choice, could you look at the pair of quotes again and tell me if anything's gained by using the second example, is there any further information contained therewithin?

Here's another:

Thus it can be seen that corrective feedback is relevant to learned, explicit knowledge because, as a conscious representation of well formedness…….blahdy blahdy blah (A. Acton 1999:28 Corrective Feedback: the Student's Perspective - this is my work so I can assasinate it without being too preoccupied with courtesy!)

All I can do is apologise and say, in my defence, that this was not what I had originally intended to say - I mean : “wellformedness”!

This article is about the use of jargon in academic writing. I'm not going to suggest that jargon is redundant. Far from it; as a short cut, or as in the universally recognised botanical reference above, it is great. But what happens when the jargon just gets in the way of the meaning? When the reader's reaction is: “You what?!” after the fifth time of reading?

For the writer, the decision whether to use a certain turn of phrase or not, can be a tough call. A researcher buried in their work can easily take the reader's knowledge for granted. It is unlikely that the next two writers asked themselves: 'Is this clear?' (Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride):

Words are like MTV images, disarticlating coherent discourse into semi coheretnt pulsations, turning each single, disorientated word into a womb that spawns its own hyper verbal harmonics and disonances (Mc Caffery 1991:134 Storming the Reality Studio.)

Well, perhaps that's more Pseud's Corner than an example of obstructive jargon. How about this one?

The infrential strategy is to establish, first, that the primary illocutionary point departs from the literal, and second, what the primary illocutionary point is.

The argument of this chapter will be that the theoretical apparatus used to explain this case will suffice to explain the general phenomenum of indirect illocutionary acts.

That's taken from John Searle's paper Indirect Speech Acts (Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 3, 1975, and is a great example of where the bad use of jargon is destructive. To those interested in pragmatics the paper gives a revolutionary perspective on what we carve out when we say certain things, what we create by speaking. It's a fascinating piece of work but boy do you have to do battle with it. It's ironic that a paper on how to interepret, should be so difficult to interpret.

And that's a crime - no? If we think of Stanislavski's advice to actors, that the actor is there for the benefit of the pther actors on the stage. It becomes obvious that that applies to researchers. Research is about finding interesting gaps in existing knowledge, experiementing, working through the specific gap until it is plugged. But the answers themselves should raise further questions and so along comes someone else - person B, interested in the quesions raised by person A and they, in turn, get to ferret someting out that could be called truth if those reading it could damn well understand it.

Good research is like double-sided Velcro. But the material has to be wide open and just waiting for someone to attach the next strip. Obstructive jargon is fluff, clogging up the material, making it less cohesive. Turning people off.

So if that is the case, and researchrs do agree that knowledge is there to be built on, why do they clog it up with fluff? Could ego be a factor? The “more-obscure-the-terminology-the-more-intelligent-I-appear” syndrome? Where ever it stems from, the French author, Georges Perec, has a blast satirising academic writing in his pseudo scientific paper: Experimental Demonstration of the Tomatotopic Organisation in the Soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.) , published in 1991. Here he is at his most delicious:

Recent obsevations by Unsofort and Tchetera pointing out that: the more you throw tomatoes on Sopranos, the more they yell and comparative studies dealing with the gasp reaction (Otis and Pifre, 1964), hiccup (Carpntier and Fialip, 1964), cat purring (Remmers and Gautier, 1972), HM reflex (Vincent et al., 1976), shriek, scream, shrill and other hysterical reactions, (Strum and Drang, 1973), provoked by tomato as well as cabbages, apples, cream tarts, shoes, buts and anvil throwing (Harvar and Mercy, 1973) have led to the steady assumption of a positive feedback oganisation of the Yell reaction (YR) based upon a semilinear quadristable multi switching interdigitation of neuronal sub-networks functioning en desordre(Beulott et al., 1974).

So if the misuse of jargon is so obviously open to parody, why do some writers do it? It's probably for a variety of reasons. Fear that the establishment won't take them seriously unless they 'polysyllable-ise' others out of the water, could be one reasons. Some hide behind jargon - if you make it impenetrable then no one will see your hypothesis is actually a little weak. This is like the Emperor's New Clothes, smother your dodgy work in dense layers of bullshit and hope no one calls your bluff. What was it Einstein was supposed to have said? 'If you can't explain your theory to an intelligent 5 year old, it isn't any good.' I have always hoped he did say that. Even if he didn't, it's a sound rule of thumb.

External pressure from over zealous supervisors who have spent too much time looking at examples of bad prose and who then force students to transform clarity into scudzy fog is also a breeding ground for monstrosities. Just say NO, (although this can be tricky and is a strategy best employed by those whose parent is Head of Department).

Can jargon ever be positive? Well, yes. If the meaning of the terminology is established then it can be a useful tool. 'Abigail' is jargon - a quick short cut for: “the-36-year-old-woman-who-has-brown-hair-lives-in-Brussels-and-teaches-English” as such it's very useful. But everyone needs to know what is being referred to. We've all been on the receiving end of lengthly anecdotes liberally sprinled with the names of people we have never met and are never likely to meet. The names have no meaning. They just slow the narrative down until we are almost screaming for mercy, tears of boredom rolling down our faces, rictus grin, praying for a swift death to befall the crushing bore who has cornered us. But if we did know who the hell they were talking about then the names would be a great tool. Same goes for jargon.

Academic writers would argue that readers should come prepared, should have the terminology at their finger tips. That is reasonable - it is a two way street. Like any type of teaching, the students have to do their bit. That is if 'their bit' can be done. If the words used are A: Needed, and B: Explained somewhere. So a good writer says, for example, the following:

“I would like to begin by reformulating, in outline, the position which I took in an earlier article.” (H. Paul Grice, Further Notes on Logic and Conversation , 1967) and everyone starts from the same vantage point - equipped to jump into the stream. A rare breath of fresh air.

But if we don't know what is being talked about; and if the unclear term is then used, along with others, to explain a new hypothesis, then the author is in danger of undergoing a dematerialising process, occurring along a vertical, anterior/posterior axis and involving a fundemental orifice. Or, in the interests of clarity and clean Velcro, should that be: 'disappearing up their own arse'?