Razzle-dazzle 'em....

Razzle-dazzle ‘em….

It is a demonstration of how far I’ve travelled in the last four years that my instant reaction to an article on academic writing is to write. Not a complete rebuttal, because as a designer, I don’t really come from that world, but have been required to inhabit the periphery at least. I have to confess I quite like it there.  As an architect, drawing - our tool for expression- has a specific purpose, which is to communicate, whether that involves the communication of a concept, a model of a complete building, or technical and construction information. If you fail to communicate with drawing as an architect, you’re on a hiding to nowhere. Being obliged to write an entire PhD has transformed this architect into a writer, and initially an extremely reluctant one, through painful adaptation, to the point that nowadays, some of you have to endure my latent hypergraphia (pedantic joke warning) on a regular basis. I write things down in order to better understand them, and that applies as much to my academic writing as to anything else. If I ever manage to make any sense of the last ten years or so of my life, there’s at least a novel in it. To those of you who would wish to write me into a novel: best get to know the story first. People’s stories are seldom what you imagine them to be, though that is half the fun in writing fiction. I suppose it rather depends on whether the intention is Tolstoy or Jilly Cooper. Please not Anita Brookner, for I would sooner die.

As an academic writer, I write from a position where my research is genuinely interdisciplinary, so that clarity and communication are critical to the reader. As a reader, I abhor the sort of academic writing which is wordy, self-consciously pedantic, designed (using the word very loosely, and largely incorrectly) to appeal to a very small group of people. In some disciplines, it is close to inevitable. I’m perhaps lucky then, that mine is design research. As it synthesises theory from a number of disciplines - environmental psychology, neuroscience, ICT, in addition to colour and aesthetic theory, I have had very little choice but to aim for clarity in order firstly, to draw out ideas, and secondly, to communicate. One of my examiners is an architect; the other researches systems optimization. If MyRoom ever becomes a reality, there will be collaboration from Applied Psychology, nano-technology, digital media, computer science, engineering….I can’t afford not to be understood. Often when I read guidelines on paper submission, there is an explicit requirement for clarity of expression for a readership from an acknowledged international and multidisciplinary audience. That the research falls into the general area of ‘Smart Design’ may not be coincidental. Perhaps there will be more of this as disciplines converge, and the need to communicate to a greater audience becomes more pressing. I don’t believe in using two words when one will do (unless it makes a sentence sing better), or a long word where a shorter one will suffice, unless of course it’s an aesthetically-pleasing long word. Perhaps I’m lucky in terms of where I landed academically. It could have been specialisation which came with an automatic requirement to murder the English language. But never make the mistake of thinking that academic writing does not serve a purpose: if the spoken work is powerful, and can bring an idea into being, the written word is ten times so. As you write, and especially if you are required to write at some length, ideas and conclusions emerge from what you are writing. Very rarely, and luckily, you read back, and think ‘Did I really write that?’, because it has taken on a life of its own while your attention was elsewhere.

I recently bought a copy of The Experience of God:  Being, Consciousness, Bliss, written by Yale academic David Bentley Hart.  While one might regard the topic as arcane or difficult to define, the writing is beautiful; a model of simplicity and clarity. I’m also at one –well, mostly- with George Orwell, writing in ‘Politics and the English Language’, and when I re-read my thesis having read that essay (with thanks to a certain academic for creating that last-minute panic; you know who you are), I found myself not so bad, though with a slight tendency to overuse of reflexive verbs. Minimalism, and the idea of elegance in design, are key concepts in my own thesis, so that it would have been resoundingly inappropriate to aim at anything other than clarity and simplicity. Sometimes “less is more”, and sometimes less is simply less. So having been architecturally educated in the minimalist canon, perhaps I was travelling from the other direction to begin with. Two roads converged in a wood?

While the New Yorker article makes the point about the necessity for academics to impress particular people, there is something a tiny bit sad about writing that sets out to do that, because it inevitably suffers, as a piece of writing, from the requirement to show off, which is a clear incitement to pedantry, which should really be a criminal offence.

My best academic writing anecdote is from an interdisciplinary ICT seminar where a young mathematician presented a paper on the algorithms he was working on. The audience was almost entirely composed of quite experienced academics. When he got the end, the chair, who was also the project PI, stood up and said “Are there any questions?”There was a ripple of laughter. “No? I didn’t think so’. Razzle dazzle ‘em…..