I read with particular interest Sheridan Blau’s description of some of his students and their practice of handing in papers composed of pompous, overly complex wording and a lack of true understanding. I was especially struck with his line, “For such students, an assignment to write a formal academic paper is an assignment to make themselves stupid” (157). He notes how these intelligent learners abandon their own voice (and often their own understanding) in an effort to sound erudite and professor-like. This isn’t an affliction merely for the young. Before I started my master’s program in the fall of 2011, it had been 27 years since I’d seen the inside of a college classroom. While I had ample confidence in my ability to write, I had much less assurance about my ability to write like an academic. I loved reading the books, poems and short stories in the lit classes, but wavered a bit on the academic treatises on theory and deep literary interpretation. I was a fish out of water, in too deep, wet behind the ears, and any other aquatic cliché you can think of.

It became a habit to read things two or three times just to make some sense of them, which admittedly, made me feel a bit dense. The language seemed unnecessarily wordy and obfuscatory (in itself, a big-ass word, but very apt). This aspect was especially frustrating for me. My undergrad degree is in journalism, where verbosity, redundancy, lack of clarity and overwrought syntax and word choices are constant enemies. You shouldn’t write like that, but even if you do, any editor worth his/her salt will rework it or make you do it over. For his part, Blau points out that “such language use is perverse in the sense that it violates most of the tacit rules or conversational maxims (Grice 1975) that have been found to govern conversations in most ordinary human transactions where people are exchanging information – maxims like try to be as clear as possible, avoid obscurity in expression, avoid excessive wordiness, say what you mean, say what needs to be said …” (157-58). But in my first couple of grad classes, writing sometimes felt like an “out-of-body” experience, using someone else’s vocabulary to make what points I could. In any event, I hoped they sounded good.

I’ve since learned to swim in the grad school pond. Subsequent classes (including ENGH 610) have helped me realize that multiple readings of texts (while a bit more time-consuming) are a good thing, both for reinforcing what I read and for enhanced understanding. I’ve come to accept that reading and learning can be very messy propositions (I already knew writing was messy). I’m more comfortable now with the discourse in the realms of writing and literary theory and instruction.

However, I still get frustrated at times with nebulous wording, and pages and pages of text that seem to run repeatedly over the same ground or veer greatly from the central point of the piece.  If instructors offer complex interpretive texts and lectures, it’s easy to see why students appropriate this tone and style to sound like they know what they’re talking about. This is not to say there isn’t a place for “$10 college words,” as we used to call them, but we must encourage students to fully understand them before they use them. Blau’s excellent suggestions of using first-person construction, reading logs and group work represent, I believe, important steps to keep students from floundering.