Bad English

When i started uni, my lecturers always reminded us that we should write cogently by writing with simple structure and using less jargon. Good writers are always writing clearly so others will find it easy to understand what they'd like to talk about. They also warn us not be tempted to use the jargon if we don't really know how to use it appropriately. They then ended their advise by lamenting how painful it was to mark bad essays which have complicated sentences, unstructured arguments, poor references, and so on. I agree partly with them, except their complains about bad essays.

Surely they know how does it feel to be first year students. You are easily amazed to find new jargon in your reading brick (the most favourite ones are juxtaposition and dichotomy) and tried to use them in your essays. You thought these words will make yourself looking more intelligent. I am not sure what happens in other faculties. But in the faculty of arts, especially in the field of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political science, history, and the like, you will find many jargon used in their discussions.

I recalled on many occasion that jargon and complicated sentences are found in the articles written by social, cultural theorists, historians, and political scientists. Is this an eerie phenomena as academic's works is one way through which public and scholars can communicate to each other?

Dennis Dutton, holding a professorship position of philosophy in the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, created a contest of bad writings. Amongst the awardees are prominent scholar in queer theory and gender, Judith Butler, a literary critics, Homi K Bhabha and a Marxian literary theorist, Fredric Jameson. The award, however, ceased in 1998 after it sparked outrage amongst scholars.

Here is an example of writing from Butler in a journal Diacritic which was used by Dutton to support his decision to chose Butler as the winner.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Butler, Bhabha and Jameson's writings are indeed very difficult to digest (I would add GayatriSpivak!). But that does not mean they do not have a clue how to write in English nor do they know how to write in a journal article. Sometimes our vocabulary are too poor to describe something abstract like ideas. Even in a daily conversation, we often understand 'one thing' although that thing does not have a clear description. Style and being informative could also be a good excuse to defend sentences which have millions clauses. If you have thousand informations which are useful and relevant to the topic, surely you won't put them away. So when all is combined together it could come up with a sentence which takes up the whole paragraph.