This week’s Water Is Wet award goes to a study of an online support group for new mothers that opens with this bombshell of a first sentence:
‘Having a new baby is an extraordinary experience for most women.’
Who knew?
To buttress their claim that new moms like consulting with their peers, the authors cite studies that ‘suggested that people going through similar situations can understand and offer support better than those who have not experienced the situation.’
Our runner-up is a study of Facebook use that found, astonishingly that ‘close friends are more likely to provide emotional aid and companionship than acquaintances.’
Let me explain (at the risk of making myself a candidate for my own award) that the Water Is Wet trophy recognizes statements of the obvious, for which my esteemed colleagues in the social sciences have a peculiar genius.
Finding worthy recipients of the award has been a hobby of mine ever since I walked off the factory floor at age 24 and entered the sacred groves of academe, first as a graduate student and later as a member of the professoriate.
The Water Is Wet award is one of two I privately bestow as I slog through the impenetrable prose of peer-reviewed publications. The other is the Hairball award. Here is a winning entry from an article about social media activism:
‘While on one level it may be straightforward to note that particular kinds of visual or textual provocation form the basis of activist media and its agonistic contestations, these can be conceived as expressions that act as the relational and qualitative dimensions through which individuals can co-perceive themselves as constituting the contours of any activist event, and the basis for emergent affective publics.’
Oh, that’s straightforward, all right. Now you know why W.H. Auden commanded, ‘Thou shalt not sit/ With statisticians nor commit/ A social science.’
Our Hairball winner recalls a modern telling of the Indian folktale ‘The Tiger and the Brahmin’ that I used to read to my kids:
”Oh my poor brain,’ squealed the jackal, squeezing his head with his paws. ‘My poor brain. I simply cannot understand the particulars of this tale.”
In Brian Gleeson’s story, the jackal feigns bafflement in order to trick the tiger, whereas I, fancy degree and all, am genuinely flummoxed.
That 63-word sentence, by the way (to return to the theme of last week’s column), is the first of three in a paragraph that also includes a relatively svelte 28-worder and a beast of a 78-worder.
Let it not be said that the candidates for the degree of doctor of philosophy on whom we inflict such readings do not earn their velvet stripes.
I bring these gems to your attention not to shame the people who wrote them — I, too, have told readers that water is wet and coughed up a few hairballs — but to ask this simple question: Must we?
Guardians of the Ivory Tower might say something like this: A layperson doesn’t need to know much more about a tree than that it has roots, leaves and branches.
The plant biologist needs words for the parts of the roots, leaves and branches. As with the natural world, so with the social world. The description of complex realities requires a complex vocabulary.
Maybe. Detractors (like me) suspect that complex vocabularies are deployed to make modest findings appear more revelatory than they actually are. When we do need new words to name new concepts, it’s all the more important to introduce them in the clearest possible prose. What we mostly get, though, is murk.
I’m morbidly sensitive to murky writing as a result of having worked at newspapers. Journalism’s faults are well known — a tendency to over-simplify, to focus on the dramatic development rather than on the ongoing situation, or on clashing personalities rather than common ground — but sentence by sentence, we strive for clarity. Our goal is to let readers in, not shut them out.
It’s particularly galling to see writing by scholars of communication — the water I swim in — that utterly fails to communicate. The problem with such writing goes beyond inaccessibility, though.
Part of the reason the professoriate churns out study after study proving water is wet is that the easiest way to assess our contributions is to count them: How many conference papers did we present? How many articles did we publish? Little wonder the online system we Penn Staters use to track our annual output is called Digital Measures.
There is, of course, groundbreaking work being done all across this university and at universities all across this country. There is also a lot of junk. Perhaps if there were less pressure to add line after line to our CVs, more of us would think more deeply and write more clearly, even beautifully.
