Clarity, Conciseness, and Nonbigwordednessocity

Lynn Z. Bloom's article "Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise" actually points out a lot of useful guidelines for student writing, guidelines that make sense and that should probably be followed by students, teachers, and writers in general. I've often talked about accessibility in the texts that I read, and whether or not a text is accessible is determined by most of these factors, demonstrated by Benjamin Franklin, Polonius, and The Elements of Style.

It seems as though many academic texts that I read for class nowadays could use some of this advice. They are often not the most accessible reading materials, and many tend to violate these very basic rules of writing and discourse:

• Be concise: "Nothing should be expressed in two words that can be as well expressed in one."
• Avoid extremes: I'm often guilty of this myself, and it closely ties into having enough evidence to support a writer's claims.
• "Place yourself in the background"/"Do not inject opinion": This really depends on the kind of writing one is doing. If the goal is to remain completely objective and informative, then yes. But it's hard not to inject opinion if one is trying to persuade others.
• "Be clear"/"Avoid fancy words"/"Use figures of speech sparingly"/"Avoid foreign languages": Here's where I really wish certain academic writers should pay attention. We get it; you have a Ph.D., you're very smart, and you know several French and Latin words. But your audience might not. Therefore, you'd be writing over their heads. Simplicity is conducive to clarity, and if your writing is not clear, then you are a bad writer, if nothing else simply due to the fact that your audience cannot understand you. Blaming your audience for not being intelligent or esoteric enough to know what you're talking about won't help matters, either; the responsibility of clearing up confusion and making yourself understood rests with you as a writer.

As far as this debate between using and avoiding the first person and a more informal tone in academic texts, I think certain professors are opposed to this for the wrong reasons. This links back to clarity: if a student's audience consists of their peers, then this might be the most appropriate method of writing to get their point across. Obviously if students are expected to write personal literacy narratives, they would need to use first person pronouns, and it might be more appealing to tell their story in an informal way. It would certainly make other students interested in reading the text. Informality is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does have its place. It all comes down to audience.