I [heart] Patty Limerick

Update: to make it even easier to access the awesome essay "Dancing With Professors" it now has its own page, on the left.  Hope that's not a copyright violation!

Wrote a little post on my history blog, in a frenzy of "I love Patty Limerick"-ness, but I realized that nobody reads that besides me, and for once I actually have something to say that might be interesting/helpful to other people, so I'm re-doing it here. 
C and I had to read an essay by Tony Horwitz for class today, "The History Beat: How a Journalist Covers the Past" (Harvard Review 32).  It talks about the challenges (?) of writing about history in a way that will be accessible, entertaining, and compelling for casual readers.  It's a nice article, especially because I know most of the references, but it immediately made me want to go and re-read Patricia Limerick's "Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose," which is just totally phenomenal.  She writes about how skewed the world of academia can be when it comes to pretty much encouraging un-readable writing:

In ordinary life, when a listener cannot understand what someone has said, this is the usual exchange:



Listener: I cannot understand what you are saying.


Speaker: Let me try to say it more clearly.


But in scholarly writing in the late 20th century, other rules apply. This is the implicit exchange:


Reader: I cannot understand what you are saying.


Academic Writer: Too bad. The problem is that you are an unsophisticated and untrained reader. If you were smarter, you would understand me.


The exchange remains implicit, because no one wants to say, "This doesn't make any sense," for fear that the response, "It would, if you were smarter," might actually be true.


While we waste our time fighting over ideological conformity in the scholarly world, horrible writing remains a far more important problem. For all their differences, most right-wing scholars and most left-wing scholars share a common allegiance to a cult of obscurity. Left, right and center all hide behind the idea that unintelligible prose indicates a sophisticated mind. The politically correct and the politically incorrect come together in the violence they commit against the English language.

The full text of the essay can be found here, and I really, really urge any of my friends (or siblings, M!) who read this blog to check it out - besides the fact the writing is far better than anything I can offer you, so if you are looking to waste some time at work, you'll get more out of Limerick (you can also check out her webpage) than this blog, it's a really fantastic, fantastic essay, if you have any interest at all in writing of any kind.  That's all - carry on!