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| Writing an intellectually-worthless PhD dissertation in a super-cool hat. |
Picking up on last Tuesday's tip: Like what you like, not what "smart" people say you should.
I came across a recent memoir that has received a lot of praise and has been nominated for a variety of awards. The writing is learned and "fancy" - one single sentence was ten lines long in the hardcover book.
When you study writing for the public (e.g., for newspapers or popular magazines) a key lesson is that the simpler the writing, the more people enjoy it. Not only that, people learn and retain more from simpler writing. This is true even for highly-educated people. PhDs will remember more from an article written at a 6th-grade level than at a 15th-grade level.
When writing and editing Losing My Religions, Anne and I very explicitly worked to keep the text an easy read. I even come right out and say that on Day 1*.
This very well be a rationalization, but I do wonder if Losing would have caught on with a literary agent if I had written in a fancy, "literary" way. Impress a reviewer rather than your average reader.
Audience capture is also common in academia. Starting with your dissertation, the key is to prove to smart people that you are smart, too. Very often, if you are unintelligible, you are considered smarter; if you write without jargon, you are looked down on. (This also applies to volume - the more you write, the "smarter" you are.)
With that said: Yes, I would very much like to reach a wider audience. But I doubt the much-praised memoir I mention above got feedback like this:
“Got your book in the mail tonight. Just fourteen pages in and already cackling like a hyena on mushrooms over here. My poor neighbors.”
* "...However, even in 1977’s Pulitzer-winning The Dragons of Eden, Sagan had written:
The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due, and can, I hope, help to extend our ethical perspectives downward through the taxa on Earth and upwards to extraterrestrial organisms, if they exist.
(Just FYI, you’ll get no sentences like that from me in this book.)"
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