Rarely will a writer write about a scandal he or she is involved in, but I think it's time I turned us all in.
The scandal is that for centuries we have elevated our writing to a point of incomprehension. The culprits are we, academics, and the victims are the 75 percent of Americans without the celebrated bachelor's degree. The crime I am charging us with: classist writing.
I am worried academia makes us worse communicators. I am worried academia trains us to only communicate with other academics. I am worried that our loaded diction is not understandable by people outside this falsified elitist reality. I am worried that our writing separates the classes and gives the highly educated more power than they deserve.
The U.S. Constitution is said to be our greatest, most influential legal document. I am in no position to prove or disprove this assumption. However, I do think it's a shame I can't understand our greatest legal document. I am by no means a bar for standard, but if we just said what we meant we wouldn't have such warped interpretations like we do for the Second Amendment.
President Bush recently proposed a tax cut that will help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A similar argument can be made about the \formal"" writing of academia. By writers continuing to make our work digestible only by the highly educated, we are helping the educated become more educated and further retain power. If only the top 25 percent of our country receive ideas born from academia, we as writers are fostering a gap.
In our society, a blatant correlation can be made between our societal class, race and our education. Denying our ideas to the majority is classism. We have elevated our diction and sentence structure to a level that borderlines on incomprehension. I too have become a classist writer.
We are all writers, but because I am writing this article, allow me to use myself as my own case study. I came to this university with the notion I would learn to circulate fresh ideas to the masses. I have since realized I have allowed my work to become so tailored by the academic world, that the very audience I want to connect with won't read my annoyingly prestigious prose. Let me share an example:
""The effects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, occurring during 1932-1972, filter into today's medical institution by preventing confidence from the African-American segment of our population due to this case of institutionalized racism, which infringes upon our system of democracy.""
I received an ""A"" for this piece. This ""A"" in academia translates to worthless outside of academia.
Bell Hooks is an African-American feminist writer who was condemned by her academic peers for not including footnotes in her book ""Talking Back."" Hooks deliberately chose not to use footnotes because she wanted ""her people"" to want to read her book. The meaning of Hooks' work was not compromised by her lack of footnotes. Instead, her choice made a meaningful statement about the way our society displays information.
Writers are meant to communicate; yet we have created a code only the highly educated can decipher. We are perfecting a craft only meaningful to a small sector of people. Our writing is not better in a formal style--the more formal our writing becomes, the less our writing communicates.
As children, we all wrote the same way. Our writing may not have been eloquent, but everyone in the class understood one another. Yet, 15 years later our writing has been so pumped full of academia many in our elementary class could probably not understand our writing. A decade and a half of education later, our writing communicates less.
If we believe our ideas are of enough quality that our entire society could benefit from them, we should present our thoughts in a style that can be appreciated by all. We all write, we just have to make sure we all communicate.
