Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [251]
As the botanical and legal examples suggest, the line between acceptable and obfuscating jargon has far more to do with the audience to whom the words are addressed than with the actual content of the language. Because most academic writing is addressed to insiders, students studying a particular area need to learn its jargon. Using the technical language of the discipline is a necessary skill for conversing with others in that discipline. Moreover, by demonstrating that you can “talk the talk,” you will validate your authority to pronounce an opinion on matters in the discipline.
Here are two guidelines that can help you in your use of jargon: (1) when addressing insiders, use jargon accurately (“talk the talk”); and (2) when addressing outsiders—the general public or members of another discipline—either define the jargon carefully or replace it with a more generally known term, preferably one operating at the same level of formality.
The Politics of Language
We cannot leave this chapter without reflecting on its place in what we earlier labeled the culture of inattention and cliché that surrounds us. Style has political and ethical implications. A little over a half-century ago, in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell warns of the “invasion of one’s mind by readymade phrases… [which] can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them.” The worst modern writing, he declares, “consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”
Insofar as style is an expression of the writer’s self, Orwell implies, (1) we are under attack from broad cultural clichés and sentimental nostrums that do our thinking for us, and (2) it is thus a matter of personal integrity and civic responsibility to ask ourselves a series of questions about the sentences that we write. As Orwell says,
What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? […] Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
Words matter. They matter in how we name things, in how we phrase meanings—but also in how we are shaped by the words we read and hear in the media. Words don’t simply reflect a neutral world that is out there in some objective way that offers self-evident meanings we can universally agree upon. Words don’t reflect—they constitute; they call the world into being. They call us into being when we write them.
Earlier in this chapter we noted, for example, that the decision to call a woman “aggressive” as opposed to “assertive” matters. There are examples all around you of language creating rather than merely reflecting reality. Start looking for these on the front page of your newspaper, in political speeches, in advertising, even in everyday conversation. Does it matter, for instance, that there are no equivalents to the words “spinster” or “whore” for men? Does it change things to refer to a bombing mission as a “containment effort” or, by way of contrast, to call an enthusiastic person “a fanatic”?
An article in the journal Foreign Affairs by Peter van Ham (October 2001) offers one last dispatch from the frontier of the culture of inattention and cliché. The article is about the rise of the so-called brand state—about how nations market themselves not only to consumers but to other nations. A brand, defined as “a customer’s idea about a product,” is a powerful tool to replace what a thing is with what other people, for reasons of their own, would have you think it is. This is the world we inhabit, and