Post Academic

I was reading this opinion piece from the Chronicle by Rachel Toor about bad academic writing and it got me wondering about who was the best writer–the academic, the creative writer, or the journalist.  Now there’s no decisive way to judge this and the question seems to be a futile one to ask, at best, or a stupid one, at worst, since it obviously boils down to a matter of opinion and probably subject position.  But seeing as I’m kinda two of the three types of writer I’ve listed, I was thinking about the skills that the different kinds of writing entail.

To try to compare apples to oranges to bananas, I came up with three criteria to consider each kind of writer/each style of writing: the writer’s strengths, the self-identified weaknesses, and how one might make a case for itself/against the others.  I’m only focusing on an academic’s point of view here, since Toor’s essay got me to think about this.  And if someone wants to make a case for the creative writer down the line, please do, because I’m definitely not one!

Strengths: As an academic, I’ve always been invested in the idea that scholarly writing was the superior or at least the most intellectually engaged (read: superior) form, because it allowed for the most complexity and the ability to make connections that neither journalism and creative writing could.  So what if academic writing is dense and opaque more than some of the time?: It just reflected the complexity of the thought it was trying to convey and there really is an art to slowly building an argument that makes academic writing appealing.  Plus, academic writing and research require a command of materials like no other, since the scholar needs not only to have a strong grasp of the creative works it is analyzing, but also other critical work in the field, historical background, and theoretical methodologies.  So I guess that’s why academic essays and manuscripts have to be so long, if they have to incorporate all of those elements.

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