Last week I was involved in an online discussion about writing ability, and whether it is actually less common among people who majored in STEM fields vs those who majored in the humanities; I explained that, in my experience as a writer, editor, and former teacher and librarian, it isn’t common in either group, but is slightly less uncommon in the humanities. I used to edit technical papers as a side gig, and they were often so unintelligible I had to get on the phone to the author to ask what in God’s name he was trying to say.
Of course, the problem is a bit more complex than a simple “which group is better”; certain subgroups of humanities majors, most notably those in the “Ideological Studies” ghetto, are taught to write such convoluted, cumbersome gibberish that after graduation most of them can’t stop doing it even when explicitly told not to. I was once in a working group trying to draft a press release; despite everyone being told we wanted to keep the language concise, simple, and straightforward for the general public, the draft modifications one group came up with were absolutely larded with academic and identity-politics jargon. We had to ignore nearly all their contributions in the final draft because the additions, prevarications, disclaimers, lists, and semantically-empty garbage they wanted to insert would’ve tripled the length while crippling the meaning. It’s important to recognize that this was not truly their fault; for their entire academic careers these participants were repeatedly rewarded for crafting ugly, clunky, unreadable rubbish interchangeable with every other statement of its type, the literary equivalent of an East German institutional building. Writing ability develops with practice; unfortunately, many students of the past several decades have been taught practices that make their writing worse instead of better. So, I guess the best summary of the situation is: Most students start as bad writers. STEM students tend not to improve. Humanities majors in traditional fields usually improve at least some. And “ideological studies” majors improve at writing committee-approved ideological garbage. People learn what they’re taught. If they’re taught to write properly, they’ll learn that. If they’re taught to write improperly, they’ll learn that instead. And if they aren’t taught to write at all, they will learn whatever they are taught.
Years ago I attended a clear writing seminar given by a John Brogan. What I remember best is that he had two major points:
1. If you want to write well, read good writing.
2. If you want to find good writing, read the sports pages.
Saying this to an English teacher will guarantee you and eye roll.
The best writing on writing was and still is “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell; the six rules he includes are the best guide to clear writing I’ve seen.
I learned to write well during my PhD. Most conferences in my field (a sub-area of CS) had a 6 page limit for papers (including references), some even had a 4 page limit. You still had to give an abstract, an introduction and cover your contribution, related work, discussion of benefits and drawbacks, experiments, measurements, future work, etc.
With that, there was just no space for unclear or convoluted language. Took me a while and a lot of work to get the hang of it, but that skill is continuing to serve me really well.
Oh boy did this post bring back some bad memories of working as a tutor at the university level. I completely agree with your analysis. I had a similar experience to yours with a STEM major who haughtily told me that she didn’t need to know how to write properly. I told her, “good luck getting published”. Also reminded her that not all of her future peers have English as a first language and would have difficulties with badly written English and the effect it could have on her career. She…changed her mind after that.