In a review of Mark C. Taylor’s book Confidence Games, William Blaze writes:
Taylor is shockingly lucid for an academic writer, and clearly both and intelligent reader and gifted storyteller. All of which almost hides the severe lack of depth behind the vast facade constructed in Confidence Games.
I haven’t read the book, but I trust the characterization. It is the phrase “shockingly lucid for an academic writer” that gets me, because I sense the truth in it, that I too have been frustrated by the obtuse writing of academia, even as I particpate in it. On the other hand, the rest of this quote speaks to a counter-argument, that depth is difficult if not impossible when one writes lucidly. At the end of the review, Blaze further delineates the divide between academic and lucid by writing: “Take it out of an academic context and place it into the world of popular non fiction and it stands up quite nicely”. It bothers me that acadmic writing and popular non fiction have to be mutually exclusive. I am not picking on Blaze here, as I sense he’s right. Does popular non fiction get you hired? Tenure? Everyone sees the divide, too. Non-academics scoff at the dense prose of academia, and there seems to be an implicit rule in the academy as to which authors are quotable in a paper, which types of ideas are acceptable to cite in a publication, etc.
I know that dense prose does not guarantee depth, but does lucid writing always compromise it? Is it possible for clear, accessible writing to also stand up to academic scrutiny? Must it always be shocking when an academic is lucid?
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