The Smell of the Lamp: Bad Writing in the Behavioural Sciences

Abstract

An academic who writes badly does so for one or more of three reasons: He (or she) may be insufficiently sophisticated in the uses of the language; he probably shares the peculiar linguistic habits of an insular community of academics; and he may be under some distortive pressure from the habits of thought and language inculcated by his particular discipline. Writers in the fields of human science, in particular, are led and even encouraged to deploy reifications copiously and incautiously, to neglect such rhetorical problems as the clarifying of contrast or comparison, and to fall into traps set by the seeming similarities of syntax or metaphor. In all this they are typically beguiled by the demands for quantification and generalization that dominate their disciplines, and by some rather simplistic assumptions about the nature of language.