Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences by Michael Billig (review)

'Gigerenzer . . . has said that psychologists treat theories like toothbrushes: no one would wish to use someone else's' (190).

I have a happy memory of the late 1980s. I was still new in my first academic job. I had written a paper outside my normal range of expertise and wanted an opinion of it. My younger brother, although separated from me by the Atlantic Ocean, was the ideal sounding board. He lacked a university education, but he was largely self-taught in paleontology and was, and still is, an excellent collector. He had helped me to collect the fossils that I was discussing, and I had also raided his private collection for relevant specimens. He read the paper for me and replied, as you did in those days, with an airmail 'flimsy.' His one major comment was one that I cherish twenty-five years later: He understood the paper because I had avoided dense jargon and concentrated on writing clearly. I have aimed to write that way ever since, although I admit that it is not always simple to write simply.

Michael Billig is a kindred spirit. He also prefers his English to be written for the easy digestion of the reader. The title of his book, Learn to Write Badly, I found irresistible when I found it in the Cambridge University Press bookshop last summer. Despite the title, it is well written. It is an exposé of the poor writing habits that are endemic in some areas of academia; Billig admits that he 'could not master the academic language which I was expected to use' (2). I, for one, am grateful for that; Learn to Write Badly is a joy to read. Billig takes a broad view of academic writing habits. The pressures of modern academic life favour 'hasty writing . . . such that academics are expected to publish continuously and voluminously' (5). Time to think, time to rewrite and rewrite again, are not part of this landscape. Part of the problem is that certain social scientists try to write like natural scientists and, in doing so, lose clarity. If I am describing a new species of fossil, then I am discussing a thing. Not so in the social sciences, where actions and habits are more important than things; yet social scientists adapt the 'heavily nouny style' (7) of the administrator and natural scientist. Such writing dehumanizes the social sciences. Billig rightly emphasizes, in whatever academic pursuit we engage, 'the importance of using ordinary terms where possible and using verbs in the active voice rather than nouns which theorists have formed from verbs. . . . It is possible to use ordinary language originally' (8, 10). This, of course, is the problem—by writing dense prose with newly minted nouns of uncertain definition, the weak academic seeks self-aggrandizement and can hide shallowness and lack of original thought behind a smokescreen of gobbledygook. It is not the way anyone would ever write unless they were taught to in order to 'fit in' with other purveyors of platitudes: 'You have to study long and hard to write this badly. That is the problem' (11).

Before I go further and before I make an enemy of any social scientist, please let me qualify this geologist's review of a book on writing in the social sciences. Who the devil does this Donovan think he is? He is, in brief, someone who cares deeply about academic writing in any discipline as communication. The clearer we write, the better we communicate. This is as true for my own area of expertise as any other. As one notable geologist said, 'Many a paper has been published that adds nothing to geological knowledge, little of value to geological theory, but a plethora to the geological vocabulary.'¹ A Learn to Write Badly could be written for any area of study, I am sure...