Academic Writing vs. Public Writing

Since most of the pointy-headed academics types (full disclosure:  this statement refers to myself) read the same blogs and works when they do research in the same or similar areas, I am not surprised to find my mentor, Steve Saideman, commenting upon this recent blog from Stephen Walt.  I am also not surprised to find Steve pointing us back to Drezner and to the response to Walt by Ulfelder.  You can read Saideman's response to Walt here.  And of course, here is my two cents on the Walt comments.

First, the conversation regarding writing well in academia is as old as writing in the academy.  So, if anyone expected something earth-shattering or new, forget about it.  Walt gives a restatement and his own opinion, but not a new argument.

I have personally found writing in general to be poor stylistically and grammatically in the last several years of my academic career.  My own writing suffers from issues of style and clarity, that I must work very hard to overcome.  So, my own argument is that we simply do not work carefully enough on our writing.  More to come on this issue.

What does Walt get right?  Well, what we are writing about is often difficult to express with great ease and clarity for the general public.  But, that is the general public.  I think Walt fails to account for the intended audience of the written work.

Walt considers logic of discovery and logic of presentation.  Well, logic of discovery is appropriate in the language of the written work or oral presentation if one is writing to other academics or students of the subject matter.  Logic of presentation is appropriate if you are writing to a general audience that is not versed in the "jargon" of the academic discipline which the written work is attempting to engage. 

Walt himself makes this point, but seems to ignore it in his critique of writing well:

"really effective writing involves sitting down and thinking hard about the best way to present that argument to the reader."

Well, to whom am I writing.  If I am writing to other political scientists who study conflict processes (ethnic conflict, civil wars) and political violence (terrorism and counter-terrorism) I use a different prose and metric of writing than if I am writing to my mom and dad about the discoveries I have made in my research.  I would also write differently to policy-makers than to my mom and dad about the same discoveries.  I mean by questioning how well we write to question how well we edit our work for the intended audience.  We academics often forget to ask who the reader is before submitting work for consumption--or maybe I am just writing about myself.  However, what we academics need to further ensure is that in addition to crafting the work for the intended reader is that we grammatically craft our work properly, period.