Just after returning to Harvard’s campus for the fall semester, an unusual review in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye. Kathleen DuVal, writing about a new survey of the Revolutionary War by Joseph Ellis called “The Cause,” departed from the generally positive pattern in most book reviews these days to take Ellis to task for his “neither original nor well-put” sentences and his bland argumentation.
“‘The Cause’ combines the worst quality of popular history (not saying anything original) with the worst qualities of academic writing (it is dully written),” DuVal opines.
As I finished the review, though, I wondered what a book of the opposite flavor might look like: How could a piece of writing say something original (especially in the context of an academic conversation) while still remaining engaging? After all, I have my senior thesis in front of me, and it presents a perfect opportunity to take up DuVal’s implicit charge to couch an academic argument in accessible journalistic language, so to speak — even when neither journalism nor academia at Harvard want particularly to engage with each other, and when the boundary between the two appears clearly demarcated, fixed, and immutable.
At Harvard, the disdain within student publications for academic arguments gets beaten into you from the very first comp session. I remember one of my first editors telling me that the HPR wrote analytical articles, not research papers — as if research papers only regurgitate other academic viewpoints without contributing anything new. (Spoiler alert: This is not the case of a good research paper, although plenty of mediocre research papers manage to say nothing original.)
And for their part, classes, seminars, and colloquia on the other end somehow look down on journalistic writing. When I mentioned in a Center for History and Economics seminar that I aimed to write historical papers for my grandparents, the seminar leader called me an “academic populist” — jokingly, to be fair, but the joke had a kernel of truth to it: Academia does not particularly like academics writing for their grandparents. My grandparents are smart people and avid readers; what does it mean that academia explicitly wants to keep them beyond its ivory gates?
Even if academic writing at Harvard does not reject journalistic style explicitly, it does so implicitly when it continues to use ponderous, run-on sentences and lengthy paragraphs.
Take, for example, a prize-winning senior thesis on beet farming in interwar Japan. “The illumination of the violent history of Ainu exploitation and an explicit recognition of the coloniality of Hokkaido is welcome, yet the lack of attention to the ongoing operation of settler-colonial strategies in interwar Hokkaido is unfortunate,” reads one sentence in the introduction. In an already fairly long sentence, almost a sixth of the words are longer than four syllables, and the sentence presumes the reader knows what exactly “coloniality” and “settler-colonial strategies” entail.
I can only imagine the contorted looks on my grandparents’ faces as they try to unpack that sentence — and unfortunately, it is not an outlier.
I first attempted to cross this seemingly sacrosanct boundary over the summer through my ever-growing, ever-mutating article on the HPR’s history, which is fundamentally a journalistic piece. I conducted 43 interviews for the article, and I am writing the piece in the way I might write an 800-word article for the Crimson: short sentences, one paragraph per speaker, even paragraphs with one sentence to build suspense.
But the question to anyone beyond the HPR is obvious: Why should we care about a student publication? To me, I needed to make an argument to answer this question, and this argument fundamentally relies on entering academic conversations about Harvard’s history specifically and media history more broadly.
I have the opposite challenge in my thesis: How can I bring in journalistic language to a work sitting squarely inside the ivory tower, read by only three or four professors and graduate students, especially when our thesis seminar advises us to avoid colloquial language and write page-long paragraphs?
I’m not sure I have fully found an answer to that question. I usually write two or three paragraphs on each page, making them longer than the average HPR or Crimson paragraph but shorter than the average academic paragraph. And, as I’m quickly finding out, I use way too much colloquial language for an academic paper, but not enough for, say, a newspaper article. I will probably find a compromise in keeping my writing concise rather than colloquial: no Marxist jargon, no 40-word sentences replete with multisyllabic words.
I think the ultimate strategy for bridging the gap between academic scholarship and journalistic writing, then, will be thinking about my grandparents when writing my thesis. Will they be able to read it without falling asleep? Will they find it engaging? Mulling over those questions, at the sentence level and at the chapter level, will help me to make my writing clear and concise.
But I won’t be the judge of that. After all, a writer’s opinion on their own work doesn’t matter; perception and reception do. And so I will send my thesis to my grandparents, and they will (hopefully) read it through to the end. Only then will I know if I have succeeded in putting academia on newsprint.
Image by Iñaki del Olmo is licensed under the Unsplash license.
