Pinker on how academic writing sucks, but maybe not why

Steven Pinker completely avoids stereotypical academic behavior.

Steven Pinker thanks you for coming to office hours, where something sexy could probably happen.

Now that we’ve all done our reading for today, I think we can agree that Pinker’s “Why Academics Stink at Writing” might be better titled “How Academics Stink at Writing.” The bulk of his essay documents the quirks and vices endemic to the genre; only in the last 500 words or so does he focus on the psychology behind them. The why of bad academic writing lives less in Pinker’s analyses than in the boldface headings he uses to taxonomize them: hedging, apologizing, “shudder quotes” (Pinker’s name for scare quotes,) et cetera. The insecurities these gerunds orbit help explain why a sentence trying to explain that people read statements marked true and false came out like this:

Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word.

To oversimplify his argument, Pinker believes academics write badly because they’re scared.

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