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How To Avoid Sounding Like an Idiot

An Underground Guide to Literacy
Even in Termpapers (III)

Signs of Suspect Sources

Scholarly journals, whether published on paper or electronically, are created with the intent of making accurate knowledge publicly available. Writers are expected to present facts that can be demonstrated and to defend their arguments. The audience is made up of other specialists on the same thing, who are not likely to be very tolerant of inaccuracy or misleading arguments. Inaccuracies creep into scholarly journals because of mistakes, fashionable idiocies in scholarly thinking, or totalitarian governments that force scholars to toe a party line on some subjects. But in principle inaccuracies are avoided.

Other sources, however, may have other goals. Popular magazines aim to entertain, and may sacrifice accuracy for a breezy style. Propaganda magazines aim to persuade the reader to love the agency issuing the magazine. Blogposts play loose with the facts because it is a nuisance to check stuff before sounding off about it. And so on.

Here are four of my pet peeves:

  1. The word "feudal" is used by Chinese Communist writers merely as a derogatory label for pre-Communist society. It has nothing to do with feudalism as a social system built on rights in feud and is essentially meaningless.

    Similarly, it is a point of Communist doctrine that late prehistoric society was both matriarchal and matrilineal. There is, to my knowledge, no convincing evidence whatever that Chinese society was ever matrilineal, or that any society was ever actually matriarchal.

  2. References to everybody thinking the same thing usually reflect what an author wants them to think, not what they really think, and they can accidentally suggest a good deal of pretentiousness on the part of the writer. Beware of expressions like the following examples. The last one here (from a prominent British news magazine) verges on truly offensive in its tone of snooty superiority.
  3. Laws are not customs. Reform of laws does not constitute effective reform of popular practice. The fact that it is illegal to kill people in the United States does not mean that there are no murders, and no termpaper has ever maintained that it does. But termpapers routinely do assume that reformed laws of inheritance in Nigeria, say, show that inheritance instantly changed to conform to whatever the new law was. The relationship between law and practice is complex and cannot be assumed.

  4. Propaganda magazines are not scholarly journals. Some propaganda magazines can be informative. But they must be approached thoughtfully. When the Pyongyang Bugle writes that a certain law was passed on a certain date, there is every reason to believe that it was. But when the Pyongyang Bugle writes that the North Korean masses have rejected the obsolete practice of joy at weddings in order to save their joy for reading the works of their Beloved Leader, you should be suspicious. Above all, simply quoting such a statement from such a source in your termpaper does not establish it as a fact. Instead it tags you as an uncritical thinker.

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Signs of Fashionable Thoughtlessness

The term "jargon" has come to designate, among other things, the bureau-babble of the thoughtlessly fashionable managerial consultant. We live in a world of

Some of these expressions are destined to become lexicalized, that is to turn into garden-variety English, spoken by ordinary mortals and not confined to the bureau-geeks. That may be happening with the formerly goody-goody euphemisms "senior citizen" and "significant other." (In China it happened with the saccharine expression "little friends" to refer to elementary school pupils, so clearly anything is possible.) And some bureaucratese expressions, although never becoming general parlance, can become specialized terms for particular institutions or practices (such as "affirmative action").

In most contexts, however, newly fashionable expressions in general, and bureaucratic ones in particular, are used by people who want to say something high-sounding but don't have anything original to say. In that context, such terms serve mostly to symbolize the position of the speaker or writer among "the insiders." If you have a tendency to fall into the seductive cadences of newly fashionable turns of phrase, consider what (and whether) you are really communicating anything beyond your group loyalty!

Never refer to your own research as "in depth"; if you are not a world authority, "depth" is a transparently pretentious claim.

For depressing satires on thoughtless gibberish from various fields, click here.

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Miscellaneous Comments on Content

  1. The Bible. The Bible is an important book in the history of Judaism and Christianity, but it is not a description of modern practice and belief among Jewish or Christian believers. To quote the Bible as a point of contrast with some non-Christian religious practice or belief (such as Japanese village processions) does not constitute a comparison of that practice or belief with the ethnography of Christian life.

  2. Value judgments. Value judgments are usually easily made once a criterion of value is established: elephants are "better" than hummingbirds once we agree that bigger is better. But value judgments are seldom what scholarship is about. A tirade about how outrageous it is that Song dynasty Chinese women were mistreated (by your standards) does not, in itself, constitute a study of Song women or of the forces that operated in Song society. Expressing outrage that the Spanish suppressed the delights of human sacrifice in Mexico does not constitute an analysis of Spanish colonial motives, policies, or daily life.

  3. Time of Authorship. Different articles are written at different periods. Your source authors may speak of China "today," but if you refer to their writings as meaning China on the day you are writing, you are likely to be anachronistic. For J.J.M. de Groot China "today" was 1900. For J. Beattie the Nyoro "today" lived in British colonial Uganda. When I find a student who refers to conditions as described by de Groot or Beattie and writes that this is how China or Uganda is "today," I know the student is a nudnik.

  4. Authors' Opinions. Authors' conclusions, impressions, and opinions are not facts. If an author says that French art in the XVIIIth century was hideous, that should not be built on as a fact about French art; it is a fact about that author's impression or opinion. Informed opinions are important, and the people expert enough to write books and articles on subjects are normally well informed and may well represent what reasonable people think, but their opinions are are not facts.
  5. Authors' Conclusions The flip side of the previous point is that the arguments made by experts are not mere "beliefs" either; they are reasoned positions which the experts believe to be the best integration of all available evidence with the most persuasive ways of evaluating it. To say that Jones "believes" that Neanderthals were capable of artistic production fails to credit Jones with having arguments to back up that position. If Jones has a reasoned argument and not just a blind faith in Neanderthal artistic capacity, it is far better to say that Jones "argues"or "reasons"or "concludes" that Neanderthals were capable of artistic production. (And then, of course, you should probably indicate the published source or suggest the argument so the reader has some idea why Jones would reach such an implausible conclusion.)

    The key point is that it is not the specialists' "beliefs" that matter, but their arguments, even if we don't understand the arguments and are willing to take their word about them.

  6. East & West. The tired words "East" and "West" as contrasting kinds of civilizations have always been rather silly, and they remain silly, at least most of the time.

    Arguably, there actually is such a thing as "Western" civilization, referring loosely to those societies most directly the heirs of the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and, even more so, Rome: the European Medieval philosophers, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and so on. The use of the term "the West" to refer collectively to such societies is unexceptionable. Also reasonable, in appropriate contexts, is the use of the term "Western" to refer to the general political alliance structure centered on North America and Western Europe.

    No comparably coherent tradition is shared by any entity called "the East." The term "the East" (or even "the mysterious East") was used in the last century to invoke popular notions of the inscrutability, arcane superiority, or inherent untrustworthiness of people in much of Asia.

    As a geographical term, "the East" covers everything from Turkey and Israel to Korea, from Siberia and Mongolia to Borneo, and even Australia. It is not a cultural category, and it has no analytical value whatsoever. When set in direct contrast to "the East" without further specification, "the West" covers everything from Norway to Argentina and from Romania to Angola and everybody from Zulus to Navajos. So it becomes meaningless as well.

    Thus, if it can sometimes make sense to refer to "the West" (although it is still stupid if what you really mean is "middle class people in California"), it never makes sense to talk about "the East." It never did, and it still doesn't. If you find an author who does that, the work is unlikely to be a good termpaper source. For example, here is a bit of meaningless blather from a UCSD doctoral dissertation (not in my department), trying to sound profound. This author even manages us to use "Asian" equally meaninglessly!

    Eastern philosophy is circular; the individual is one with the universe. The Eastern path is reconciliation with nature, not mastery or exploitation. The Asian way enables a pluralistic approach to healing, while narrower Western medicine is physician dominated.


  7. Made-Up History. On the whole, it is a bad idea to make up history. Too many termpapers begin by telling me about what happened in "olden times," based on no evidence whatsoever. Here are some examples from student papers. None of these writers was intending to write about these themes (or to sound like an idiot), but rather made up the passages without much thought in order to introduce what was to follow.

  8. Made-Up Motivation. Related to making up origins of customs is the attribution of motivation to government policy makers or shadowy culture heroes without any actual evidence of what they in fact had in mind (or even that there was any uniform opinion or widespread agreement). Making up the origins of customs or policies is also faking history, after all, even when the result is plausible:

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Writing Definitions

It is a bad idea to use words you cannot define, since it means you don't know what you are talking about. This deficiency can become painfully obvious if a reader is inspired to challenge a word that is central to your argument or description. ("You say his motivation was religious. What does that actually mean? What is a 'religious motivation' anyway?")

Indeed, being able to define words is so central to human knowledge, that many professors think a good exam question is to ask a student to define a concept, sometimes with an example. (They are right. Such questions are good. They are easy to write and quick to grade, and it is easy to argue that they successfully separate the sheep-students from the goat-students. Unfortunately, some very competent and insightful students do badly because they are unpracticed in developing adequate definitions.)

A definition, be it in an essay, on an exam, or in a dictionary, sets a word or phrase to be defined equal to a word or phrase constituting its definition. In principle, the definition can grammatically replace the thing being defined:

There are two common ways in which exam-paper definitions go tragically wrong. Here are two real examples:

  1. Free Association Instead of Definition:
    to run = they had to run cause their were no wheeled vehicles
    [But what did they actually do? Haul timber?!]
  2. Phrase Starting With "When":
    Virilocality is when the bride becomes a member of her husband's household.
    [But what is it? A time?! A rule? A condition?]

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Awkward Embedding

In English many structures enclose others:

He wrapped the gift up in green paper.

However a large number of structures embedded inside each other rapidly become ugly, silly, or hard to understand. The solution, not always easy, is to move at least some of the embedded material outside of the "containers":

The problem of awkwardly complicated sentences clearly goes beyond embedding as such. In general, if one part of a sentence is especially complex, it is more reader-friendly to avoid sticking it in the middle:

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Misc.

More cautionary notes about ways people subvert their credibility through their prose go here as soon as I read some more exams, termpapers, theses, dissertations, committee reports, bureaucratic memos, editorials, quotations from politicians, or first drafts by my colleagues or (blush!) myself.

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