According to Walter Benjamin, Brecht used to have a little wooden donkey around the neck of which he’d placed a sign which read, ‘Even I must understand it.’ The point was that whatever political point he was making in his plays (or his songs or poems or essays or short stories), this must be made so clear that anybody – no matter how stupid – should be able to understand it. It’s a view of communication that I share, and I try and practice this in my teaching and in my research.
However, not everybody agrees. I once had a reader’s report in response to a book proposal I’d submitted, which said that my writing style was both ‘approachable and easy’ and ‘patronising and overly simplified’. By implication, that means for work to be considered suitably academic, it should be unapproachable and difficult. By coincidence, patronising and overly simplified is exactly how I would describe the tone of the reader’s report.
In a piece for the Times Higher published earlier this year, Sally Taylor, the director of the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange complained about ‘the obfuscation of language in many academic presentations’ which she suggested might even be a deliberate ploy, quoting a phrase she had come across at an AHRC event: ‘Knowledge is not the same as the algorithmic properties of information or its Aristotelian and Cartesian representation as unbendable and unbending nuggets of reality.’ (2 April 2009, p.27)
There are academics who would argue that they have to use convoluted, esoteric and jargonised language in order to get their point across. I have some fundamental problems with this view. First of all, language can be used in this way in order to flatter to deceive. A rather simple, obvious point can be made to look more intelligent and profound than it actually is by writing it in such a way that it’s difficult to understand. That’s not being clever, that’s just showing off.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if academic research into Drama is simply addressed at other academics, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on. All we’re doing is trying to work out how actors or playwrights or directors or designers or performance artists work (or have worked in the past). This can be quite a useful and interesting thing to do as long as the ideas are capable of getting beyond the walls of the ivory tower. What we write could be of real interest to actors or playwrights or directors or designers or performance artists – or even, God forbid, ordinary members of the public – providing they can understand what the hell we’re going on about.
As a result, I try to aim whatever I write at not just an audience of fellow Drama academics, but also at the general reader. This not only means avoiding unnecessarily difficult words, but also trying to make my prose lively, engaging, and – dare I say it – fun. Just because I am an academic doesn’t mean I can’t be playful with the language I use, not least because I’m usually writing about stand-up comedy.
This approach has paid off for me, in the sense that my books have managed to grow their hair long and fashion it into a rope which they’ve used to climb down from the window of the ivory tower and escape into the wider world. I know this because they’ve been reviewed in national newspapers, sometimes by well known comedians.
The downside is that my prose can be dismissed as patronising and overly simplified by other academics. The problem is summed up beautifully by my old professor, the excellent Peter Thomson, in a review of my last book: ‘This is the kind of book that troubles grey-suited committees of academic peers. It’s too enjoyable. But that, given its subject, is just what it ought to be, and it treats its subject seriously.’ (Studies in Theatre and Performance, vol. 26 no. 3, p.301)
There will always be grey-suited academics enjoying writing their stodgy, unreadable sentences which are destined to be read (although not enjoyed) only by other grey-suited academics, and they will probably always be determined to keep the drawbridge of the ivory tower raised and nailed shut.
I will never be one of them. For me, the first rule of writing a book, article or chapter is simple: be understood.
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