Working at university has made my vocabulary worse. I now wage my own vendetta against jargon, gobbledygook, and sentence structures that would make my sixth-grade language arts teacher cry.

Sure, I could blame the pedantry of the ivory tower or the posturing of men and women trying to outdo each other with words rooted in Greek and Latin. They tie their identity to these flashy displays of learning: Their words and sentence structures are signals that after a decade in post-secondary schools, indeed, they belong.

To be an intellectual elite is to believe that out of seven billion humans, you alone own the infinitesimal fraction of knowledge that will save humanity from itself.

In academia, identity is attached to superiority. To be known is to be better than the rest, to have your papers more cited, more read. To be an intellectual elite is to believe that out of the seven billion humans on the planet, you and you alone own the infinitesimal fraction of knowledge that will save humanity from itself. And what better way to prove that than to hide your ideas beneath concepts and language so convoluted, so abstruse that you may be the only human being who truly understands what you mean?

Words Without Meaning, Without Truth

As Frederic Nietzsche points out, those who conceal their ideas behind jargon and gobbledygook often do so deliberately. Ever the linguistic magicians, they trade truth for illusion. He writes: “The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.”

Nietzsche wrote this in 1878. He was a hundred years ahead of his time, anticipating critical postmodernism before it became an academic rage. The postwar generation scribbled pages of unintelligible, useless prose that earned the ire of intellectuals ranging from far-Left linguist Noam Chomsky to conservative political theorists Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss.

Postmodernists deny reality and reject the possibility of reliable, objective knowledge. For them, there is no answer just as there is no spoon. Morals are relative. Existence is futile. Aesthetic standards for art and beauty are impossible. Everything is viewed with skepticism and irony. Nothing is what it appears—even language itself. Think Fight Club. Think Matrix. Darkened ideas of existence, indeed.

The Danish sociologist Jürgen Habermas observes the irony behind all this there-is-no-spoon nonsense: Anyone asserting language has no meaning must use language with meaning to defend their position. Habermas calls it a paradox. I call it dishonesty.

Bad Writing: A Simpler Explanation

During my graduate education, postmodernism and Marxism were easy targets to blame for bad writing. These approaches allowed professors to justify their hatred for capitalism and Western civilization while simultaneously collecting paychecks for teaching students to question all truth but their own.

Managing proposals for astrophysicists and virologists, I’ve had to re-evaluate my earlier position. As the medieval theologian William of Ockham reminds me, I need not come up with a complicated explanation for a phenomenon when a simple one will suffice. In other words, academics may simply be bad writers.

Researchers learn how to be a great researchers without learning how to explain their research to both academic and lay audiences. Quality writing is neither rewarded in peer-reviewed journals nor considered in the promotions and tenure process. After all, why waste time cogently articulating results and ideas when you can let your data and neologisms talk for you?

Those not taught how or encouraged to write well at the last minute string together convoluted passive sentences that recall the words of English novelist George Orwell: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.”

The Curse of Knowledge

Academics spend almost all of their time with their own ideas in their own disciplinary monocultures. To fit in, they use the same jargon and awkward sentence structures. They forget the rest of the world has no clue what their forced acronyms means or that words like parthenogenesis could easily be rewritten as virgin birth.

Academics simply cannot imagine what it is like to not know what they know.

Much like country clubbers disconnected from the other 95 percent of income earners, academics have an impossible time appreciating and communicating with outsiders. They simply cannot imagine what it is like to not know what they know. They suffer from what Steven Pinker terms “the curse of knowledge.”

Thanks to obscurantism, to postmodernism, to the curse of knowledge, over the past few years, my writing has become less florid, more direct, more plain. I write with clarity. I strive for brevity. To be read is to not to have eyes fixed on your work; to be read is to be understood.

To be read is to be understood.