Blog Project 3000

A Blog About Blogs: By No Means the Sign of an Intellectual Fraud

I consider myself a tech-savvy guy; yet, a brief five years ago, I could be found asking my friends, "What the hell is a blog?" After hearing the word mentioned so much on NPR and the like--blogs were becoming a major issue during the 2004 Presidential race-- I felt like I had totally missed out on something that a complete nerd like me should have been fully aware of. Little did I know, I had actually ran my own psuedo-blog as one of the many websites I started and abandoned during the late 90s and early 00s; I had also been reading blogs and blog-like things long before that famed neologism entered my brain.

I may have been unaware of the word, but I was aware of the practices and writing of bloggers; this eased me into started my own blog a few years later, which launched me straight into the humiliating world of professional writing. Fast forward to today, and you'll find that blogs and blogging take up a rather shameful chunk of my life. In fact, I had to request time off at one of my blogging gigs just to get projects like this one completed on time; and, considering that I make far more for from freelance writing than I do in academia, you can clearly see that I have mixed priorities. But I digress.

So, when approaching the idea for a creating a research project in my Writing Technologies class, blogs were obviously on my mind. One major motivation for this is the fact that staring at a Word document for hours on end--with its soul-crushing whiteness, Times New Roman, and abohorrent double-spacing--is not a proposition I'm too keen on these days. Since academic writing is the only space I see this particluar format, its mere appearance produces a Pavlovian response caused by memories of the headaches, back pain, and black coffee-induced ulcers that come with the production of any formal, academic research paper. So, with avoiding prolonged pain as my inspiration, I conned another professor into letting me do my final research paper as a blog. Since it's the genre I'm most comfortable in--and most used to writing in--I figured having to work in the blog writing space would be much more comfortable than trudging through the constraints of formality.

My plan ended up working--to the detriment of my free time. An essay I had originally planned on limiting to 4000 words (and at first I was unsure that I would even make this point), soon ballooned to almost 6000. For some reason, when I'm blogging, I can't stop the words from a-comin'; and this fact is largely responsible for rambling and inappropriate sentences, like the one you're reading right now. At first, I was a little unsure of how to broach my original, planned research question, "How does blogging change writing?" until I saw a clear response to this question with how comfortable and easy blogging made academic writing for me.

It could be that, yes, blogging is where I practice writing for entertainment (with brief nods to the betterment of society), so the mode I enter when I blog is far different that sitting down with the blank canvas of a Word screen, mountains of books, a bottomless cup of coffee, and a nearby loaded revolver. It's like the academic monster who made my writing into a thick slurry of academic nonsense suddenly disappeared, leaving me remembering that I actually like to write.

This, of course, brings me to what I plan on doing in this very blog post. Having already raised the issue of how blogs change writing, I first want to define what a blog actually is. Looking at the different elements of a blog will move us nicely into our next topic: the practices of bloggers. Finally, with these two areas of knowledge elucidated, I'll be providing a video comparison of two Internet compositions: a web site, and a blog. These compositions will feature the same type of content, but the blog will obviously reflect the genre of blogs and the practices of bloggers. Word of warning: you are going to see the word "blog" and its derivative forms about 9000 times in this project. Try not to let it lose all meaning.

I'm also hoping this composition itself will reflect the genre of blogs, and the practices of bloggers. While I'll by no means be following the prescribed features of blogs and practices of bloggers prescribed by my research, my presence in the genre brings about some inevitabilities that come about unconsciously. And, working in a format where I have many multi-modal options available to me, I'll be using video to make some of the denser research a little more clear--and possibly entertaining. After reading this work, you should have a good foundation of knowledge about the genre of blogs, the practices of bloggers, and why I'll probably never be able to do something like this again. But I regret nothing.

Blogs - More Than Just a Stupid Word My Parents Don't Understand

Recently, on a standard parental squalor check (I rated very high), I told my mom about the various jobs I was working to get by. When the subject of blogging came up, she--like me five years ago--asked me, "What's a blog?" My mom is not a very tech savvy person. I could have responded to her question by pulling out a Polaroid of me in my underwear, playing with LEGOs on a cold basement floor, and she'd just be happy that I wasn't asking her for gas money. This made me think, "How, exactly, can I explain what I do?" Telling my mom that I do things for the Internet and am later sent money could lead her to believe that I'm a pornographer. I was inspired to create something--anything--to define just what blogs are to the uninitiated. And the following video is what I came up with:






This video draws upon the findings of Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd's "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog," as well as multiple other sources cited in this work; the original article can be accessed by clicking its title in this sentence. For the sake of completeness and productivity, I'll now go into a little more detail about the some of the basic facts presented in this video. The video has some obvious deficiencies due to my desire to keep it short--not to mention the lousy text placement options in the wholly worthless Windows Movie maker--but after watching it, you should have some basic knowledge that will aid you in understanding the discussion to follow.

So, what, exactly, are the implications behind the different elements of blogs? The videos briefly explained the various parts of blogs and their functions, but not how they lend to the general, personalized blogging atmosphere. Below, I'll move through a list of the aforementioned features and give you more of a sense of their function, and how their function makes blogging a unique genre. What follows are my interpretations of the research I've done which I've already summarized in the videos. Please refer to my bibliography for research credits.

The Header: This contains various features mentioned in the video, such as the title of a post, the date and time the post was made live, and also the author's name. Depending on the type of blog used, this information can sometimes be found at the bottom of the page. The display of a name--or at least a psuedonym--allows a reader to immediately associate the work displayed with a single writer; this is different than non-blog sites, which commonly hide descriptions of authors on "About" pages.

The listing of the time and date of the posting also falls in line with the typical blog protocol of showing content posted in order from oldest to newest; web sites often hide their updates behind a "What's New" section, which can make it unclear as to when the site was last updated. But a blog will always inform the reader as to when it was last updated, which can cause the reader to aniticipate new content. And this anticipation of new content is expected; many kinds of blog software allow the reader to "poke" or "nudge" a writer in order to get them to produce more content. Various tags can be used to index a piece of writing and, along with the permanent link to each and every blog post, this keeps a writer's work alive in a larger discussion that can later be linked to or referenced by the writer of the post in question, or other writers.

Comments: This feature makes blogs unique in that the perceived audience for the piece is real and can actually respond to a piece of writing and have their response appear in tandem with the post. Websites often offer contact information for their writers, but, this method is contact is generally private (which you'll see in the next video on blogging practices), and typically won't be addressed on a web site itself, barring some sort of "letters to the editor" feature. Comments also allow a piece of writing to require the upkeep from a writer after its publication; a writer may continue to address questions, problems, and unseen issues in their post through the use of their comments section. Since comments are typically included at the bottom of a post, these author additions can be seen as an addendum to their original work.

Blogroll: Mentioned various times throughout this project, a blogroll is a list of links bloggers choose to associate themselves with by posting them on their blog. The sharing of these links can be reciprocal--authors may choose to link to each other under the agreement that the linkee will also link to the linker--or it can just be the presentation of linked content that a blogger reads or likes to associate themselves with. This inspires a sense of community in online writers as they link and are linked to one another.

The next issue the video addresses is just why people blog. It's a complicated subject, but it can be boiled down to some basic factors. Self-expression and self-validation are two major inspirations for a blogger to begin blogging; speaking from highly-valued anecdotal evidence, I became a blogger for these factors alone--I wanted my work to be appreciated and enjoyed by like-minded people. But, speaking generally, people blog about their personal interests--including themselves--and enter into communities of bloggers that will help reinforce these interests. This isn't to say that every blogger is successful in this area, as the regular upkeep of a blog can be a daunting task for someone not used to the burden of having to write every day; but the bloggers out there who are productive and have an audience have fully realized the opportunity that blogging can provide them with.

Also important is the use of personality in blog writing, sometimes achieved by including personal information--as seen in the very introduction to this blog post. Some of the most popular blogs out there feature authors with strong personalities about the subjects they address; this is by no means a feature exclusive to blogs alone, but there's a certain ironic and snarky bitchiness that seems to be a necessary quality of popular blogs. A brief look at the most popular blogs on the web reveals that, no matter if the subject ranges from mousepads to celebrity nipple slips, a strong, personality-laden sense of writing is apparent, even if you only look at the headers. Quite possibly, in this blog, you can feel my obnoxious and overbearing personality radiating from your computer monitor. Hate the genre, not the sinner.

What Do Bloggers Do? The Answer May Surprise You.

Obviously, bloggers blog. But if things were as simple as that, studying blogs would hardly be a way to advance an academic career. One person who has struck such academic gold is Jan Schmidt, with her article, "Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework" from the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. Using the structure of this article, as well as the many, many sources it draws upon (seriously, the bibliography is nearly as long as the article itself), I decided once again to frame this information in a user-friendly video much like the previous one. For the purposes of thoroughness, clarity and, perhaps most importantly, lengthening this blog post, I will go into further detail about some of the terminology made and points used in the video below. Again, please turn to (or rather, page down to) my special bibliography section for research credits. The limits of free video editing programs provide me with certain difficulties. Ones you will undoubtedly notice below:





So, let's shed some more detail on some of the that terminology, eh? Namely, the ideas of rules, relations, and code.

Rules: First, rules are broke up into two different types: Adequacy Rules, and Procedural Rules. As I did in the video, I'll break them down here.

Adequacy Rules: These rules determine a blog as the most appropriate outlet for a writer's needs. People seeking the gratification that blogs can supply (already detailed above) will find the benefits a blog offers more appealing than another format or outlet for writing.

Procedural Rules: These rules frame the use of blogs, and can be broken down into three separate areas:

Selection Rules: These rules define what online sources a user decides to read; basically, selection rules are all about input. A reader chooses their reading selection based on such motivations as personal interest in a topic, the desire to meet people, and many other factors, depending on the temperament of the actual reader.

Publication Rules: Where Selection Rules were all about reading, publication rules are concerned with the production of content. A blogger has to make many decisions about their role as a producer of content: choice of topic, what methods to use to present the topic, and design of the blog itself. As discussed above, this content is most often presented in an informal, conversational style. All of these factors were podered upon by me for the very creation of this blog: the topic was one I feel most comfortable writing about, I'm choosing to present it in a multimodal fashion, and I'm using the Blogger software, as it's something I'm familiar with and also because Blogger makes it extremely easy to produce new content. And I'm presenting all of this information in a conversational, informal tone, except in instances like this when I'm trying to describe dry, objective facts. My apologies.

Networking Rules: Neworking rules are concerned primarily with the establishment of social ties, both to other blogs and to actual people. As with the other rules, what happens here is also fueled by routines and expectations. Some of the ways to gain these social links are obvious, like by linking to another blog, or featuring a certain blog or blogs in a blogroll. More on this in the next section.

Relations: Since I've already talked extensively about social relations, I'll now move onto the social relations made possible by blogging. Obviously, since there are actual people behind blogs, blogging network are comprised of more than just a network of hyperlinks. Social relations can be developed and maintained out of the blogging environment with techniques like face-to-face meetings, instant messenger conversations, personal e-mails, and other techniques. Obviously, these approaches are judged appropriate based on the routines and expectations of bloggers. For example, seeking out a face-to-face meeting with someone whose blog you just started reading would probably be considered a tad creepy. But some sites foster personal ties to where this kind of meeting could eventually be considered appropriate. Certain blogging sites, like LiveJournal, allow you to seek out other bloggers in your general area, and even allow you to restrict your content to a select group of people you decide upon. Approaches like this encourage relationships of bloggers on more than just the superficial, hypertextual level. Also, this is a good way to meet girls.

Code: Our final element of blogging practices, code is the technical and nerdy side of blogs. To frame the use of code through example, I'll explain the software and architecture of this blog on Blogger. Basically, Blogger allows for many things that I didn't take advantage of, given the limited readership of this project. Features like a blogroll and tagging my posts were available, but I chose not to use them, as this blog will not be consistantly updated, or a means for networking. On other Blogger blogs (I'll try to stop using those two words in tandem so much) I've created, like this one for the first college writing class I taught, I took advantage of the blogroll and a few other features to better maintain online social relationships with my students, and to make it clear that the blog would be updated at least once a week. With both this blog and my class blog, I did take advantage of Blogger's template feature, which allowed me to choose a quick, attractive (though derivative) design without any real work from me. This feature is important to me, as paying close attention to design is not my most important priority for a project like this. Therefore, I chose Blogger because its architecture works best for my limited plans.

So now, what exactly do you do with all of this information firmly planted in your head? A segue to our final topic is in order; and there's no better way to do that than through, once again, the magic of embedded video. The following should do a nice job of wrapping up my points so far and move us to looking at the blog/website comparison promised so many paragraphs so far. And since you're in this deep, there's really no point to turn back; sort of like seagulls when they fly out to sea to die.



Comparison videos hosted here some time before the fall of man.

---

Bibliography
In keeping with the friendliness of the format, I chose to reserve this section at the end for research credits. Some of the reasons have already been detailed (like the general awfulness of Windows Movie Maker), but I also felt that traditional research-style writing would disrupt the flow of a composition I'm trying to create in the blog genre; and, part of this project--if you didn't notice by now--was to stick to the tenets of the blog genre by producing an entertaining and informative piece of writing. It's a research blog about blogs that's written like a blog and hosted on Blogger. Also, blogs.

Since the videos are a distillation of my research, below I will give research credits for these videos in the standard MLA format. To prevent any possible plagiarism scandals, under each citation I will list what information is contained in the source. Rest assured that all other information came out of my head and my head alone. Well, I assume I picked it up just by existing in this world, but most of the things I absorb are in the public domain of knowledge. Except any food I eat that's shaped like Disney characters.



VIDEO ONE CREDITS

Miller, C. & Shepherd, D (2004). Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog. In L. J. Gurak, S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratliff, & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Retrieved November 22, 2008, from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action.html

This served as the basis of my construction of the blog genre. The following sources were used to aid in this construction:

Blood, R. (2000, September 7). Weblogs: A History and Perspective. Retrieved November 22, 2008, from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Contains information regarding the implications of the reverse-chronological order in which blogs present their content, and how blogs serve as a tool for the self-expression and self-validation of a blogger.

Clark, J. (2002, 28 December). Deconstructing 'You've Got Blog'. Retrieved November 22, 2008, from http://fawny.org/decon-blog.html

Discusses in detail the importance of comminity-building in the blog genre.

Kelleher, T. & Miller, B (2006). Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 11, 395-414.

Contains information regarding the importance and prevalnce of conversational, informal writing in the blog genre.


VIDEO TWO CREDITS

Schmidt, J (2007). Blogging Practices: An Analytical Framework. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 12, 1409-1424.

This served as the basis of my blogging practice discussion. The following sources were used to aid in this discussion:

Lenhart, A., & Fox, S. (2006). Bloggers. A Portrait of the Internet’s New Storytellers. Washington: Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved November 22, 2008 from http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP%20Bloggers%20Report%20July%2019%202006.pdf

Discusses the goals that motivate the use of a blog.

Efimova, L., & de Moor, A. (2005). Beyond personal webpublishing: An exploratory study of conversational blogging practices. Proceedings of the Thirty-Eigth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.

Discusses the different procedures related to Networking Rules.

Hodkinson, P. (2006). Subcultural blogging? Online journals and group involvement among U.K. Goths. Retrieved November 22, 2008, from http://www.paulhodkinson.co.uk/publications/hodkinsonsubculturalblogging.pdf

Discusses the importance and implications of hypertextual and social relationships of blogging.

Lievrouw, L. A., & Livingstone, S. (2002). The social shaping and consequences of ICTs. In L.A. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs. (pp. 1–15). London: Sage.

Contains information about codes, i.e., how people use technology to suit certain needs.

THE END

No researchers were harmed in the writing of this project. At least not physically.

Academic Writing: The Colon Is There Because It Has to Be

Calvin and Hobbes take on Academia. Bill Watterson is a curmudgeon after my own heart.
Twenty Years of Education and I Still Can't Read

As a graduate student, I've been known to mark up my share of books; this often comes back to bite me in the ass years later when I return to old texts and see columns of ignorance scrawled in the margins--a testament to the fact that I'm growing as a person, and that I also tend to write down anything that crosses my mind, even if these thoughts promise to stick around in a state of semi-permanence. These habits of mine do not tread into the hallowed grounds of the library-owned book, for reasons that involve both the fear of being caught and the annoyance of having taken out a book full of someone else's ignorant, reactionary comments and haphazard highlighting. But something in John Guillory's Cultural Capital--a mere sentence--inspired me to violate the unspoken agreement between librarian and library patron by (gasp) using the traditonal dog-ear technique to mark the offending passage. And here it is, in all of its glory:

The difference between the canon and the syllabus, then, is the difference between the pedagogic imaginary, with its images of cultural or countercultural totality, and the form of the list, as the instance of mass culture's social imaginary, with its simultaneous denial and manifestation of cultural heterogeneity. (37)

When I first read this quote, my first reaction was, obviously, to begin screaming. I also thought another, perhaps more tactful approach would be to scrawl a common expletive phrase--abbreviated on the Internet as WTF--right next to the offending sentence. But instead, I folded back the corner of the page as part of my new mission to discover just what the hell John Guillory was trying to say. I would read this labyrinthine sentence to my peers--taking care not to get out-of-breath or go cross-eyed halfway through--only to find them unconscious on the ground after I reached the period and looked up from Cultural Capital with hopeful eyes. John Guillory had written a sentence that could disable a robot. And, somehow, it fell upon me--a mere man--to serve as a Rosetta Stone for the language of academics.

But wasn't I an academic? The constant reminders of my debt by the kind people at Key Bank, along with my cold apartment and complete lack of nice things were more than enough proof that I should have been able to take Guillory's baroque sentence, create a properly-formatted 8-page exegesis, and sit back in academic glory as one person reads my work once before it's forgotten about forever. But I was completely stymied, and not just by the length of Guillory's sentence; heck, if you compare the first sentence of what you're reading now with the above quote from Cultural Capital, you'd find that Guillory's 47 words pale in comparison to the hefty 78 I've written--my apologies. The real problem here is that making any sense of Guillory's sentence involved about 5 deferments to a dictionary; and by the time I figured out where I was going, I had forgotten how I had gotten there. Every time I'd thought I'd solved the Great Guillory Mystery, my supposed findings turned out to be a mere mirage--and I was left shoveling academic sand in my mouth.

The thing is, this was just one sentence. And it was by no means an anomaly; Cultural Capital has hundreds of sentences that read like they were created via some crazy game of academic Mad Libs. The tragedy behind all of this is that, after finding out just what Guillory was trying to say with his work, I felt his argument was both interesting and very important--especially for academia. But I'll be damned if I couldn't find his text completely impermeable. This is by no means a promotion of anti-intellectualism or a request to "dumb down" academic work so guys and gals like me don't have to work so hard. If anything, I'm a complete intellectual snob, so much so that it interferes with my daily life; God help you if I see you reading popular fiction, watching reality TV, or drinking anything produced by the Anheuser-Busch company. But, being someone who earns most of his keep writing about topics in popular culture for an audience not limited strictly to academics, writing that dares you to make sense of it has started to become a real pet peeve of mine. And, unfortunately, this indecipherability is not limited to Cultural Captial alone.

Recently, a good friend of mine voiced this problem without me even having to initiate the complaining. He's a highly-literate guy and a full-time journalist, going back to school to pick up a degree in English Lit after getting a degree in Journalism a few years back. He, like me, ran into "The Guillory Problem," while reading an academic article on Shakespeare, and specifically stated his beef: "It's like the only people who can understand this stuff are the ones who've had hundred-thousand dollar educations. What good is this work if only a select few insiders can make use of it?" "Aha!" I said quietly to myself, so I could be the sole person to profit from this idea, "That's a great idea for a research project!" And that bring us to where we are now.

The purpose of this project is twofold: my first goal is to provide a discussion of and argument against the use of what I call academic language (seen most egregiously in works like Cultural Capital), and to discuss the implications of its use. In form, this approach to the topic also acts as an argument against the overuse of academic language; the location of this research paper on a blog, couched in an informal writing style, is my attempt to show that a hurdle of accessibility, both physical and cognitive (i.e., understanding just what the heck I’m talking about), is a not a necessary quality for the academic essay.

After my discussion of this topic, I will move on to provide an analysis of The Simpsons episode "They Saved Lisa's Brain," which features themes and issues about both intellectual elitism and accessibility. This analysis is a reaction to the "The Theory of Infantile Citizenship" chapter of Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, which analyzes The Simpsons episode "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" using the same confusing, jargon-heavy prose as Cultural Capital. I feel that Berlant's approach to this chapter is caused by the academic insecurity of writing about a "popular" subject, and that her work could have reached viewers of the show if she had addressed--or had been allowed to address--the millions of people who actually watch the show.

Books full of essays by academics for a general audience have been published about The Simpsons, such as The Simpsons and Philosophy, The Gospel According to The Simpsons, and What's Science Ever Done for Us? These books reach outside of academia to reach the people who find the show most relevant--and quite possibly more relevant than any of the other work that academics do--at least in the Humanities. This blog will serve that same purpose, and will be available to read by anyone on the Internet, rather than just being read by one person or the limited group that can access academic journals. Hopefully, with my approach to this topic, I can justify my beliefs through the function of this work--and maybe, just maybe, wheel the Trojan Horse of approachable writing through the gates of academia.

Clarity, Schmarity; Give Me Your Page-Long Sentences

When I first sat down to start researching this project--admittedly, a little bit later than I wanted--I assumed that I would find a lot of resources, or at least the faint breeze caused by heads nodding in approval. My training in linguistics made me a rabid foe of prescriptivism, which essentially is creating rules--and, very often, unnatural rules--for a language, and criticizing those who don't follow these artificially-constructed and arbitrary rules. As a descriptivist--meaning someone who observes and respects language as it exists--I'm deeply annoyed by the nonsensical rules of academic writing. Salvatore Attardo and Steven Brown's linguistic textbook, Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation describes the fight between these two factions that's nearly as violent as the Sunni-Shiite rivalry in the Middle East (pardon the hyperbole):

Prescriptivists and descriptivists disagree deeply: descriptivists seek to find the rules that govern the languages spoken by people (i.e., English, French, Chinese, Swahili, and all others), while prescriptivists, for the major part, seek to impose arbitrary rules that come from outside the language and/or seek to preserve a stage of the language that has been left behind by the evolution of the langugage itself.(6)

Veda Charrow's The Washington Times editorial "Why the Bad Grammar?" is a perfect example of the fundamental differences between prescriptivists and descriptivists, and proof why privileging one arbitrary system over another is ridiculous. The beginning of her essay--as with most prescriptivist screeds--begins with a lamentation of the loss of meaningless distinctions in a language; in Charrow's case, she's downright peeved about the evils of the singular "they" and sentences like "The new phone bill will be different than your previous bill." I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with the latter example, but I'm sure trying to figure out could only lead to madness; a search to discover why I shouldn't begin a sentence with the word "and" (after a professor marked it wrong on an essay) led me to a usage book that gave me the equivalent of, "Yeah... I wouldn't do that if I were you." So, what, exactly, is the cause of all Charrow's woe? Why, it's linguistics itself:

Linguists are trained not to make value judgments. Thus, if asked whether a non-standard variety of English is worse than standard English, we would unhesitatingly say "No." As a result of linguists' refusal to be prescriptive, non-standard usages have crept into areas where they would not have been allowed 30 years ago, and have become accepted. The effect has been to lower the bar for students and their teachers. (1)

Charrow gives no evidence as to how standard dialect is necessarily better, other than the fact that it's what she speaks and prefers. It could be that her brain actually treats language as a mathematical concept and reads double-negatives as positives, but it's more likely that she's had the privilege of speaking and writing in a learned code that a certain group values, and doesn't understand that linguistic diversity can't be policed. She ends her essay lamenting (yes, again with the lamenting) the lack of knowledge about parts of grammar: dangling modifiers, clauses, phrases, and so on. Again, she wants to speak about language in a code that people have to learn; and knowing the artificial terminology of a language isn't exactly going to improve anyone's writing. It's not like Michael Chabon stares at a finished page, furrows his brow, and then realizes, "Yes! All this page needs is two zero conditional sentences and a move to the pluperfect!" Rules of language and parts of speech aren't exactly consistent, either. Have you seen how many things can be counted as adverbs? It's insane.

Of course, surface-level prescriptivism about word usage makes up only some of the hurdles an academic writer must leap to get to their point. Still, it's important to recognize that these rules are rooted in academia, and are classist by the very fact that they originated back when a select few were educated. In his book, Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers Through Innovative Grammar Instruction, Harvard Professor Edgar J. Shuster traces the history English grammar books to the two most important titles, Robert Lowth's 1762 work, A Short Introduction to English Grammar, and Lindley Murray's 1795 work, English Grammar. These two 18th-century works--rooted in a deep, unhealthy envy of the Classical Languages and penned by sour, awful men--serve as the foundation for prescriptive grammar as we know it (Schuster 15). Schuster outlines in great detail the problem with Lowth and Murray, as well as the problems that are inherent in all believers of prescriptivism:

1. They seemed wholly unaware of the intuitive grammatical knowledge of the native speaker.
2. They believed that the best way to learn was by studying errors, memorizing definitions, and drilling.
3. They relied on definitions that did not define grammatical terms in way that were truly helpful to students.
4. They created--in grammar, usage, composition, and punctuation--rules that did not rule, rules that educated writers and speakers did not observe. (15)

Another good explanation of the problem with prescriptivism can be found in Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter's The Teaching Company lecture "The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar:"



The advanced, beastlier form of prescriptivism seen in academia--another layer of arbitrariness a writer must shuffle through, if you will--is something I couldn't find people doing much railing against, outside of a few of my peers and a smattering of articles. Frankly, it's not very surprising that my efforts to find sources arguing against the prescriptive publishing standards of academic work were less than stellar; after all, writers that hold this opinion would eventually have to send their work through gatekeepers with fundamental disagreements about the topic at hand--and the fact that non-standard voices are being suppressed is definitely part of the problem. But one article, Eugene Nida's "Sociolinguistic Implications of Academic Writing," addressed my complaints succintly, both about the clarity of academic writing, and the implicit insularity and elitism it fosters.

In his article, Nida looks at three different published academic articles and finds many common problems throughout in the practice of academic writing. And, while he didn't examine any of John Guillory's work, we can apply some of Nida's issues about academic writing to our Guillory quote, repeated again for your convenience. (And again presented in Times New Roman to preserve its stuffiness.)

The difference between the canon and the syllabus, then, is the difference between the pedagogic imaginary, with its images of cultural or countercultural totality, and the form of the list, as the instance of mass culture's social imaginary, with its simultaneous denial and manifestation of cultural heterogeneity. (37)

The most obvious quality of Guillory's work is its polysyllabic nature, or what Nida would call an "oversupply of high-level vocabulary" (479). If I had the capacity, I would translate the above quote into something that makes sense--at least to me. And Nida does exactly this in his article by showing, through his own examples, that the verbosity of academic writers is often nothing more than the thesaurus-juggling; in the following quote, he makes his point crystal clear:

A well-read person can normally figure out from the contexts the meanings of such polysyllabic terms, but this takes extra mental effort, and to find all but one of these on a single page is surely a case of verbal overloading. It would seem much more efficient to readily understandable phrases rather than depend on such rarely used derivative formations. (480)

Nida also takes issue with "left-hand extensions;" this term describes sentences where, to fully understand the meaning, a reader must retain all information until the final word (480). But "right-hand extensions," that is, sentences where a reader can "mark off meaningful segments one at a time," are also a problem for Nida, especially if a series of segments is too long and weighed down with jargon (480). The quote from Cultural Capital I keep picking on contains seven prepositional phrases, where Nida finds that five prepositional phrases in a series of segments is the limit of human comprehension. I guess, in this case, knowing the parts of speech is important, if only to measure your level of confusion.

The most biting criticism of academic writing, as well as the source of my creative drive for this project, comes during the conclusion of Nida's article, where he widens his scope from the dissection of a handful of articles to academia as a whole:

The publication of scholarly research represents a vicious circle. The researchers inevitably develop a professional dialect, and when they write, they normally have in mind the in-group who use the same dialect and who will be the ultimate judges of the validity of the findings... There seems to be no way of breaking into this circle apart from a radical shift in social sensitivity on part of publishers, editors, and scholars... Perhaps scholars should learn to write on at least two different levels: technical and semipopular. (485)

Doing a little research on Nida, I was expecting to find that he was a young academic punk back when this article was published in 1992; so it shouldn't be too shocking to hear I was more than surprised to discover he wrote "Sociolinguistic Implications of Academic Writing" while he was in his late 70s. Being a young punk myself, I began to wonder if it was just going to be me and a 94 year-old man shaking our fists in solidarity against opponents of clarity--until I was given hope by discovering Philosophy and Literature editor Denis Dutton's short-lived Bad Writing Contest. To be fair, I don't agree completely with Dutton's ideology--his snarkiness towards impermeable academic writing is much more appealing than his irritation over theory's mere presence in literature--but he does make some good points. Though he probably would scoff at my plans of dissecting a Simpsons episode.

The last year of Dutton's Bad Writing Contest is worth examining, if only to see the reaction it received--which will explain why the contest was so short-lived. Dutton's 1999 Wall Street Journal article "Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate," attacked fellow academic Judith Butler for a baffling sentence that appeared in the journal Diacritics. Dutton's take on this excerpt?

To ask what [this sentence] means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.

Dutton's approach here might have been somewhat unprofessional, but his point about being "in the presence of a great and deep mind" holds some truth. Academics are forced to learn an ultra-prescriptive style of writing that is often unintelligible to those without the training to decipher it; and, by sticking to these prescriptive constraints, an academic can "show off" how well they can preform within them. Yet Judith Butler's response to Dutton's award addressed nothing but his conservative ideology, avoiding the problem of the intelligibility of her work (at least, in the instance Dutton cited). Her response?

No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.(1)

A large point I believe Butler is missing is the idea of accessibility; it's fine to find new ways of looking at a familiar world, but how much use can you be when your work is limited to yourself and a small social circle? A partial answer to this can be found in Richard Byrne's Chronicle of Higher Education article, "How Can the Humanites Prove Their Worth?" In it, Byrne questions the relevancy of the humanities by shedding light on the problem of academic literacy. Here, he quotes the comments of Michael Holquist, the MLA's 2007 President, at that year's December meeting:

Mr. Holquist, in his Presidential address, argued that people's unease with language is a key reason that the work of the humanities is so difficult to communicate. Language is as essential to being human as lungs are, Mr. Holquist argued, and yet literacy is "unnatural." That notion is so powerful, he noted, that "in a world where truth is assumed to be the guarantor of reality, awareness that something so central to our being is invented makes most people uneasy.(1)

This unease over academic language is more than just an issue of alienation; it also has far-reaching social implications. In "Sociolinguistic Implications of Academic Writing," Eugene Nida makes it clear that the purpose of his article is more than just the promotion of clarity; his primary concern lies with the people being shut out by the complexity of academic writing:

The concern of this article is the academic language of most technical journals, which are crucial for thousands of graduate students, especially in the developing countries of the world... Almost 90 percent of scientific publications come out first in English, but many people who need such information have only limited competence in the English language. (477)

The issue of academic writing shutting out the third world in both form in process is also addressed by A. Suresh Canagarajah's A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Canagarajah's main argument in this text is inspired by his own experience as a writer in the third world; his problems were not those of the American academic, but rather those of a writer trying to survive in a climate of severe political strife. Instead of putting up with the minor annoyances of not being able to track down a library book or forgetting to save a file, Canagarajah had to spend most of his day finding both writing supplies and food, tolerating long stretches of time without electricity, and avoiding gunfire. The introduction of A Geopolitics of Academic Writing puts his own experience in a larger perspective:

Academic writing holds a central place in the process of constructing, disseminating, and legitimizing knowledge; however, for discursive and material reasons, Third World scholars experience exclusion from academic publishing and communication...(6)

Though I'm not primarily concerned with the third world as Canagarajah is, his argument about exclusion ties into my own feelings on academic language, that, for the sake of clarity and conclusiveness, I'll try to summarize as best I can with the points below.

• Academic language requires two layers of arbitrary prescriptivism: "correct" grammar and a kind of academic prescriptivism that encourages the use of jargon, overly-long sentences, and a syntax that disrupts the flow of meaning. These requirements are rooted in both racism and classism due to their history and inception.


• Given the above requirements, the main audience for academic writing is people who speak English as their first language and have the resources available to acquire the level of formal knowledge necessary to understand this writing. Obviously, this shuts out a large group of people from the knowledge produced by academics.


• The work of the academic--especially in the humanities--is becoming increasingly irrelevant as the amount of people who can understand it remains so limited.

Now that my argument is clear, I'll now take these main point and apply them to The Simpsons episode "They Saved Lisa's Brain." I will also focus on the elitism and inclusiveness caused by the gatekeepers and holder of knowledge, drawing upon both John Guillory's Cultural Capital and Eugene Nida's belief that academic language "may also serve as a symbol of social solidarity and a sign of belonging... Such language can, however, become a form of elitism and a way in which insecure people try to beuild status" (478). Nida's quote is something that factors heavily into "They Saved Lisa's Brain;" and, in my general agreement with Nida, my analysis will be approachable and intelligible to even those without the ability to get through a chapter of Cultural Capital without having a stroke.

Making Litter Out of Literati: Elitism in "They Saved Lisa's Brain"

The staff of The Simpsons are no strangers to academia; a good portion of the show's writers passed through the ivy-covered gates of Harvard, a school known for academic prestige even by people who know very little about college; for most, the mere mention of Harvard bring to mind one of the best schools in the country, much like how namedropping Kent State initially conjures up images of national guard gunfire. Comedy nerds like me recognize Harvard mainly for its production of some of the smartest humor around, both with the publication of The Harvard Lampoon and the dissemination of hilarious graduates who move on to produce great comedy for many different outlets.

[Interesting note: Simpsons creator Matt Groening's second television show, Futurama, had four PhDs on its writing staff.]

Matt Selman, the writer of "They Saved Lisa's Brain," was not a Harvard student, but he did graduate from The University of Pennsylvania, a prestigious private college in the Ivy League. Nearly all of the show's writers have been academics at an Ivy League school at some point or another; this shared nerdy-ness brings a lot to the character of Lisa Simpson, the middle child of The Simpson family. An eight-year old academic wise beyond her years, Lisa faces alienation for her brainy, liberal ways--especially from her family. "They Saved Lisa's Brain" is both a sympathetic and critical examination of the academic and their purpose in this world; this examination is undoubtedly informed by the writers' experiences both in academia and as academics.

The episode opens with The Simpsons (including Lisa) sitting in front of their living room television, watching low-brow entertainment; a cookie-cutter sitcom, the aptly-named Ethnic Mismatch Comedy #644, is cancelled in the middle of an episode, leaving the network to air an encore presentation of Princess Di's funeral. While they're seemingly content to watch anything that airs (with Lisa sitting bored on the end of the couch), one thing inspires the family to pry their butts from the firm grasp of the couch: a commercial promoting a pudding-company-sponsored contest in downtown Springfield, where a trip to Hawaii is up for grabs to whoever makes the biggest jackass out of themselves.

The Simpsons head downtown with Lisa in tow, clearly despondent over the very premise of the contest. Grumpily shes sits with her mother and laments this celebration of jackassery as her brother and father both trade in their dignity for a chance to win a free vacation: Bart boasts that he'll swallow anything the audience throws as him, while Homer burns himself terribly as he tries to ignite the popcorn kernels stuck to his clothes like so many sequins. The contest ends in disaster after the townspeople discover it's a sham; when one of the judges announces himself as the winner (for having to be seen with the townsfolk), the people of Springfield riot, as they're typically inclined to do. Lisa, unable to stop the needless violence and destruction, finds an outlet to voice her lamentation: print.

CLIP 1

She may not have access to academic journals, but as an academic Lisa still chooses print as the method to voice her disapproval and judgment of the town and their lowbrow ways. Couching her argument in the terms of a gentle "prodding," she obviously wants her work to be read and seen by people outside of her limited social circle. But the reaction to the very publication of Lisa's letter shows evidence of her irrelevancy, and the irrelevancy of the medium itself to the non-academic:

CLIP 2

As Lisa travels through Springfield, desperately looking for someone who's read her editorial, she's given a tour of her own irrelevancy; her father only wants to look at pictures, her neighbor doesn't want to hear dissenting opinions, the police chief plans to use Lisa's writing to house-train his dog (and son), and the local pastor identifies knowledge that Lisa privileges as something that should be destroyed. Her mistake, of course, was to expect that the people she wanted to address would meet her on her own terms; because of this, Lisa's work is being ignored and literally pooped on. For the people of Springfield, television, not print, is the lingua franca. Yet Lisa chooses to put out her message in the way that she privileges and not in the way it could be most easily understood by a large audience.

However, some people in Springfield do manage to read Lisa's editorial; they soon contact her through a paper airplane-delivered note containing information about a clandestine meeting where people like her are appreciated. The correspondence ends with a mysterious "Tell no one. And bring a dessert." Lisa does exactly this, and, pie in hand, soon finds herself at a MENSA meeting. She soon meets the group (all regular members of The Simpsons cast) and finds out just what smart people like her do when they gather together:

CLIP 3

Lisa soon abandons her mission of social action via print for the comforts of a new social circle that see eye-to-eye with her intellectually. From the beginning, their elitism is apparent; Lindsey Naegle praises Lisa's editorial as "delightfully condescending," while the group immediately starts participating in intellectual masturbation by trading palindromes with one another--and Lisa's prowess in this area is what finally seals the deal. After a brief discussion about library standards, it's easy to see that the group is fully embracing their irrelevancy to the general public at large. For the Springfield intellectuals, only the "Dennis Miller ratio" matters.

When Lisa returns home, elated by her new social relationships, she's once again confronted with her own irrelevancy with the "normals" that make up her own family. In this brief moment, the writers again point out--somewhat brutally--that television is the most relevant medium for the non-academic.

CLIP 4

Homer's complete lack of compassion drives Lisa deeper into her insular group, which further embraces its irrelevancy by dressing in full Renaissance regalia for a day trip to the Springfield Park. Marked as outsiders in both garb and speech, the MENSA crew finds it impossible to acquire the gazebo they reserved when forced to negotiate with people outside of their circle:

CLIP 5

This call to action for gazebo reservation reform--a slightly self-centered action, given the group's constant whining about widespread illiteracy--ends with Springfield's mayor ditching town to avoid yet another scandal; this sudden change of events leaves the town chapter of MENSA in charge after it's discovered that the town charter (fittingly, they have a speed-reading contest to see who can finish it first) states, "Should the mayor abdicate, a council of learned citizens shall rule in his stead." The group decides that they're the best team for the job, and begin their reign by capitalizing on the power of their preferred medium, print.

CLIP 6

Even though the MENSA member have finally received relevance and attention from the outside world, they still refuse to see how their particular nature and ways may be confusing or impermeable to anyone outside of their exclusive social circle. A town meeting with the MENSA folks reveals a complete ignorance of the interests, cares, and knowledge of those outside the group:

CLIP 7

Principal Skinner's invention of "metric time" here is especially telling; just like with the case of ultra-prescriptive writing in academia, he thinks he's improved a system by placing unintelligible (to everyone but him, anyway) and arbitrary constraints that require a lot of effort both to learn and to understand. And with Lindsay Naegle and Dr. Hibbert's agreement on the type of shadow puppet theatre they plan on building, it's plain to see that they are willfully ignorant to how much their work will benefit anyone but themselves. Lisa's change from the beginning of the episode is clear at this point; she no longer cares if the people of Springfield better themselves by their own actions. Instead, the non-elite must adapt themselves to the unfamiliar and often intolerable ways of the elite if they don't want to be judged.

The following scene at the Springfield "state of the city" meeting shows this elitist attitude in action as the MENSA members detail the new, strange regulations they want the non-elite to live by. As she witnesses the townspeople's reaction, Lisa's original spirit of social change slowly returns:

CLIP 8

The townspeople voice their disapproval by--in the traditional Springfieldian way--rioting and attempting to pull apart the gazebo with the MENSA members still trapped inside. Lisa is nearly crushed, but she's saved at the last second by the unexpected appearance of Stephen Hawking, who traveled to Springfield just to find out what a town run by intellectuals was actually like. His reaction, obviously, is one of disappointment.

CLIP 9

Hawking's message of "everyone having a different vision of the perfect world" can be seen as a description of the split between academics and non-academics, seen both in "They Saved Lisa's Brain," and in the real world. In the episode, Springfield's MENSA chapter basked in their irrelevance and elitism, and even pulled the socially-progressive Lisa Simpson into their self-serving cause.

Lisa was initially left voiceless by her reliance on print to distribute her message, but, as she discovered an insular group of like-minded individuals, she was given a voice; albeit, one that served the needs and occasional pissing contests of her academic circle. When the group was eventually given relevance to the public at large, at no point did they try to make their message understandable or relateable to those outside of their circle; instead, they just assumed that everyone else would adapt to their unnatural ways.

To me, "They Saved Lisa's Brain" is a great allegory for the problems I've tried to address in this project: namely, the use of academic language, the implications of academic language, and the relevance of academia to the public at large. In fact, this episode has been on my mind since started mulling over the topic at the beginning of this semester. Rather than just presenting a straw man group of intellectuals to tear down, the writers of The Simpsons (intellectuals themselves) have produced a slightly-exaggerated but tranchant fable about the flaws of academia. The constraints of academic writing are personally just as confusing, needless, and irritating as the move to metric time would be; and through both my argument and analysis, I hope I've shown that the dry, confusing, and self-serving qualities of academic writing are not essential for the production of something meaningful to those both inside and outside academia.

---

Works Cited

Attardo, Salvatore and Steven Brown. Understanding Language Structure, Interaction, and Variation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Butler, Judith. "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back." The New York Times 20 March 1999. 11 December 2008. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE5D61531F933A15750C0A96F958260>.

Byrne, Richard. "How Can the Humanities Prove Their Worth?" The Chronicle of Higher Education 54.18 (2008).

Canagarajah, A. S. A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.

Charrow, Veda. "Why the Bad Grammar?" The Washington Times 15 December 2004. 11 December 2008. <http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/dec/15/20041215-085728-5559r/>.

Dutton, Denis. "Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate." The Wall Street Journal 5 February 1999. 11 December 2008. <http://www.denisdutton.com/language_crimes.htm>.

Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Nida, Eugene. "Sociolinguistic Implications of Academic Writing." Language in Society 21.3 (1992): 477-485.

Schuster, Edgar H. Breaking the Rules: Liberating Writers Through Innovative Grammar Instruction. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003.

"They Saved Lisa's Brain." The Simpsons. Fox. 9 May 1999.