Stodgy By Design, and the Notion of `dumbing -p’

"Your paper did not, at least in its presentation, appear to be the rigorous type of study that this journal would wish to publish."
—An anonymous reviewer of a professional paper

Let’s face it. Professional writing tends to be, well, stodgy. For years now, I’ve thought that was because professional writing had to be precise and rigorous. I turned in my first paper in graduate school, as a highly successful ex-undergraduate, only to have that paper returned to me marked in a sea of red ink. The problem with the paper was my wording had been sloppy, imprecise, and careless.

I quickly caught on to what I had done wrong, to the point of accepting blame for and being embarrassed about how imprecise I had been. That acceptance and embarrassment marked a milestone in my maturing as a professional person. That was probably the only paper I wrote in graduate school that had that flaw.

But let’s scroll ahead to the period where I joined the Software Engineering Institute as a professional staff member, after years of work as a software practitioner in the aerospace industry. And—déjà vu—something similar to the graduate school problem began happening all over again. My colleagues at the SEI paid my ideas and proposals scant attention, and when they did listen, it was only to reject them.

Concerned about this unhappy turn of events, I searched through my behavior patterns to try to figure out what I was doing wrong. I was certain it had to do with my practitioner background. Despite my five years on the faculty of Seattle University’s software engineering graduate program, I was still a practitioner at heart. Yet, I couldn’t figure out what could constitute such a turnoff to the predominantly academic SEI crowd.

Then a guest lecturer from industry came to the SEI and the audience paid him rapt attention. He was saying the same kinds of things I had been saying—that there are lessons to be learned from practitioners and industry—but they were listening to him as they had never listened to me.

After his talk, I approached him and asked his opinion of my predicament. He recognized my problem right away. He explained: "You have to speak to academics in their own language, or they simply won’t listen." He went on to say that over the years he had become fluent in that language.

As I pondered what he said, I realized it was true. I was still communicating using verbal and writing patterns developed in industry. These were not patterns my new academic colleagues were comfortable with. My writing patterns were informal, even chatty. To a community of people who avoid being informal and chatty, this was tantamount to saying, "ain’t."

Here’s the deal. There was nothing imprecise or erroneous about what I had written. Instead, the problem was that I had been informal when the world I was addressing wanted me to be formal.

This time, I learned my lesson—again—but with less conviction. I could, as a colleague once said, "play their silly game," but my heart wasn’t really in it. The problem this time wasn’t a lack of precision. It was simply a lack of formality. And that, of and by itself, didn’t seem all that problematic. I realized I could adjust to become a functioning part of their society. But except for immediate goal satisfaction, I really didn’t see the point.

More time passed. I learned to play that silly game well enough to get a couple of dozen professional papers published in some of the more respectable journals. I really didn’t enjoy that kind of writing. The stuff I did in the books I wrote, where the rules of writing style were considerably more relaxed, were much more fun to do. But still, you do what you have to do.

Now let’s scroll ahead to the present. I have just received a rejection letter on a serious paper I had sent to perhaps the leading journal of our field. There were lots of substantive comments about the paper, ones I will address in a revision before sending the paper to another journal. But there was one comment that really stuck in my craw. The comment criticized the paper for what it called "casual language." I had said things in the paper like "fodder for future efforts," and "doing yeoman work," and (to create suspense) "as you will see," and "we will see what it was…"

On one hand, I realized I had lapsed. I had reverted, to an extent, to that informal writing style that served me so well elsewhere. I had momentarily neglected the lesson I had learned those many years ago.

On the other hand, I realized I was beginning to lose patience with this sort of thing. I will be 70 years old by the time this column is published, and I no longer want to play this particular game.

Here’s the deal. There was nothing imprecise or erroneous about what I had written. Instead, the problem was that I had been informal when the world I was addressing wanted me to be formal. I had built suspense when the world I was addressing didn’t want suspense. I had used colorful words when, to be honest, the world I was addressing wanted me to use stodgy words.

What kind of impoverished society tends to stamp out color in its way of speaking? I felt ire rising. I feel it still.

As I mulled over all of this, I remembered the phrase "dumbing down." It’s a thing professionals say when they have the task of taking professional writing and changing it to appeal to a mass audience. It’s an arrogant phrase, of course. That arrogance is expressed in both "dumbing" in the sense the new audience is considered intellectually weaker than the previous audience, and "down," in that the new target audience is considered to be beneath the old.

But that phrase, I now believe, is used in another sense. It is used to address the issue of turning formal writing into the informal form more appropriate for the mass audience. After all, most in that mass audience—which is often the world of practitioners—have no use for a formal, stodgy style.

The more I thought about all of this, the more a new phrase seemed appropriate to me. A phrase that describes the process of taking informal, casual, colorful writing, and turning it into the style required by professionals. I like to think of that process as "dumbing up." By that I mean catering to the verbally impoverished society that demands formal and stodgy writing, even when doing so doesn’t add either precision or accuracy to what has been written.

Dumbing up. I like it. It still preserves some sense of the hierarchic superiority the professionals need to feel, while indicating the process of formalizing what is informal is really pretty dumb.

What did I do about the paper that used too much casual language? I asked my co-authors their advice. It was this: "We see nothing wrong with the way you have written what you have written, in fact we like it. But we think you’d better change it in case the reviewers at the next journal feel the same way."

And so I did. I guess I’m still not too old to play that silly game.