> http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s2004031.htm
>
> PM - Monday, 13 August , 2007 18:34:00
> Reporter: Mark Colvin
>
> MARK COLVIN: "The fight against bad English is not frivolous", said
> George Orwell, who argued that, "the slovenliness of our language
> makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts". These days one of
> the strongest proponents of Orwell's argument that sloppy writing
> breeds sloppy thinking is a man called Denis Dutton.
>
> A professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New
> Zealand, Denis Dutton is also editor of the website Arts and Letters
> Daily, and for some years he ran an extremely successful annual Bad
> Writing contest for turgid prose from around the world.
>
> Denis Dutton is in Sydney for tonight's CIS Big Ideas forum, and I
> asked him today about his campaign against bad writing.
>
> DENIS DUTTON: I was finally so sick of the awful writing that was
> coming out English departments in particular in the 1990s that I
> decided to use the Internet to solicit entries in a bad writing
> contest. And the rules were that it had to be published writing, that
> it had to be published by a university press or a reputable publisher.
>
> It couldn't be a translation from another language into English, it
> had to have been written originally in English, and I think above all,
> and most important, no parodies were allowed, because where ... self-
> parody is so completely prevalent, so you can't actually allow
> parodies.
>
> MARK COLVIN: Did a lot of people enter?
>
> DENIS DUTTON: Oh yes.
>
> MARK COLVIN: Obviously, they weren't entering their own work.
>
> DENIS DUTTON: No, well no one was entering their own work. I mean, one
> of the things about it is I think this particular contest hurt very
> badly a lot of people academically, because academics of the sort of
> pretentious self-important stripe that I was targeting in the Bad
> Writing Contest were people who above all, take themselves very
> seriously.
>
> If you criticise them, from any kind of a commonsensical point of
> view, or you know, an establishment point of view, they love it. They
> want to be excoriated by what they consider to be the "establishment",
> although they of course, they're the academic establishment
> themselves.
>
> The one thing they can't stand is to be laughed at, and I think the
> Bad Writing Contest, by making a laughing-stock of so many people, so
> many well-known academics all over the Internet and in the New York
> Times and the BBC and everyone who covered it, it did its job.
>
> MARK COLVIN: Can you recall any particular examples, winners of your
> Bad Writing Contest?
>
> DENIS DUTTON: Well, I was just looking over some papers here. I should
> say the particular quotation which is only a single sentence, the one
> that got it going in my mind, I was sitting, you know, I think in my
> easy chair at home and I picked up a book called The End of Education:
> Toward Posthumanism, written by an English professor, and this was the
> first sentence in the book: "This book was instigated by the Harvard
> core curriculum report in 1978 and was intended to respond to what I
> took to be an ominous educational reform initiative, that without
> naming it would delegitimate the decisive, if spontaneous, disclosure
> of the complicity of liberal American institutions of higher learning
> with the state's brutal conduct of the war in Vietnam and the
> consequent call for opening the university to meet the demands by
> hitherto marginalised constituencies of American society for
> enfranchisement".
>
> MARK COLVIN: That's a sentence.
>
> DENIS DUTTON: That's a sentence, and it's written by an English
> professor whose job must be to teach people how to write. And it can't
> be inadvertent because it's the first sentence in his book. And it was
> at that point that I thought, "Well, there should be a contest that
> actually puts altogether the very worst examples".
>
> One of the more famous examples was one written by Professor Judith
> Butler of the University of California, Berkeley in the journal
> Diacritics. Now, she is a professor of rhetoric.
>
> Anyway here's ... here is the sentence from Professor Butler: "The move
> from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
> structure social relations in relatively homologous ways, to a view of
> hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
> convergence, and the rearticulation, brought the question of
> temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a
> form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as
> theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent
> possibility of structure, inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony,
> as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the
> rearticulation of power".
>
> MARK COLVIN: Enough. My eyes are crossing.
>
> DENIS DUTTON: Well you know, it's interesting because you see when you
> read something like that, that the point is not communication at all.
> The point is that you are to fall on your knees before her and bow
> because she is such an elevated person.
>
> MARK COLVIN: But, I was going to ask you, if you understood some of
> what she was saying there - I don't even know what Althusserian means
> - but if you do understand it, is there an excuse for it?
>
> DENIS DUTTON: Well, that was quite interesting because when that came
> out on a number of email lists, various professors and scholars
> started arguing about it. And quite a few of them said, "Oh, this is
> ridiculous. Just because she is writing something difficult and
> technical doesn't mean it's clear. I mean, this is what it means".
>
> And that person would ... but someone else would come and, "No, wait a
> minute, it can't mean that". And the arguments, the endless arguments
> about what it actually did mean from her sympathisers told the whole
> tale.
>
> MARK COLVIN: Academia is not the only area in which the language is
> being beaten around, prostituted, whatever you want to call it. The
> battle is hardly won is it? Even though you've given up your bad
> writing contest.
>
> DENIS DUTTON: Well, I mean we just gave it up because it was too much
> work and it seems the point had been made, though people still write
> me and wish that I would reinstitute it. But, oh I don't know, there's
> other fish to fry.
>
> You know, I'm not against hard subjects, which require difficult
> writing. Kant, a philosopher, whom I greatly respect and have spent
> much of my life studying Kant is a very difficult philosopher to read.
> And Aristotle is not always easy. Wittgenstein is hard.
>
> But these thinkers are hard because they're working at the very limits
> of what they can understand, and they're trying to make it clear. It's
> an honest attempt. What gets me about so much of the poststructuralist
> jargon is the fundamental dishonesty, the pretentiousness, the idea
> that we are writing in such a style that we are the deep thinkers of
> the age. Well, rubbish.
>
> MARK COLVIN: Professor Denis Dutton, who among other things, is the
> editor of the remarkable website Arts and Letters Daily.