Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword

Author:Helen Sword [Sword, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press

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SPOTLIGHT ON STYLE

MARJORIE GARBER

Shibboleth thus came to mean a word used as a test for detecting foreigners and also, by extension, a catchword used by a party or sect to identify members and exclude outsiders. In this sense academic jargon itself functions as a kind of shibboleth.… Jargon is any kind of language that has been overused and now substitutes for thought, a mere container for thinking, a verbal gesture rather than an idea, whether highly technical or highly banal.… Jargon marks the place where thinking has been. It becomes a kind of macro, to use a computer term: a way of storing a complicated sequence of thinking operations under a unique name.

In Academic Instincts, a study of academic versus journalistic discourse, literary critic and cultural theorist Marjorie Garber offers a nuanced and largely sympathetic analysis of scholarly jargon. She echoes Aristotle’s advice that poets should not balk from using “unusual words” and notes that “a difficult text may be worth the trouble of deciphering.” For her, the question at stake is not how to avoid jargon altogether, but “how to keep language at once precise and rich.”

Garber’s discussion of jargon models the judicious use of jargon. Describing jargon as a shibboleth, she defines a resonant historical term even while appropriating it for her own purposes: any reader previously unfamiliar with the concept has just acquired a new vocabulary word, a new nugget of knowledge, as well as a new way of understanding the cultural complexities of jargon. Next, she uses concrete images (container, gesture) to explain the abstract workings of jargon. Finally, she offers a compelling metaphor (“jargon is like a computer macro”) that carefully incorporates a clear, precise definition of the specialist word macro. Her language is indeed “at once precise and rich,” studded with anecdotes, allusions, examples, quotations, figurative language, and subtle humor.

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