# Learn To Write Badly



## Earion (Jul 17, 2013)

Prospective entrants to this year’s Incomprehensibility Prize will be cheered by the arrival of a new handbook dedicated to their art. Michael Billig’s _Learn To Write Badly: How to succeed in the social sciences_ (Cambridge University Press, £14.99) is an indispensable guide to the correct usage of terms including “descriptivization”, “re-ethnification” and “ideational metafunction”. Mr Billig is particularly enlightening about the “nominalization” or “nouniness” of modern academia, informing us that “academic writing contains almost double the ratio of nouns to verbs than do ... fictional writing and conversations”.

A section on acronyms looks at the way in which these bastions of bafflement have infiltrated everyday language, or the CLF (“communal lexical field”). The author provides useful lips on all the major disciplines of incomprehensibility, including the formulation of compound nouns, the employment of passive constructions and the wanton “name-dropping” of complex technical or philosophical terms.

Mr Billig, a self-confessed social scientist, reserves his umbrage for his academic peers: “I am an insider ... and I am publicly criticizing my fellows for their way of writing”. The book is nonetheless recommended reading for budding obfuscators from all professions. Candidates are advised to act quickly before the elders in the Basement Labyrinth ban it on grounds of lucidity.

TLS June 28, 2013


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