As a favor to someone I adore, I agreed to edit an essay written by an academic who shall, for my purposes, remain nameless. I'm sure this person's points must be valid or perhaps even brilliant, but I can't be certain because reading the text is like slogging through mud with 20-lb. weights wrapped around my ankles while someone bangs on my head with a hammer. In fact, it sounds a lot like this essay which, it turns out, is "completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodern Generator" using the Dada Engine, a system used to generate "random text from recursive grammars."
I don't know what any of that actually means, but what it means to me is that you have to go to a lot of trouble to write in a way that nobody can bloody understand. It would be so much easier on both writer and reader--don't you think?--to keep it simple. I'm not advocating "dumbing down," mind you. I'm just saying.
This reminds me of a story my brother told on our family message board when one of the threads was getting too convoluted (he just wanted to talk about shoes, but people were insisting on an involved discussion about someone's thesis topic). In the sixth grade, his teacher taught the class this familiar song:
Show me the way to go home
I'm tired and I wanna go to bed
I had a little drink about an hour ago
And it went right to my head.
She also taught them this version:
Indicate the way to my habitual abode
I'm fatigued and I want to retire
I had a little drink about an hour ago
And it went right to my CE-RE-BEL-LUM
I can only hope that she did this as a lesson in effective communication, rather than as a song for sixth grade truants to sing as they sipped beer behind the bleachers on the upper field. But you never know.
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