The voting machine story is just on the cusp of being mainstream. It'll take an actual example of election fraud, I fear, before the big outlets really run with it and stir up mass indignation.

Of course there is some academic writing which is difficult for a reason, if not of necessity. Derrida and Lacan come to mind (and I don't think Dutton is off the mark when it comes to Jameson) as instances of justifiable difficulty. Like zen masters smacking the reader on the head with each successive sentence, they let you know that what you think you've grasped can be taken a step further where implications will multiply. But, what they are doing is very self-reflexive. Neither of them claims a privileged perspective, and they are commited to reminding the reader of this. I'm sure that some people will dispute this perception of Lacan (including Derrida), and I welcome their comments.



Anyway, to get back to writing that is just BAD, I present a sample from "...one of the most oustanding liberal intellects of this century..." That century was the 20th and the intellect was Isaiah Berlin. It comes from his essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" and would be even more incomprehensible than it already is without some explanation. Foxes are intellectuals that operate on multiple levels, generally suspicious of the view that there IS a way things ARE. Hedgehogs relate everything to some central idea or theory, and 'know' that there is a way things are, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. And I quote: "For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle;..." and I'm a little more than half way through the sentence.



This comment is getting out of hand, but if this intrests you, please email me as I have much more to say on related subjects.

interesting John... I wouldn't have necessarily said that was a bad sentence, although admittedly I've only seen the first half. Sentence length isn't necessarily a sign of convolution or incoherence. I saw a study once of the speeches of Clinton and Bush 2, and sentence length and complexity sure made an interestin point of comparison.

here's the Clinton sentence mentioned in that article (it's called The Presidential Leadership Style of Bill Clinton by Fred Greenstein):

The people who say that if I want to go to a four-year phased-in competition model and that won't save any tax money on the deficit in the first four years, but will save huge tax money on the deficit in the next four years, miss the main point, which is that if we have a system now which begins to move health care costs down toward inflation, and therefore lowers health care as a percentage of the GNP in the years ahead, the main beneficiaries by a factor of almost two to one will be in the private sector.

Paul - First I think it is important to make a distinction btw two types of writing: rhetorical and expository. I think that in the former instance, it's very difficult to say what "bad writing" would be, perhaps only that some writing is more effective (maybe better) than other writing. In the latter, however, it's not at all hard to pin-down what "bad writing" is. To return to the Berlin example, he's trying to make explicit the relationship between Tolstoy's philosophy of history and Tolstoy's novel War and Peace - something that's subtle enough to have escaped most of Tolstoy's major critics and fellow novelists (e.g Turgenev and Flaubert). If a reader has resorted to reading a critic to get a better handle on the subtleties of War and Peace, the last thing the critic should do is confuse the issue with further niceties. If there is such a great chasm between hedgehogs and foxes why pile on appositive after appositive? Does Berlin have some sort of rhetorical point he's trying to make about history and literature? It's not really the length of the sentence that bothers me, it's the gratuitous nature of that sentence and many of the others that really pisses me off. I reading Berlin because he's writing about Tolstoy, and he can't just tell me what he thinks and why and let it go at that - and in this context I can't see any good reason for it.