Writing Is a Trade

In a Shoe cartoon strip long ago, the uncle bird comes in the front door with a briefcase overflowing with paper and says to the nephew bird, "I'm exhausted, but I've got to work. I've got to get this report out by tomorrow morning." Next panel: "I'll be up until 3:00 writing it." Last panel, picturing the nephew with a horrified look on his face: "You mean homework is forever?!"

Yes, dear, homework is forever. A lot of it is writing.

Outsiders have been complaining for a long time about how economic and sociological and business and bureaucratic writing gets written (Williamson 1947). I'm an economist by training, a historian by avocation, a professor of English by late-life passion. People in all fields write. Unlike professors of English, though, only a few economists and historians have written about the craft of writing or taught it to their students. As a result, the standard of economic and historical writing has declined steadily. For example, nowadays even pretty good writers of economics and history and, yes, English use locutions like the academic "as we will see," the newspaper version being "more on that later," pointlessly anticipating in a manner you never see in Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) or Lord Acton (1834–1902), or even John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) or A. J. P. Taylor (1906–90). The economist Walter Salant did his part in an essay published in 1969. In 1978 J. K. Galbraith wrote a piece called "Writing, Typing and Economics." He was referring to the novelist Ernest Hemingway's crack about the Beat Movement novelist Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing: that's typing." A lot of writing in economics, history, business, government service, the military, and on and on isn't even very good typing.

No one tells the beginner in a craft with a lot of writing how important it is to improve it. The researchers at the US Department of Agriculture, surprisingly, do care about writing. It's a tradition in the department. So do some Federal Reserve banks. Private companies do a lot of business by writing, and their CEOs often claim to care how it's done. On the other hand, presentations in business, and now too in academic life, are dominated by the worst of PowerPoint. Academics of course must write, feverishly, if they are to get tenure and the respect of their colleagues. But many of them do so with a trowel. In most colleges the undergraduates are taught nothing about writing after the compulsory first-year course in composition, which they try to forget. The graduate students do not get even that. The master carpenter turns her back on the apprentice, concealing the tricks of the trade, such as how to cut a board without splintering the back of the cut.

The big secret is that good writing pays well and bad writing pays badly. Rotten writing causes more papers and reports to fail than do rotten statistics or rotten research. You have to be read to be listened to. Bad writing is not read, even by professors or bosses paid to read it. Can you imagine actually reading the worst report or term paper you've ever written? Your sainted mother herself wouldn't.

A couple of trowel-writing professors of economics attacked the article version of the present book by claiming that actually obscurity pays off. Well, suppose it does. Suppose I'm wrong that bad writing pays badly. So what? Being bad is bad. The sainted mother I mentioned told you to be good, period. Being clear — or, to use the term of art, "readable"— is an ethical matter beyond mere profitmaking prudence (McCloskey 1992).

Writing Is Thinking

Another reply to instruction such as what's offered here is "That's just a matter of style. After all, only content matters." Students will sometimes complain about bad grades earned for writing badly, arguing that they had the content right or that they meant to say the right thing (people who complain about grades speak in italics). Your boss probably won't tell you outright that she thinks you're an idiot on account of the shocking illiteracy of the last report you turned in. But you'll get the point soon enough, with a pink slip or a lack of promotion. And anyway you want to do a good job, for your personal and professional self-respect. I know you do.

The influence of mere style is greater than you might think. Ideas are not merely "conveyed" or "communicated," as though through the pneumatic tube at the drive-in bank. In communication studies we call "conveying information" the "conduit metaphor," which is not meant as a compliment. Any idea changes, sometimes radically, in its expression and in its reception. The history of ideas has made many wide turns caused by "mere" lucidity and elegance of expression. Galileo's Dialogo of 1632 persuaded people that the earth went around the sun, but not merely because it was a Copernican tract (there were others) or because it contained new evidence (though it did). It was persuasive in good part because it was a masterpiece of Italian prose in an era in which most scientific writing was in scholarly Latin. Poincaré's good French and Einstein's good German early in the twentieth century were no small contributors to their influence on mathematics and physics. John Maynard Keynes (rhymes with "brains") hypnotized three generations of economists and politicians with his graceful fluency in English. Keynes is acknowledged as the best writer that economics has had. Yet look at...