What Do Students Confuse “Complex Thinking/Complex Writing” with “Simple Thinking/Complex Writing”?
As writing instructors and advisors in the Anglo-Saxon world, we often talk about our dislike for elaborate writing that uses long words and complex sentences at the expense of clarity. When writers have English as an additional language, their belief that serious writing must be complex and dense might partly stem from the assumption that the norms of their first language will be mirrored in the norms of English writing. Spanish has been documented as a language where complexity of expression is seen as respectful to the writer, but in my experience, the same is true of most Romance languages, as well as Slavonic languages. Indeed, a Scottish friend of mine was once ordered by the editor of a Hungarian journal to make his writing “a bit more foggy.”
Rhetorical and cultural differences across languages, however, may not be the only or even the most important reason why student writers use complex phrases and word choices. Other factors may be at play which have more to do with how students perceive their place in and relationship to the academic world, factors which are equally relevant regardless of their first language. Understanding these factors may help writing specialists to better support students in their writing and guide them away from unnecessary complexity and towards clarity.
When undergraduates enter university, their experience at secondary school has often not prepared them for the dense, complex, abstract texts that are set as course readings. For them as novice scholars, the forms and conventions of argumentation and analysis in the discipline may be largely unclear. The specialised vocabulary of the discipline is also likely unfamiliar: scholarly work often necessitates defining lay words in much more precise ways, or in some fields, coining new words that may appear familiar but are not. Finally, the issues that attract the interest of experienced scholars are often ones that are not yet on students’ radar. They may not understand why a reappraisal of the founding narratives of the EU is so important, why it might matter that a certain ritual or ceremony can be a lieu de memoire, or why we need to spend so much time understanding what it really means to learn something. Reading about such abstract issues may seem irrelevant to them, and thus the course readings appear pompous, pontificating, and deliberately obfuscatory. This, they are at risk of assuming, is how one writes academically: good academic writing is (to quote the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes) “an intimidating and impenetrable fog”.
To aid students in understanding the relationship between ideas and writing, it can be helpful to use a four-quadrant chart with two axes: simple/complex thinking, and simple/complex expression. The chart above is a slightly more elaborate version of the back-of-an-envelope sketch I have used for many years to help students understand these differences. Like any attempt to explain anything, it is a simplification of a complex reality.
Complex Thinking + Simple Writing
In the top left quadrant (complex thinking + simple writing) are the true geniuses, those who show us fascinating deep insights in accessible language that is readily understood. Each discipline will have its own examples.
Complex Thinking + Complex Writing
Then there are those who fall into the bottom left quadrant (complex thinking + complex writing). This quadrant includes very many scholars, but in the humanities a commonly cited exemplar is perhaps the philosopher Judith Butler. Butler’s work is widely recognised as groundbreaking and highly significant, but even experienced scholars often admit they need to read it multiple times before making sense of it.
Simple Thinking + Simple Writing
In the top right quadrant, there is simple thinking + simple writing. These texts we might encounter in primary school, or in information leaflets from the social benefits office. They don’t concern us here.
Simple Thinking + Complex Writing
Finally, in the bottom right quadrant is simple thinking + complex writing – the Calvin and Hobbes “impenetrable fog”. The important point to be grasped here is that if you are an undergraduate to whom the whole canon of knowledge and why it matters is new and unfamiliar, this category and the Judith Butler complex-thoughts-require-complex-expression quadrant are indistinguishable from each other.
Simply put, Butler famously argues that gender is not something we are but something we perform, by carrying out behaviours – ways of speaking, dressing, acting – that are associated with the gender we choose, or feel pressured into by society.
By the same token, students may be pressured by the university to perform the scholar with their writing behaviours. In courses, they are pushed to read academic texts, and simultaneously produce academic texts, the unspoken assumption being that success in writing will look like what they have been reading. In their coping strategies, what they often identify and carry out as part of their performance of scholarly behaviour is the use of long, complex sentences with big words, quite regardless of whether it makes good sense. This is precisely because when they read academic articles, what they perceive is long complex sentences with specialist vocabulary that make little sense to them.
For many undergraduates, my conversations with them suggest, to perform the scholar means to choose the word with more letters or syllables over the one with fewer (utilize instead of use; moreover instead of also), and to prefer sentence structures that suggest the writer is battling with complex ideas, rather than ones that suggest they are mastering those ideas. They don’t do this because they want to cheat or deceive; they do it because they think this is what instructors expect of them.
In the film Catch me if you can, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a young con man who becomes rich by convincing people he is an experienced pilot, teacher or member of another profession. At one point he masquerades as a surgeon. He observes an experienced surgeon providing an expert diagnosis, ending in a confirmation with his colleague, “Do you concur?” When subsequently asked for his own diagnosis of the treatment for a patient with a knee injury, he cobbles together phrases resembling what he heard the real surgeon using earlier, then brusquely asks his supposed colleague “Do you concur?” The doctor is puzzled by DiCaprio’s largely nonsensical diagnosis, and asks for clarification. In desperation, DiCaprio repeats peremptorily “do you concur?” When students enter the world of academe, like DiCaprio, they masquerade in the role of the scholar by desperately aping the style and phrases they think a scholar would use. With bravado, DiCaprio gets away with it; for students who seek not to deceive but to perform well, however, such an outcome is not desirable. More constructively, writing instructors can use the insights of the four-quadrant chart to help students move away from performing academic writing as impenetrable fog, and towards clarity of communication.
