The art of bad writing

In a recent article for Prospect, Michael Billig launched an attack on the academic cult of jargon and obscure writing. Since the publication of Orwell’s seminal 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” the principles of good writing have been the subject of much debate. For Orwell, clarity was not simply a matter of “aesthetic enthusiasm” but a political imperative. Bad writing, he argued, was incompatible with good thinking. On the other side of the debate have been thinkers, such as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who argue that since language is normative, it is only in defamiliarising everyday terms and adopting innovative turns of phrase that we are able to cast off routine assumptions and think anew.

To reignite debate on style versus content, here is a selection of Prospect articles on the fine art of bad writing:

1. Words and Things: Andrew Marr looks back at Orwell’s essay on prose puritanism, considering how our language holds up 50 years on. He finds our political writing in good health—thanks, in part, to Orwell’s caveats. Pity about the prose of corporate culture, though.

2. Sense and nonsense: Kant, Locke, Aristotle—plenty of philosophers have been terrible writers, says Bryan Magee. But we should never mistake obscurity for profundity...

3. Cultural notebook: Sam Leith on “business bullshit” and the closed ecosystem of cultural theory.

4.The genius of jargon: In Marjorie Garber's book Academic Instincts she rode to the defence of specialised academic language. Was she right? asks Robert S Boynton