Welcome! On Writing

Welcome to our blog! This will be our irregularly updated gathering place of news, promotions, and whatever piques our interest in the realms of language, publishing, and writing throughout the ages. This first blog post, however, will serve to introduce Verbi Gratia and to illustrate why our services are relevant at the intersection of academia, the cultural sector, and communication with the general public.

Why is Verbi Gratia ‘useful’ or even ‘necessary’? If you have made it to his blog, it is likely that you already have an inkling: you may require a proofreader, (developmental) editor, translator, or ghost-writer. You believe you need one because you care about the way you express yourself and thus present yourself and your ideas to the world. You might be an (aspiring) academic who needs to finesse their paper ahead of peer-review or publication, you may have a lively imagination and beautiful stories to tell but struggle to transfer those notions onto the page, you could simply be a person who believes firmly in ‘getting things right’. These individual considerations, however, have much wider implications.

For instance, scholars often lament the infamous ‘publish or perish’ culture in academia, where quantity often outdoes quality when it comes to divvying up increasingly rare positions (whether temporary or, that fabled beast, permanent) or funding. As a result of the pressure to publish as many (and, therefore, often short) articles as possible, academics, often without being aware of it, gradually and insidiously develop an opaque, jargon-laden lingo.

As Michael Billig (2013) shows in his witty book Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, such articles would be infinitely more readable had they only been written in simpler language, without the curious preponderance of noun-based terminology that serves to obfuscate or exaggerate what authors are saying, not to mention to promote the work of these authors. In the current situation, however, it is more advantageous to scholars to write quickly in compressed but faulty sentences and to publish as much as they can as fast as they can.

Similarly, Hieke Huistra (2019), historian of science and medicine at the University of Utrecht, critiques the seemingly laudable plan of the Dutch Research Council (NWO: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) – the principal funding body in the Netherlands – that all scholarship carried out and published in the Netherlands, and as such financed indirectly by the Dutch tax-payer, should be available in Open Access. In her view, Plan S, as the scheme is known, will not improve the tax-payers’ access to knowledge since specialized articles often are written in the aforementioned impenetrable style of academic publications: the general reader may be able to find and access publications in her of his area of interest, but that still is a far-cry away from being able to comprehend them.

Huistra’s objections to Plan S follow close on the heels of the official response of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen). In their position paper (KNAW 2019), the KNAW outline several ways in which the sudden shift to Open Access may prove to be counterproductive and might even hurt academics’ chances of building a career. The KNAW advises the NWO that it would prefer a ‘national archive along the lines of arXiv in which all Dutch scholars place their preprints or publications’ (original emphasis). Such a platform would undoubtedly democratize access to scholarship, but do little to enhance its readability.

Huistra’s suggestion for the NWO? Rather than investing in venues for Open Access publication, a free library card for every Dutch citizen. A precious and transparent commodity indeed. However, like Plan S it will improve access but not readability. Perhaps it would be better if funding bodies such as the NWO provided financial support to those who seek to write with clarity and precision. Mutatis mutandis, this naturally holds for many other institutions at home and abroad.

Until that day, we are here to help!

References

Billig, M. (2013). Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huistra, H. (2019). ‘In wetenschapsliteratuur telt kwantiteit zwaarder dan kwaliteit,’ Trouw 16 February 2019 (https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/in-wetenschapsliteratuur-telt-kwantiteit-zwaarder-dan-kwaliteit~b6e69d23/, last accessed 4 august 2020).

KNAW (2019). ‘Academy Response to Plan S’ (https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/news/academy-response-to-plan-s, 5 February 2019, last accessed 4 August 2020), webpage with associated download.