Sly Like a Fox: The Line Between Clarity and Confusion

Back in the days of yore, my history teacher lead my class through the hallways of my high school to the mezzanine overlooking the cafeteria. We were then instructed to yell out to our fellow students sitting below, "WE ARE ALL INTERCONNECTED!" My teacher did not explain the purpose of this little activity, but the experience has remained with me since then (I won't tell you how long it has been, you will have to guess). So, why all this talk about interconnectedness you might ask? What does any of this have to do with being sly like a fox?

In an attempt to enhance your understanding I have provided a roughly hewn vignette....

It was a fine September day much like any other. My brother, a tall lanky fellow in his late twenties, stood just beyond his front door stoop with an eraser in one hand and a book in the other. Like many students he had employed the trick of 'highlighting in pencil' in one of his recent library books and now he needed the aid of the sun to see the faint markings in the margins so he could erase all trace of them. "Ah ha," I heard him exclaim from my spot in front of the kitchen. "Here's something interesting," he said, handing me the book. "Read from this paragraph to here," he directed, pointing to specific sections on the page. I remained in the kitchen while I read the excerpt from Robert L. Peters' book 'Getting What You Came For' The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or a Ph.D. Suddenly it all made sense. Everything was interconnected.

Well, that more or less is what happened if you eliminate my epiphany about everything making sense and my realization that everything is interconnected. It is not quite so simple. What I did read from the Peters' book (excellent read by the way, very amusing and informative for anyone looking into pursuing higher levels of education), in his section on Advice on Writing Clearly, was a description of one reason why academic writing can at times be so confusing and so poorly written.

Unitelligible Management Research and Academic Prestige by J. Scott Armstrong detailed the results of an experiment performed in the 1970s that showed that despite a lecture being incomprehensible and nonsense, the audience still evaluated the lecture as intelligent and more or less understandable.

Dr. Fox was an actor who looked distinguished and sounded authoratative. He was provided with a fictitious but impressive biography and was sent to lecture about a subject on which he knew nothing. The talk, "Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education," was delivered to a total of 55 people. One hour was allowed for talk and 30 minutes for discussion. The audiences consisted on highly educated social workers, pyschologists, psychiatrists, educators, and administrators. The lecture was comprised of double talk, meaningless words, false logic, contradictory statements, irrelevant humor, and meaningless references to unrelated topics. Judging from a questionnaire administered after the talk, the audience found Dr. Fox's lecture to be clear and stimulating. None of the subjects realized that the lecture was pure nonsense. (Naftulin et al.)

Now, in his book Peters does go into more detail to state that this experiment with "Dr. Fox" has been criticized for its poor methodology and further research has shown that audiences may not always be so gullible. However, if you link to Scott Armstrong's article, Unitelligible Management Research and Academic Prestige, you will see that serious research has shown that the "Dr. Fox effect" (that clear communication is not always appreciated, and less readable articles are often viewed as more impressive) appears real enough.

I do not address this topic in an effort to aid the effort to put an end to metadiscourse, or to eliminate the many beautiful polysyllabic words that feature so prominently in my vocabularly. Rather, I am posting this information because it made me ponder... When does a text cross the line between clarity and confusion?

Peters' book addresses many common sense approaches to writing clearly. He talks about writing with the goal to communicate... avoiding "jargon filled abstruseness"... Later on, Peters makes a humourous point about jargon, stating that contrary to the defense by some academics that jargon words are essential terms, we use jargon because it sounds impressive. I agree (somewhat) with this statement, I know that I use jargon to improve the tone of my writing but I try to be conscious not to overuse it. As Applied Communicators we discuss repurposing our information for various audiences (and for some audiences.. jargon is appropriate). Our goal is always to communicate. But is our goal always to communicate to the lay audience? I tend to think not. (However, one should hope that our writing, regardless of the inclusion of jargon, is clear enough that most people can understand it)

In an effort to find the full transcript of the Dr. Fox lecture, I came across some interesting articles regarding the Sokal hoax, where the Dr. Fox effect (jargon filled abstruseness... my new favourite term) was extremely evident. In the article, A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies, Alan D. Sokal describes how, in an effort to test what he saw as "an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigour in certain precincts of the American academic humanities", he was able to publish an article that made no sense in a leading North American journal of cultural studies. Sokal's nonsense article, Trangressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantam Gravity appeared in the Spring/Summer 1996 edition of Social Text. Both are worth a read, especially Sokal's analysis of his experiment.

So, again you ask, what does any of this have to do with interconnectedness? Let me recap... There I was, standing in the kitchen minding my own business, and my brother tosses me a book. From this book I read a passage about writing clearly that sparks my interest... I search for more information on this topic and this leads me to another topic that makes me ponder the considerable social importance of effective communication. Funny thing, since I am studying communications. But my poorly supported point is, our observation of interconnectedness is hard to avoid. Even when we are standing in the kitchen... minding our own business... Similarly (because I feel the need to link my title to my overarching concept of interconnectedness), perhaps all we need to do to avoid ineffective writing or communication is to understand how clarity and confusion are interconnected. Hey, it is a stretch... but this is a blog that no one really reads or responds to so I can say whatever I feel like for the time being.

For your additional reading pleasure:
The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction