Consider these memorable opening lines: "Call me Ishmael"; "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"; "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."

Now ponder this grabber, the first sentence of an academic tome about filmmaking: "The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination; thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that, if it is unwilling to betray its object; while the most austere films necessarily draw their energy from the attempt to repress their own excess."

Hooked yet?

This sentence won first place in a bad writing contest sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. Reading this passage, observes the journal's editor Denis Dutton, "is like swimming through cold porridge." Dutton, as the porridge expert Goldilocks put it, gets it "just right."

Each year the Bad Writing Contest identifies the ugliest, most convoluted passages from articles published in scholarly journals and then heaps obloquy on them for obscurity, obfuscation, obliquity, obstruction and general "ob"ness.

Why is so much academic writing so bad? To answer that question in academese, "its textual deregeneration consequences from a multi-causal, heteroglossic modality."

In plain English, academic writing is often terrible because it's loaded with jargon, assumes that incomprehensibility equals profundity and puffs forth from windbags who have nothing to say.

To wit, here's an excerpt from the second-place winner: "If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the now-all-but-unreadable DNA of a fast deindustrializing Detroit..." Talk about all-but-unreadable!

And the third-place winner should be laundered with extra-strength de"turgid": "The lure of imaginary totality is momentarily frozen before the dialectic of desire hastens on within symbolic chains."

My nomination for fourth place is this sentence: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure."

They do go on and on. These academic emperors have no close.

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to WordGuy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, California, 90254.

Photo credit: kkppwoshizhu at Pixabay