Bafflegab

 

Back in 1983, when I started teaching writing, Americans frequently wrote sentences that baffled readers: a style called bafflegab.  Too many of us still do.

For example, today I was enticed by the title of an article about how I could teach better online.  But the article was so hard to grasp that I gave up.  

Here is a typical sentence of bafflegab:

Initially, ongoing survey data from 248 pre- and 47 post-program student surveys and additional summaries of course evaluations given to students within the MVCR program were analyzed for student beliefs about necessary qualities for their instructors. 

Why did that writer fail to put actions into verbs, so I could understand as quickly as I could read?  The writer preferred bafflegab, probably because it sounded impressive.  But bafflegab limits his discoveries to the elite few who have time and skill to decode them.

Why?  Is the purpose of research to “get published” and elude criticism through obscurity?  Is it true that “bafflegab pays,” as J. Scott Armstrong showed back in 1980? 

In the same source, I found other types of bafflegab:

 

Finally, design is an ongoing process.  Technologies, incoming faculty, student needs, curriculum, etc. are always changing.  The document will therefore continually need revision.  Document revision can be on a structured or unstructured time scale.  It can also be performed by any number of committee formulations.  Then the process of acceptance of any new formulation of the document must reiterate itself.

(If a camel is a horse designed by committee, imagine a horse designed by a “committee formulation”!)

Decoded, the paragraph says, "Update documents." Scarcely a discovery.

To heal those rapid-fire sentences, writing teachers tell us to “vary sentence structures.”  But arbitrary variation solves little.  The sentences above need to be combined, not arbitrarily, but so that the each one has a word or two, early on, that repeats from the previous sentence.  And on that foundation, each sentence’s end should add its new information. 

If sentences linked ideas, and if actions appeared not in nouns but in active verbs, writers would clarify what they meant.  And the results might truly impress people. But that style requires writers who know what they mean, and writers who prefer communicating over impressing.

Most people really do want to communicate.  They will give up bafflegab if they know how.

That’s why I teach.