Letting my style run free (feedback please).

This shirt has nothing to do with the topic!

I have been considering something, and in considering that consideration I have come to the conclusive conclusion that my writing style may benefit from the removing of the mind-forged manacles of academia.

Whenever I sit at a keyboard, the ghost of the fantastic Peter Jones delivering the delicious dialogue of Douglas Adams takes over my mind, and tries to force my writing style. Half a decade of academic training has taught me to resist: “No, thou shalt not write that way”, my rational soul cries, but now I have had a rethink. I have decided that the little Peter/Douglas gremlin sitting in my head should be given free reign over my fingers, allowing the natural playfulness that is embedded in my child-like personality, and my utterances, to embed itself within my prose.

This does not mean that I will not be academic. The first role of academic writing, as far as I am concerned, is to get often nuanced and complex points across to the audience, and as a Humanist (as in Scholar of the Humanities) I think it beholden to me to get my point across as clearly as I can to as many people as I can.  To allow my sarcastic, irreverent side a bit of freedom will, I believe, achieve this better. Indeed, one of my great forefathers in the Humanist tradition, Erasmus, also believed this, even writing a famous treatise to celebrate it – In Praise of Folly.

“But academia is a serious matter” you say, and indeed it is. I do not intended to suffuse my work, blogs or rambles (unless it makes a point) with jokes about breasts, buttocks or badonkadonks (or to be gender neutral- knackers, knobs, and nether regions), or drape my prose with other excessively humorous haberdashery whose fanciful designs might obscure the windows into my arguments. However, I do think my writing style has, until this point, been rather forced down a path of severity I am not entirely comfortable with; I rather like playing with language and making reading (and writing) a fun and interesting experience.

So I resolve to rejig the rules laid down George Orwell in his essay ‘Language and Politics’ (which everyone should read, although it really isn’t very fun at all) coupled with a famous statement by Nietzsche (who certainly was fun, at first).

From now on I will ask of my writing the following questions (in this order):

1.       Can you be clearer?

2.       Can you be shorter (Like Nietzsche, can I aim to say with 3 lines what others say in a book, something more possible, as with Nietzsche, if there’s a touch of humour and creativity, show don’t tell etc. )?

3.       Can you be more entertaining?

So, I hope this has been entertaining, I hope it has been clear, and here is me making it short.

Rich 

PS- feedback would be wonderful. Should I remain shrouded in the gloom of expected academia and scholarship, or should I produce stuff that is rigorous, precise, but entertaining?