Note Worthy

By Paul Gray

A HANDBOOK FOR SCHOLARS

by Mary-Claire van Leunen

Knopf; 354 pages; $12.95 hardcover, $5.95 paperback

Graduate schools do not profess to train people to write at the greatest possible length for the smallest possible number. But they might as well take credit for the job. Thanks to a number of factors,^1 the typical scholarly article is now a footnote-clotted monstrosity comprehensible only to the few friends, enemies and students who already know what is on the author's mind. Everybody talks about the academic smog; Mary-Claire van Leunen, a writer and editor, has done something about it.

Not for her the easy way out. She could have recommended that the subsidies for a thousand or so academic journals be canceled; the state of prose writing in the U.S. would have improved overnight. Instead of draining the swamp, though, Van Leunen wants to redecorate it. The first suggestion in her manual does away with old-fashioned footnotes and the superscriptions^2 that heralded them. This simple stroke could save typists and printers everywhere from a common, dizzying dilemma: how to make the damnable text and footnotes count out correctly on each page. The new footnote would simply be a number, in brackets, that refers a reader to the corresponding number in the bibliography. Thi change is not totally revolutionary. Spared are what the author calls "content foot notes,"^3 those often pointless little entries at the bottom of the page, in which scholars amuse4 themselves if not others. The author holds these in high regard: "By using footnotes judiciously you can fill your reader in on general information he lacks, satisfy his curiosity about fine points, whisper delicious tidbits in his ear, and share with him an occasional small frolic." But banned are such standard and numbing footnote fare as ed. cit., loc. cit., op. cit., idem and ibid.

Skeptics may argue that amending the footnote and throwing away some Latin abbreviations hardly amount to an effective attack on the problem of scholarly gobbledygook. Perhaps not, but Van Leunen's strictures may spur a few professors and scholars into reflection. The practice of footnoting every phrase or idea that does not fit into the text quickly be comes habit-forming.5 So do many of the tics that help make so much academic writing so impenetrable. Such habits should be broken.

For all the jokes about bad scholarly prose,6 the subject is not really funny. When citizens who are paid to think do not adequately share those thoughts with others, everyone loses. Scholars grow more isolated and the public more puzzled and hostile to their efforts. Discoveries in some fields, especially in the sciences, will always be too hermetic to become common knowledge overnight. But simple prose could clear up much mis understanding. The task may be impossible; Van Leunen shows how it could be done.

^1Increasing specialization of knowledge, the splintering of old disciplines into many new ones, the rise of the masses, the decline of the West and close encounters of the surd kind.

^2Nothing to add here. Number^2 is given only as an example.

^3Note', for example, but definitely not Note^2, which, as noted above (in Note^2), was a false note.

4One is reminded of a salacious anecdote, probably apocryphal, involving Sir Isaac Newton.

5Like eating a single peanut or potato chip.

6Claimed John Barry more: "A footnote is like running downstairs to answer the doorbell during the first night of marriage."

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