Table 5.1How different pressures on authors improve or

a philosopher may end up imitating the sage’s portentous style. Ora commentator on a literary text may come to mimic its mannerisms in her own approach, perhaps unconsciously.
Similarly a researcher analysing a particular bureaucracy or organization can often unconsciously copy officials in overusing organizational acronyms and employing the bureaucracy’s ponderous and passive phrasings as her own.
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An effort to cram in substantive content is the last of this set of influences. Academic authors often try to convey a great deal of detail about their argument methods and research techniques, resulting in a text which looks close-packed with material and dense to read. All these imitative influences tend to make your text more esoteric, more polysyllabic, more specialized. There are some widely used measures of readability, like the fog index which increases with average sentence lengths and the number of multi- syllable words per sentence. Many theses will top the outer limit at the top of the fog index scores.
A third set of style pressures has a different type of impact. As the centre column of Figure 5.2 shows, emphasizing these factors will make for better style and a more readable and accessible text up to a certain point. But carrying on beyond this point,
overemphasizing these factors beyond an optimum level, will thereafter begin to make your text more and more difficult to read.
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A push for parsimonious phrasing, a style eliminating all redundant text, follows through on a less is more policy.
This stance can be a force for good or ill depending on circumstances. Ina loosely knit text, full of waffle, making cuts down to the bare bones of the argument will generate important improvements in style and readability. It will often cutout pointless, minimally reshaded extensions of a core argument, and help sharpen up the profile of the author’s thought for readers.
An unnecessary word does no work. It doesn’t further an argument, state an important qualification, or add a compelling detail. (See?)
Howard Becker
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1 0 AUTHORING AP H D

But with an already pared down and well-organized text the same stance can have different effects. Cutout all unnecessary words, leave only what is strictly essential no asides, no for examples, no flavouring, and you may end up with apiece of writing too dense or too formal for many readers to make inroads. Journal editors and referees often stress this kind of paring away of closely written text.
But it can produce excessively hard-boiled, remote,
underexplained and unnecessarily difficult pieces of text. As de Botton notes in the epigraph to this section, making life hard for readers will trigger two reactions, neither of them encouraging for the reception of your text. If readers blame you as author for being obscure there is a direct threat to your passing the final examination without having to make revisions. If readers blame themselves for not being able to measure up to your text, this may rebound in unsympathetic views of your work. Triggering realizations we would all prefer to avoid is not away to get widely read.
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The ‘say it once and say it right’ approach urges you not to blur the argumentative impact of a single connected set of points about X by dissipating them in dribs and drabs, a little bit here and then again there and somewhere else a third time. Instead you should pull together all the related little ‘x’s into one, big bloc X argument. In weakly organized text this idea can again be a great force for good. Nothing is so corrosive of readers confidence in an author than the feeling that they are simply re-encountering material already described in a disorganized text, or are revisiting in only a marginally varied form points made already, perhaps for the third, fourth or fifth time. But some degree of linkaging back and forth across a text is inevitable and necessary. For instance, cross-referencing and short reminder passages can often be justified on the need to know criterion. Radically overdoing a say it once and say it right logic may sometimes push an already well-structured text into inaccessibility, denying readers the ‘warm-up’ links that they need to grasp a wider pattern of argument.
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