My UChicago colleague Agnes Callard has a typically incisive column complaining that most serious academic philosophy is not very readable. Some excerpts:

These words exist for you to read them. I wrote them to try to convey some ideas to you. These are not the first words I wrote for you—those were worse. I wrote and rewrote, with a view to clarifying my meaning. I want to make sure that what you take away is exactly what I have in mind, and I want to be concise and engaging, because I am mindful of competing demands on your time and attention.

You might think that everything I am saying is trivial and obvious, because of course all writing is like this. Writing is a form of communication; it exists to be read. But that is, in fact, not how all writing works. In particular, it is not how academic writing works. Academic writing does not exist in order to communicate with a reader. In academia, or at least the part of it that I inhabit, we write, most of the time, not so much for the sake of being read as for the sake of publication. . . . .

Writing for the sake of publication—instead of for the sake of being read—is academia’s version of “teaching to the test.” The result is papers few actually want to read. First, the writing is hypercomplex. Yes, the thinking is also complex, but the writing in professional journals regularly contains a layer of complexity beyond what is needed to make the point. It is not edited for style and readability. Most significantly of all, academic writing is obsessed with other academic writing—with finding a “gap in the literature” as opposed to answering a straightforwardly interesting or important question.

Of course publication is a necessary step along the way to readership, but the academic who sets their sights on it is like the golfer or baseball player who stops their swing when they make contact with the ball. Without follow-through, what you get are short, jerky movements; we academics have become purveyors of small, awkwardly phrased ideas. . . . .

When I am asked for sources of “big ideas” in philosophy—the kind that would get the extra-philosophical world to stand up and take notice—I struggle to list anyone born after 1950. It is sobering to consider that the previous decade produced: Daniel Dennett, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Derek Parfit, John McDowell, Peter Singer, G. A. Cohen and Martha Nussbaum. In my view, each of these people towers over everyone who comes after them in at least one of the categories by which we might judge a philosopher: breadth, depth, originality or degree of public influence. Or consider this group, born in roughly the two decades prior (1919-1938), remarkable in its intellectual fertility: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Stanley Cavell, Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls. These are the philosophers about whom one routinely asks, “Why don’t people write philosophy like this anymore?” And this isn’t only a point about writing style. Their work is inviting—it asks new questions, it sells the reader on why those questions matter and it presents itself as a point of entry into philosophy. This is why all of us keep assigning their work over and over again, a striking fact given how much the number of philosophers has ballooned since their time.

A very similar complaint is frequently made about legal scholarship, which is famously ponderous, obsessed with prior literatures, burdened with citations, insufficiently engaging to the bench and bar, etc. etc. etc. And though I have defended law reviews in the past, I still share a lot of Callard’s instincts as applied to my own field. Why can’t more of us write like John Hart Ely or Charles Black?

Still, there must be reasons other than a collective failure of willpower or art. Here are a few hypotheses:

1. Citation norms and length are a powerful arms race. If everybody else’s papers are 35,000 words and contain 400 footnotes, your 25,000 word paper with 200 footnotes will seem “rushed” or “underdeveloped.”

2. The more advanced a field is, the less fun it is. This is why we need to invent new fields every so often, lest all of academia get bored and wander away.

3. Two kinds of people get away with defying the norms described in (1): The super-eminent academics whose reputations are so strong that everybody will read what they say even if it doesn’t have enough footnotes; and the cranks whose fun-to-read papers are sometimes more like a rant, and for whom the lack of footnotes signal a lack of seriousness or rigor. Lots of good academics who could write fun-to-read papers of the first type hold back for fear of looking like the cranks in the second type.

4. Word processing and citation managers made it too easy to write long papers. Our papers would be more fun to read if we still had to write them out and do all edits longhand.

5. This is not actually a problem. Scholarship should ultimately be about contributions to knowledge, not fun to read.

Other possibilities?