Chapter dzǵ: Tacit Preachments are the Worst Kind ȁȄȆthe wider scholarly community.) Putting heavy demands on your reader
may advertise your own learning. It may intimidate him into not question-
ing your argument. (MayerȀȈȈȂ, p.Ȇȇ, suggests that formalist trappings
may help protect a paper from criticism by making critical comment on
it costly in time and effort.) You may make your message appear fresher
and more important than it really is by practicing product differentiation,
as opposed to taking care to relate your message to the existing literature,
exploiting similarities, parallels, analogies, and contrasts. Perhaps recon-
diteness and obscurity really do bamboozle editors and readers; and per-
haps unintelligibility masquerading as profundity may sometimes ward
off identification of what is no more than poor style. If so, a moral aspect
enters into writing. (Cf. McCloskeyȀȈȇȅ, writing in a slightly different
context.) If so, furthermore, questions again arise about the incentive struc-
ture prevailing in academia.
At the very least, get your grammar, word usage, spelling, and punc-
tuation right. (Nobody is infallible, certainly not I, but at least one should
work at these things.) Why do economists tolerate so much slovenliness
in these respects? Ļey do not tolerate its counterpart in the mathematical
strands of economics—not, that is, when they notice it (and I have some
stories to tell about this qualification). If rigor is prized, why shouldn’t it
be prized in the cut-and-dried aspects of writing?
If for some reason you cannot get your grammar and so forth right,
then hire someone to repair your writing before you ship it off to a journal
and perhaps even before you inflict it on colleagues. Beyond getting the
mechanics right, strive for a readable style. When you ship your manu-
script off to a publisher, have it in a form in which you would be glad to
see it in print. Don’t count on someone else to improve it.
Ļese exhortations bear on what to do about a national crisis (per-
mit me to exaggerate as Andy Rooney does on the tube). Not even Wal-
ter Block, who wrote a whole book (ȀȈȆȅ) trying to portray the pimp,
the drug pusher, the litterbug, and other unsavory types as heroes—not
even he attempted any defense of the itchy-fingered copyeditor. Ļat
would have been just too preposterous. I wonder whether obscurities, jar-
gon, and symbols may not sometimes help protect authors from tamper-
ing: copyeditors may shy away from trying to improve on manuscripts
that they cannot even understand. Mere palpable sloppiness, on the
other hand, flags the copyeditors on. One of my bitterest complaints
against writers who think it beneath them to bother with their gram-
mar, spelling, punctuation, and style is that they create externalities: they