Fall 2022 Post 11: Shouting

We are nearing the end of the term where I find it appropriate to talk about cleaning up your academic essays to make them more readable, more acceptable to an academic audience. As is often the case in this blog, I'm prompted by a post from Josh Bernoff entitled "Cheer down: How to create drama in your prose without shouting," in which Bernoff discusses the bad writing habit of shouting, or shouting, DAMN IT!!!!

I just shouted by using italics, bold, underlining, colored font, background highlighting, all caps, profanity, and exclamation points in a post that should be more academically toned. As Bernoff notes in his post, this kind of shouting is really poor form, especially in academic writing, and is a sure sign of a novice writer. This kind of shouting undermines your credibility as a writer, which is the worst thing that can happen to an academic writer. If your readers lose faith in you — especially your teachers — then your relationship with your readers and your grades will suffer. Bad news.

Shouting in writing is not always a sign of poor form. Advertisers shout all the time to get your attention quickly and focus it on some product or service that someone wants you to buy. As it happens, sex and money are the top two attention getters, so a company such as Burger King will use sex to focus your attention on their burgers. The exact relationship between eating Burger King hamburgers and hot sex is never quite explained, but apparently gullible men will buy their burgers anyway and hope.

But this is not the kind of writing that we do in college, and most of you will never write ads for a company. Unfortunately, almost all of you text, and people who text are very fond of shouting — mostly through unusual grammar, punctuation, and spelling — LOL!!!

All of you know what LOL means because you've seen it in your own texts or the texts you read. You use it daily. That's fine in your text messages to your besties and beasties, but it is just awful in ur academic writing. See? And did I mean your or you're. I'm not quite sure, and neither are you. Bad form.

In his post, Bernoff is not writing to an academic audience, so he does not mention the number one form of shouting in academic essays: non-standard grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Most students regularly turn in essays with grammar, punctuation, and spelling that shouts to the teacher: "Hey! I'm a novice writer who can't do any better." When you submit an essay with unusual grammar, punctuation, and spelling, then you are telling your teacher one of two things:

1. You're incompetent. You can't spell, and you don't even know that you can't spel. See?
2. You don't care. You know that you can't spel, but you don't care enough to run spell check to correct the errors.

This is similar to when I used to schedule in-person conferences to discuss my students' work with them. If a student showed up to my office poorly or barely dressed and smelling like last night's party, then I assumed that either they didn't know any better or they didn't care. Neither message builds trust between that student and me, nor does it encourage me to work with them and spend any more time with them than is absolutely necessary. This almost never works in the student's favor.

So what's wrong with shouting? Just as with someone shouting at you on the sidewalk, shouting in your essays draws the reader's attention away from what you are saying to how you are saying it. This almost never works for you in an academic essay. So don't do it. Rather, keep your reader's attention focused on what you are trying to say rather than on how you are saying it.