Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.”

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From Slate:

In January, Karin Wulf, a history professor at William and Mary, wrote an installment for her blog, Vast Early America, that promised to teach “How to Gut a (Scholarly) Book in 5 Almost-easy Steps.” The blog post, which described a process for getting the gist of a book without having to read it cover to cover, tossed a lifeline to doctoral students everywhere struggling with the overwhelming impossibility of keeping pace with their weekly reading requirements. “I don’t always read this way,” Wulf cautioned. “For work that’s in my research area, and when I’m reading for the joy of reading history (which I try to do regularly), I read more deeply and thoroughly. But thinking historiographically, getting a sense of how evidence and argument are related within a book (or essay), and how those relate to other scholarship, I find pretty well served by this approach.”

I knew well the process of what I call “book breaking,” having recently completed a Ph.D.
in history at York University in Toronto. Wulf’s excellent advice is indispensable to anyone embarking on doctoral studies. But the blog post also resonated with my misgivings about academia’s messy relationship with books, with how its books are written, published, and consumed.

I have an unusual relationship with the academy. After a career of some 30 years as a journalist and author, I returned, at the age of 51, to higher education to secure a history Ph.D. I was never sure of exactly what I would do with one, if I survived the process, but it was a now-or-never challenge that I thought I should accept. One of the hopes the academy had for me was that I could bridge the worlds of academic history and “public” history; I had published a number of history books with leading trade imprints (Doubleday, Penguin, Bloomsbury), and I had a book on Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, The Race to the New World, in edit at Palgrave Macmillan in New York as I began my course work in the autumn of 2010. I knew academic writing was different than trade writing, but I was unprepared for the way reading—and consequently writing—was treated in the context of academia.

Every week for two semesters, I would attend a seminar in each of my three coursework fields—Canadian, American, and indigenous history—to discuss the week’s readings. A professor would guide debate and mark our performance over the span of about three hours. A week’s readings were a mix of books and journal articles that were drawn from a larger course reading list, or syllabus. A typical week would add up to about three books per course (the rule of thumb seemed to be that four journal articles were the equivalent of one book). That meant reading nine books a week. The entire syllabus of one course might contain about 100 books. You then faced the hurdle of the comprehensive exams, or “comps.” At York, I was expected to know the entire syllabi of two courses, which I demonstrated in two four-hour written exams and an oral examination by a panel of professors. Then came the dissertation.

Three weeks into my coursework, I nearly quit, overwhelmed by the weekly reading requirements. My first week included Bruce Trigger’s The Children of Aataentsic, a 600-plus-page doorstopper of a history of the Huron-Wendat people, and there were about eight other books besides to digest. I learned quickly that reading in a doctoral program was not like reading at home. You had to “gut” a book, as professor Wulf describes—absorb its essential contents so that you could discuss the author’s ideas and evidence intelligently in that week’s seminar. Even for comps, with months of preparation, there was no way to read the entire syllabi of two courses. Foremost, you read the book’s introduction and conclusion, and the introduction and conclusion of individual chapters, and looked at sources and notes. If desperate, you got by with a scholarly book review—whatever it took to gather enough knowledge to discuss the work in a seminar or a comps exam.

. . . .

 There is an insidious feedback loop where academic writing is concerned. Academic works in the humanities are written by authors who survived their doctoral studies by book breaking. When successful doctoral candidates then publish, they’re inclined to write in a way that makes book breaking possible, especially if they hope to see that book on a course reading list. After all, it’s not just students who need to be able to get the gist of a new book quickly—professors must do so as well. When the target audience has no time, need, or inclination to read books in their entirety, then books at a basic level are written not to be read in a conventional sense. It’s a short bus ride from that reality to academic books that are not particularly readable. By “not particularly readable” I do not mean that ideas are not presented clearly, or that the prose is necessarily stilted or burdened by jargon. What I mean is that the books are written without regard to elements and narrative techniques that are fundamental to nonfiction in a trade setting—that academic writing is often hostile to storytelling as a way of conveying important truths.

. . . .

 The consequences of academic books being fundamentally written not to be read in full, even by an academic audience, are troubling not only for academia but for society as a whole. Society suffers when the ideas of academics are trapped inside the feedback loop of academia; academia suffers because society considers its output irrelevant.

Link to the rest at Slate