John McWhorter, the richly opinionated linguist and controversialist, sets his sights in Doing Our Own Thing on what he (correctly) perceives as the decline of formality in certain aspects of American prose and speech — music, too, though on that subject he has little of interest to say — and the concomitant rise of “casual speech,” a legacy like so much else in our culture of the ’60s and its “mainstreaming of the counterculture.” —Washington Post

Related: Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me?:

For most scholars, bad academic writing, like bad academic sex, doesn’t call for explanation — or argument.

It’s poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It’s failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A’s clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental reflexes of Overly Essentialized Reader B. It may be sheer incompetence at nouns, verbs, and adjectives….

The publication of Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena, edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (Stanford University Press), lets us address the more pressing pedagogical issue, and leave bad academic sex for the Human Resources Department. An anthology of essays by opponents of the Bad Academic Writing epithet (including two honored as leading darknesses of the notorious practice), this volume poses the question that could stop all “Writing Across the Disciplines” and comp classes in their tracks: When is bad writing not so bad, even if it’s terrible? —The Chronicle of Higher Education