Beyond bullshit: Writing with compassion, clarity and creativity

I once had a conversation with a student from the United States, who was in the UK for an exchange visit.

Student: Can you explain what your UK qualifications mean, please? They look different to the ones we have in the States.

Me: OK, we have three levels. BSc means Bachelor of Science, MSc means Master of Science, and PhD means Doctor of Philosophy.

Student: Ah, not so different then. We have BS, which is bullshit, MS which is more shit, and PhD which is piled higher and deeper!

When academic writing is bullshit, then bullshit is what we teach, and how our work is perceived by students. If academic bullshit results in writing that is disingenuous, dense, and difficult to digest, it can lead to discomfort for readers. This is why we need to write with compassion, clarity, and creativity.

Is this academic bullshit?

I have been thinking about this article for a long time. As a novice writer, I experienced the discomfort that comes from reading stodgy and indigestible academic writing; what the social psychologist Michael Billig simply calls bad writing, or 'big words in small circles'. I would send drafts of my own writing to critical friends for feedback before submitting my work (I still do). 

As a practice-based psychologist, I think it is really important that I write clearly, and I can only do this with good feedback. I would ask my academic friends for feedback on the content, omissions, scope of the article, and its contribution to a scholarly conversation in the field and journal I was submitting to. But my most reliable and honest critical friend was Frank – an apt pseudonym – who did not work in academia but had a strong commitment to evidence-based practice in his professional field. My one question to Frank would always be: 'Is this academic bullshit?'

That's not a new notion. Harry Frankfurt's (1986/2005) original piece On Bullshit described a bullshitter as a person who deliberately conveys a false impression of themselves. Littrell et al. (2021) differentiate bullshit (the product) from bullshitting (the act). André Spicer has warned how empty and misleading communication takes over organisations, 'playing the bullshit game' (2020, p.1). And in 2008 Eubanks and Schaeffer observed that 21st century Western culture singles out academia as 'the mother lode of bullshit' (p.374). How many times have you heard 'Ah well, that's all very academic ...', with the subtext that academics and academic writing have no place in the 'real world'?

So, from those earlier roots, what inspired me to write this article now? It was a recent call for papers in a (nameless!) journal that really annoyed me. It had me reaching for a dictionary, wondering 'what does this really mean?' While the use of readability indicators such as the Flesch Kincaid Calculator are unreliable and lack construct validity (Crossley et al., 2019), just out of interest I ran a section of the call for papers through an online calculator. The Flesch reading ease score came out at a big fat zero. This is on a scale where a score of 100 indicates the piece of text is extremely easy to read; between 60 to 70 is plain English; and 0 is highly complex and difficult to understand. I felt irritated at the pretentious use of gratuitously complex language.

Chatty and familiar

My areas of research and scholarship span work and organisational psychology, organisation studies, higher education practice and pedagogy, all of which have their own linguistic quirks when it comes to academic writing. In my own writing in the field of organisational gossip, I try to reflect the 'chatty' and familiar nature of that which is constituted and experienced as gossip. 

Gossip is informal evaluative talk, usually about an absent third party, that may be spoken, written or visual (Michelson et al., 2010). Like with bullshit, we can distinguish the product and the act; gossip is both a noun (i.e. content and person who is gossiping) and a verb (the act of gossiping). And I gossiped with colleagues about 'that call for papers' and the prevalence of bullshit in academic writing more generally.

I do not want to be gossiped about in academic conversations that use evaluative terms such as 'irritating', 'annoying' and 'pretentious'. And nor, dear reader, should you want your writing to be talked about in this way.

While my oblique reference to Jane Austen's writing style might initially appear pretentious, it helps me say something about gossip and about writing. Historically, gossip has stereotypically been viewed as pejorative women's talk, with a negative reputation going back to the Middle Ages. Instruments of torture were prevalent such as the 'scold's bridle' – a gag (sometimes with a spike) inserted into a woman's mouth to restrain her tongue (Science Group Museum, n.d.). 

The enduring negative stereotypes and reputation of gossip are such that when people engage in evaluative talk about the details of their lives, academic or otherwise, it is seen as gossip. Yet when novelists such as Austen write about such details of everyday life it becomes a plot device and seen as literature. For me, that opens up new possibilities for blending literature, science and scholarship. It points to ways we can delete the academic bullshit and write differently.

Writing with compassion in mind

Compassion features across all major world religions as 'the golden rule' – the principle of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself (Charter for Compassion, 2024). Large bodies of literature and interdisciplinary perspectives point to a definition of compassion as an emotional response toward another person's suffering, coupled with the motivation to alleviate their suffering and promote their well-being (Seppälä et al., 2017; Simpson et al., 2022). 

My primary motivation is to alleviate the suffering caused by articles that contain academic bullshit and indigestible writing for a) readers; and b) writers experiencing pressure to publish in high-ranking journals that promote and publish bullshit and indigestible writing.

In his 2023 cover feature for The Psychologist, Miltos Hadjiosif suggests that while psychologists do many things well, writing is not one of them. He argues that the rules of writing were created by people and conditions that did not value anything other than a vehicle transporting an important passenger: facts. This leads to formulaic empiricism and writing that creates black holes of meaning (Alvesson et al., 2017) – craters of academic bullshit obscured by writing so dense that nothing of real value to people's lives and society can get through. Such writing privileges and excludes.

Paradoxically, the language, acronyms, and terminology used in specialist journals, academic circles and groups can lead to a type of 'indirect gossip' heard in common rooms, cafés, bars and conference conversations. Max Gluckman's influential article 'Gossip and Scandal' (1963) argued that gossip is built into technical and disciplinary discussions so tightly in these 'elite' groups that an outsider cannot always detect the slight personal knockdown concealed in academic arguments and scholarly sneers.

The field of academic bullshit is littered with acronyms, obvious to readers 'in the know' but alienating for others. Andrew Hales and colleagues (2017) point out that mindful writers will notice that most abbreviations are unnecessary and will choose to replace them with more meaningful words that underlie them. So I hesitate to use one here around compassion, but the NEAR capabilities of compassion – Noticing, Empathising, Appraising, Responding (Simpson et al., 2022) – are worth bearing in mind in writing.

Obviously, acronyms cannot be completely avoided in scientific writing, even in psychometric measures such as the Bullshit Frequency Scale (BSF; Littrell et al., 2021). But over-reliance on the measurement of everyday experiences such as bullshit and gossip is not necessarily helpful. Extending the American writer E. B. White's analogy that analysing humour is like dissecting a frog (few people are interested, and the frog dies), overly academic analyses of gossip and gossiping can result in dead descriptions and disengagement on the part of readers (van Iterson et al., 2010).

Your reader deserves better. They deserve compassion and empathy.

Writing with clarity

Joseph M. Williams, writing 30 years ago in Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, argued that the single most serious problem facing all writers is a wordy, complex and tangled style of writing. His book begins with introductory lessons on the virtues of clarity, then moves into how to eliminate wordiness and control excessively long sentences. How to make sentences 'hang together' in context, and how to write with 'a touch of class'. Ultimately, his 'golden rule' for writing with clarity is: Write for others as you would have others write for you.

Maybe Artificial Intelligence will come to our rescue – or maybe not? The Royal Society suggests that AI can be used to address time-consuming stylistic or language issues for scientists who struggle with writing, freeing up time to focus on the substance rather than the presentation of their articles (Okerafor, 2023). However, a significant risk is the generation of scientific misinformation and disinformation, and convincing but false text, data, and graphics that will become increasingly difficult to detect.

Instead, my call to action is to write differently. To write in ways that blend literature, science and creative arts-based approaches.

Writing creatively

Writing differently, creatively, involves challenging and disrupting traditional approaches to academic writing, rather than following conventional 'tried and tested' methods. Here, I offer three examples.

First, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and  Monika Kostera (2019) wrote their article as a detective story, using the plot from Agatha Christie's novel The Body in the Library to answer the question: 'Who has killed Ms Knowledge?' Readers are drawn into the narrative to experience the variety of ways in which knowledge in the social sciences is constructed and communicated.

Second, Clau Di Gianfrancesco and Elena Gkivisi's (2023) 'We(?)/I' piece of collaborative writing in the January/February 2023 edition of The Psychologist includes a photo collage, intended as something that may be troubling, surprising and/or enlivening. Their work offers early career researchers in particular an example of collaborative thinking and writing as a 'fragmentary, un-smoothened, multivoice text' (p.90) that we need to read and see much more of.

Finally, in my writing, I have used artwork to illustrate conceptual thinking around gossip in the workplace (main image, above). The picture Gossip by Belgian artist Pol Ledent vividly challenges the stereotypical imagery of gossip, often visually represented by white men and women dressed in business suits exchanging gossip around a water cooler. It illustrates the concepts of power and emotion. It is painted in dark colours with a rough texture, leading us to surmise the seriousness and weight of gossip being shared. This is men's gossip.

Not a light-hearted 'water cooler moment' or idle 'women's talk'. We are tasked with guessing, deciphering and analysing what we see. Their faces, especially the one receiving the gossip, do not show the conspiratorial smugness associated with some types of gossip. There is a hint of anxiety and tension. It contains a note of caution, perhaps a warning?

Gossip is now seen as a 'state of the art' research topic and 'early warning signal' of future failure and scandal (O'Connor et al., 2018; Waddington, 2016; 2022). Francesca Giardini and Rafael Wittik's edited collection (2019) sketches out a long-term cross-disciplinary research agenda for gossip and reputation. Robin Dunbar (1996) argued that language evolved to enable people to gossip and pass on socially relevant information: who you can trust, and who you can rely on for help when things are difficult; who is a 'free-rider' and who is a bullshitter. When we write with clarity, compassion and creativity, I hope the gossip about our work will be good.

Kathryn Waddington
Emerita Fellow in Psychology
University of Westminster [email protected]

Image: Gossip © Pol Ledent (reproduced with permission)

Key sources

Alvesson, M., Gabriel, Y., & Paulson, R. (2017). Return to meaning: A social science with something to say. Oxford University Press.
Billig, M. (2015). Big words in small circles: Bad writing and the social sciences. In Bammer, A., Joeres, R-E.B. (Eds.), The future of scholarly writing (pp. 169-175). Palgrave Macmillan.
Charter for Compassion (2024). Who we are: Goldenruleism.
Crossley, S. A., Skalicky, S. M., & Dascalu, M. (2019). Moving beyond classic readability
formulas: New methods and new models. Journal of Research and Reading, 42(2-4), 541-561.
Di Gianfrancesco, C., & Gkivisi, E. (2023). We (?)/I: Reflections on the process of collaborative thinking. The Psychologist, January/February, 90-93.
Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. Faber & Faber.
Eubanks, P., & Schaeffer, J. D. (2008).  A kind word for bullshit: The problem of academic writing. College Composition and Communication, 59(3), 372-388.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1986/2005) On bullshit. Princeton University Press.
Giardini, F., & Wittek, R. (Eds.). The Oxford handbook of gossip and reputation. Oxford University Press. 
Gluckman, M. (1963). Gossip and scandal. Current Anthropology, 4(3), 307-316.
Hadjiossif, M. (2023). Let there be chaos. The Psychologist, September, 28-33.
Hales, A. H., Williams, K. D., & Rector, J. (2017). Alienating the audience: How abbreviations hamper scientific communication.  
Kociatkiewicz, J., & Kostera, M. (2019). The body in the library: An investigative celebration of deviation, hesitation, and lack of closure. Management Learning, 50(1), 114-128.
Littrell, S., Risko, E. F., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2021). The bullshitting frequency scale: Development and psychometric properties. British Journal of Social Psychology, 60, 248-270.
Michelson, G., van Iterson, A., & Waddington, K. (2010). Gossip in organizations: Contexts, consequences and controversies. Group & Organization Management, 35(4), 371-390.
O'Connor, N., Kotze, B., & Storm, V. (2018). What's to be done when 'foul whisperings are abroad'? Gossip and rumour in health organisations. Australasian Psychiatry, 26(1), 30-33.
Okereafor, B. (2023, September 28). AI and the future of scholarly publishing (part 1).
Science Museum Group (n.d.). Scold's bridle, Belgium, 1550-1775. 
Seppälä, E.M., Simon-Thomas, E., Brown, A. L., Worline, M. C., Cameron, C. D., & Doty, J. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford handbook of compassion science. Oxford University Press.
Simpson, A. V., Arménio, R., Berti, M., Clegg, S., & Cunha, M. P. e. (2022). Theorizing compassionate leadership from the case of Jacinda Ardern: Legitimacy, paradox and resource conservation. Leadership, 18(3), 337-358.
Spicer, A. (2020). Playing the bullshit game: How empty and misleading communication takes over organizations. Organization Theory, 1, 1-26.
van Iterson, A., Waddington, K., &, Michelson, G. (2010). Breaking the silence: The role of gossip in organizational culture. In N.M. Ashkanasay, C. P. M. Wilderom, & M. F. Petersen (Eds.), Handbook of organizational culture and climate (2nd ed, pp. 375-392). Sage Publications.
Waddington, K. (2012). Gossip and organizations. Routledge.
Waddington, K. (2016). Rethinking gossip and scandal in healthcare organizations. Journal of Health Organization and Management, 30(6), 810-817.
Waddington, K. (2022). Gossip, organization and work: A research overview. Routledge.
Williams, J. M. (2005). Style: Ten lessons in clarity and grace (8th ed.).  Pearson Education Inc.