Glossary of Academic Writing Terms

COM 102/1 – Spring 2015 Academic Writing > Terminology

Anthony Marais Page 1 _________________________________________________________________________________

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Glossary of Writing Terms

Circumlocution

From Latin circumlocutionem (nominative circumlocutio) "a speaking around" (the topic),

from circum- "around" + locutionem (nominative locutio) "a speaking," noun of action

from past participle stem of loqui "to speak". A loan-translation of Greek periphrasis.

Circumlocution refers to ambiguous or roundabout speech. Ambiguity means information

that can have multiple meanings. For example, governmental income support to poor

residents might be referred to as “welfare.” Roundabout speech refers to using many

words (such as “a tool used for cutting things such as paper and hair”) to describe

something for which a concise (and commonly known) expression exists (“scissors”). The

vast majority of definitions found in dictionaries are circumlocutory. Circumlocution is

often used by aphasics and language learners, where in the absence of a word (such as

"abuelo" [grandfather]) the subject can simply be described ("el padre de su padre" [the

father of your father]). Euphemism, innuendo, and equivocation are also types of

circumlocution.

Equivocation

From Old French equivocation, from Late Latin aequivocationem (nominative

aequivocatio), from aequivocus "of identical sound," from aequus "equal" + vocare "to

call". A loan-translation of Greek homonymia, literally "having the same name."

Equivocation is the use of ambiguous language with the purpose of avoiding telling the

truth or committing oneself. For example, a person might not want to divulge his

relationship status. Therefore, he talks about his significant other without making

concessions as to their relationship. Instead of saying "She made dinner for me last night",

an equivocational statement would be “Dinner was already made for me last night.”

Another example is the use of equivocation to deceive others without blatantly lying. For

example, if a mother asks her child to clean a throw rug and the child replies that they will

"hang the rug and beat it", rather than saying that they will "clean it", the child could mean

that they will forget about the rug (hang it) and quickly leave (beat it).

Euphemism

From Greek euphemismos "use of a favorable word in place of an inauspicious one,"

from euphemizein "speak with fair words" from eu- "good" + pheme "speaking,"

from phanai "speak". In ancient Greece, the superstitious avoidance of words of ill-omen

during religious ceremonies, or substitutions such as Eumenides "the Gracious Ones" for

the Furies. In English, it was a rhetorical term at first; the broader sense of "choosing a

less distasteful word or phrase than the one meant" is first attested in 1793.



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Euphemism, however, is only sometimes circumlocutory. For example, "Holy mother of

Jesus!" is a circumlocution of "Mary!", but "heck", while still euphemistic, is not a

circumlocution of "hell". Euphemistic circumlocution is also used to avoid saying

"unlucky words": words which are taboo for reasons connected with superstition. For

example, calling the devil "Old Nick", calling Macbeth "the Scottish Play" or saying

"baker's dozen" instead of thirteen.

Fumblerules

Fumblerules are humorous rules for writing, collected from teachers of English grammar.

They contain an example contrary to the advice they give. The term was coined in a list of

such rules compiled by William Safire on Sunday, 4 November 1979, in his column "On

Language" in the New York Times. Examples:

Don’t never use no double negatives.

Eschew obfuscation.

A preposition is never something to end a sentence with.

Avoid clichés like the plague.

The passive voice should never be employed.

You should not use a big word when a diminutive would suffice.

It is bad to carelessly split infinitives.

About those sentence fragments.

Grandiloquence

From Latin grandis (great) and loqui (to speak); complex speech or writing judged to be

pompous or bombastic diction. It is often used by politicians. Warren G. Harding, the 29th

President of the United States, was noted as a grandiloquent speaker, with a florid style

unusual even in his era:

“America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not

revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the

dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in

internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality...”

A Democrat leader, William Gibbs McAdoo described Harding's speeches as “an army of

pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea.”

Graphomania

From Greek graphein "to write," and mania "madness, frenzy; enthusiasm, inspired

frenzy; mad passion, fury," related to mainesthai "to rage, go mad." Also known as

scribomania, it refers to an obsessive impulse to write. When used in a specifically

psychiatric context, it labels a morbid mental condition which results in writing rambling

and confused statements, often degenerating into a meaningless succession of words or



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even nonsense and called then graphorrhea. Outside the psychiatric definitions, the word

is used more broadly to label the urge and need to write excessively, whether professional

or not. According to Milan Kundera, graphomania is the groundless claim of being a

writer:

"The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, child bearers, lovers,

murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without

exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go

down the streets and shout: 'We are all writers!'"

—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Kundera’s feeling about graphomania may be explained by the fact that such a pejorative

meaning of graphomania is actually often used in Post-Soviet block to denote foolish,

unprofessional and excessive writings (not only in the form of literature, but also science),

while logorrhea as a noun (with its negative, pejorative meaning) is not as often used. The

word “logophiliac” is used in a similar disparaging fashion by cognoscenti in the US.

Hypergraphia

Hypergraphia is a behavioral condition characterized by the intense desire to write. Forms

of hypergraphia can vary in writing style and content. It is a symptom associated with

temporal lobe changes in epilepsy, which is the cause of the Geschwind syndrome, a

mental disorder. Possible structures that may have an effect on hypergraphia when

damaged due to temporal lobe epilepsy are the hippocampus and Wernicke's area. Aside

from temporal lobe epilepsy, chemical causes may also be responsible for inducing

hypergraphia. Both Vincent van Gogh and Fyodor Dostoevsky are reported to have been affected by

hypergraphia. It has been suggested that the poet Robert Burns was a sufferer. Lewis

Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, is said to have had hypergraphia. In his

lifetime he wrote over 98,000 letters varying in format. The letters were written

backwards, in rebus, and in different patterns, such as the “Mouse Tail” in the former

book.

Logorrhea

In psychology, logorrhea (from Greek λογορροια [logorrhoia]; from λόγος [logos],

meaning "word", and ῥοία [rhoia], meaning "flow") is a communication disorder,

sometimes classified as a mental illness, resulting in incoherent talkativeness. It is present

in a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders including aphasia, localized cortical

lesions in the thalamus, mania, or most typically in catatonic schizophrenia. Its causes

remain poorly understood, but appear to be localized to frontal lobe structures known to

be associated with language. Examples might include talking or mumbling monotonously,

either to others, or more likely to oneself. It is a symptom of an underlying illness, and

should be treated by a medical professional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorrhoea



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In linguistics and editing, the term is often used pejoratively to describe prose that is

hard to understand because it is needlessly complicated or uses excessive jargon. Writers

in academic fields which concern themselves mostly with the abstract, such as philosophy,

especially postmodernism, often fail to include extensive concrete examples of their ideas;

so an examination of their work might lead one to believe that it is all nonsense, hence the

pejorative epithet “pomobabble” (i.e., “postmodernist babble”). For example, the

Michigan Law Review published a 229-page parody of postmodern writing titled

“Pomobabble: Postmodern Newspeak and Constitutional ‘Meaning’ for the Uninitiated.”

The article consists of extremely complicated and highly context sensitive self-referencing

narratives about the article itself. The text is peppered with an absolutely excessive

number of parenthetical citations and asides, which is supposed to mock the cluttered

postmodernist style of writing.

The term is also sometimes less precisely applied to unnecessarily wordy speech in

general; this is more usually referred to as prolixity.

Obfuscation

From Latin obfuscatus, past participle of obfuscare "to darken," from ob "over" + fuscare

"to make dark," from fuscus "dark." Obfuscation (or beclouding) is the hiding of intended

meaning in communication, making communication confusing, willfully ambiguous, and

harder to interpret. It may be used for many purposes. Doctors have been accused of using

jargon to conceal unpleasant facts from a patient; American author Michael Crichton

claimed that medical writing is a "highly skilled, calculated attempt to confuse the reader".

B. F. Skinner, noted psychologist, commented on medical notation as a form of audience

control, which allows the doctor to communicate to the pharmacist things which might be

opposed by the patient if they could understand it.

“Eschew obfuscation,” is a humorous fumblerule used by English teachers and

professors when lecturing about proper writing techniques. Literally, the phrase means

“avoid being unclear,” but the use of relatively uncommon words causes confusion,

making the phrase an example of irony.

Onomatopoeia

From Greek onomatopoeia (ὀνοματοποιία); from ὄνομα meaning “name” and ποιέω

meaning “I make” is a word that phonetically imitates the source of the sound it describes.

Examples include animal noises such as "oink", "meow", "roar" or "chirp".

Onomatopoeias are not the same across all languages; they conform to some extent to the

broader linguistic system they are part of; hence the sound of a clock may be “tick tock”

in English, “dī dā” in Mandarin, or “katchin katchin” in Japanese.

Although in English the term means the imitation of a sound, in Greek the compound

word (ονοματοποιία) means “making or creating names.” For words that imitate sounds

the term Ηχομιμητικό (echomimetico) or echomimetic is used.



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Oxymora

An oxymoron (plural oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes apparently

contradictory elements. The term is derived from the 5th century Latin "oxymoron",

which is derived from the Ancient Greek: ὀξύς (oxus) “sharp, keen” + μωρός (mōros)

"dull, stupid", making the word itself an oxymoron. Oxymora may include inadvertent

errors such as ground pilot. However, they may also be intentionally crafted to reveal a

paradox. For example, Wilfred Owen's poem “The Send-off” refers to soldiers leaving for

the front line, who “lined the train with faces grimly gay.” The oxymoron “grimly gay”

highlights the contradiction between how the soldiers feel and how they act: though they

put on a brave face and act cheerfully, they feel grim.

Periphrasis

From Latin periphrasis "circumlocution," from Greek periphrasis, from periphrazein

"speak in a roundabout way," from peri- "round about" + phrazein "to express". In

linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which grammatical meaning is expressed by one or

more free morphemes (typically one or more function words accompanying a content

word), instead of by inflectional affixes or derivation. Periphrastic forms are analytic,

whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthesis. While periphrasis

concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catenae. The verb catenae of

English are highly periphrastic.

Plain English

Plain English (sometimes referred to more broadly as plain language) is a generic term

for communication in English that emphasizes clarity, brevity, and the avoidance of

technical language—particularly in relation to official government or business

communication.

The goal is to write in a way that is easily understood by the target audience: clear and

straightforward, appropriate to their reading skills and knowledge, free of wordiness,

cliché and needless jargon. It often involves using native Anglo-Saxon, or Germanic,

words instead of those derived from Latin and Greek.

Pleonasm

From Greek πλεονασμός (pleonasmos) from πλέον (pleon) meaning "more, too much"

(i.e., “too-much-ism”); the use of more words than is necessary for clear expression. It can

take the form of purely semantic redundancies that are standard usage in a language and

thus unconscious to the user (e.g., the French question "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" meaning

"What is it?" which translates literally as "What is it that it is?"). In most cases, pleonasm

is a question more of style and usage than of grammar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm



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[There exist] many sentences [that could serve to] illustrate [the occurrence of]

pleonasm, but because [of the fact that] space is limited and [in order] to save

time, this will [have to] do.

Prolixity

Prolixity is the use of confusing, verbose sentences which go into endless petty details,

without selection or perspective. It is often done with manipulative intent: to confuse and

mislead (obfuscation), to disguise the actual nature of a position or fact (euphemism), or

to persuade in politics or religion (propaganda). It is especially common in business,

political, and even academic language that is intended to sound impressive (or to be vague

so as to mask what is actually being said). For example:

“This quarter we are presently focusing with determination on an all-new,

innovative, integrated methodology and framework for rapid expansion of

customer-oriented external programs designed and developed to bring the

company's consumer-first paradigm into the marketplace as quickly as possible.”

Redundancy

In linguistics, redundancy means the use of more words when expressing an idea than

necessary; superfluity; a needless repetition in language; wordiness; verbiage. It can be

thought of as the equation A + A + A = A (not 3A). It is a general term which can be

divided into five subtypes: (1) Tautology, (2) Pleonasm, (3) Superfluous Pairs, (4) Stating

the obvious, and (5) Common knowledge.

Sesquipedalianism

Sesquipedalianism is a linguistic style that involves the use of long words. Horace coined

the phrase sesquipedalia verba in his Ars Poetica. It is an agglutinative exocentric

compound of sesqui and pes, meaning “one and a half feet long,” with reference to the

length of a word. The earliest recorded usage in English of ‘sesquipedalian’ is in 1656,

and of 'sesquipedalianism', 1863. The sesquipedalian may be seeking (1) lexical precision;

(2) to demonstrate the benefits of erudition; (3) to stifle intellectual challenge. The

usefulness of sesquipedalianism has been questioned since the origins of the term: Horace

reminds the reader that 'gigantic expressions', along with rants, are set aside by characters

'if they have a mind to move the heart of the spectator with their complaint'. More recently

it has been alleged that it is a form of obscurantism that seeks 'by using logomachinations

to divert discussion to the establishment of the opponent's comprehension of the

vocabulary'.

Some writers may feel that using long and obscure words may make them seem more

intelligent. A recent study from the psychology department of Princeton University found

that this was not the case. Dr. Daniel M. Oppenheimer did research which showed that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolixity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics



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students rated those with short, concise text, as being texts written by the most intelligent

authors. But those who used long words or complex font types were seen as less

intelligent.

Tautology

In grammar, a tautology (from Greek tauto, “the same” and logos, “word/idea”) is an

unnecessary repetition of meaning, using multiple words to effectively say the same thing

(often originally from different languages). It is considered a fault of style and was

defined by A Dictionary of Modern English Usage as “saying the same thing twice.” If an

idea is unintentionally repeated (e.g., “end results”), it may be described as tautological. It

often hinders reader comprehension and undermines the writer's credibility.

Verbiage

The use of mere words without thought; speech or writing that uses too many words or

excessively technical expressions.

Verbosity

Verbosity (also called wordiness, prolixity, grandiloquence, garrulousness, expatiation,

and logorrhea.) refers to speech or writing which is deemed to use an excess of words.

Corresponding adjectival forms are verbose, wordy, prolix, grandiloquent, garrulous, and

logorrheic. The opposite of verbosity is succinctness that can be found in plain language

(or plain English) and laconism.

William Strunk wrote about the balance between being clear and being concise in 1918. He

advised "Use the active voice: Put statements in positive form; Omit needless words."

Mark Twain (1835–1910) wrote "generally, the fewer the words that fully communicate or

evoke the intended ideas and feelings, the more effective the communication."

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), the 1954 Nobel prizewinner for literature, defended his

concise style against a charge by William Faulkner that he "had never been known to use a

word that might send the reader to the dictionary." Hemingway responded by saying, "Poor

Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the

ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and

those are the ones I use."

Blaise Pascal wrote in 1657, "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time

to make it shorter."

Julius Caesar, Roman general (100 BC – 44 BC) spoke concisely of one of his military

successes: “Veni, Vidi, Vici.” ("I came, I saw, I conquered.").


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Glossary of Academic Writing Terms