August 14, 2006: "Du Descriptif"

I have chosen to appropriate today's title from Philippe Hamon's treatise on the text type of description. (To the best of my knowledge, this book has not been translated into English.) I see that the current Wikipedia entry for text types is still in stub form. Perhaps I shall do something about that, but not right now. What Wikipedia does say is that description is one of four text types, the other three being narrative, exposition, and argumentation. The path to my current concern with description is a bit circuitous, so bear with me.

Two of my recent entries (August 9 and August 11) were inspired by my reading the survey paper, "Emergence of Communication Networks," by Peter R. Monge and Noshir S. Contractor and written for the second edition of the Handbook of Organizational Communication. (Yes, I know I said this on August 11!) While it should be apparent that this paper triggered a variety of thoughts while I was reading it, I still have to confess that the act of reading, itself, was quite a slog, to say the least. By the time I reached the "Conclusions" section and was informed that "additional work is required to reduce or eliminate the extensive redundancy that exists among the different theoretical perspectives," I felt like screaming at the authors, "Isn't that what a survey paper is supposed to do?" In ignoring the very possibility of organizing their content to reduce, if not eliminate, all that redundancy in the existing literature, the author's reduced their paper to yet another instance of Winston Churchill's definition of the writing of history: "One damned thing after another."

This could be an excellent excuse for me to get back on my hobby-horse about the deleterious effects of excessive specialization in education, the corrupting force of techno-centrism on today's writing, or just a rant on why writing is more important to an academic career than whether or not what one writes ever gets read. Instead, however, I would prefer to address the question of why survey papers are such formidable intellectual challenges, so much so that it is rare that we run across a really good one. In a way the survey paper is the magnum opus of the descriptive text type, just as the novel is the magnum opus of the narrative text type, the topic-based essay is the magnum opus of the expository text type, and, I suppose, the hard-clad forensic text is the magnum opus of argumentation. The challenge is so great that it is a wonder that surveys get written at all, except that the demand for them has been so heavy in the past. The result is that almost none of them count for exemplars of good descriptive writing.

This is more than a little sad, particularly when we take into account to ancestry of the descriptive text. After all, if we want good examples, we can go as far back as the Homeric epics to find passages such as the description of the shield of Achilles; so we know that good descriptions have been around at least as long as good narratives. So is this just another case of our losing our touch as writers, of those authors who once knew better words now using only four-letter words? (Anything goes, indeed!)

I would argue that this problem is a bit more complicated; and now I have to take a jab a techno-centrism! See, in a world that is now driven by all the databases that store our "knowledge" (those are scare quotes, by the way), we tend to be deceived into flipping the coin around and thinking that knowledge is what we store in databases. So the object of descriptive writing is just that: an object. As database designers will tell you, an object is described in terms of its attributes and its relations to other objects. This is a nice, neat abstraction, so nice and neat that it often can be most conveniently illustrated by a directed graph; and, invoking language that Donald Knuth introduced into our vocabulary, one can then describe the object by traversing the graph that represents it. In other words, if you can represent your description in the abstract form of one of these directed graph, then you should be able to formulate a text description by stringing together smaller textual units for the nodes and edges of that graph. Of course when you do that you get exactly what aggravated Churchill: one damned thing after another. It usually does the reader a greater service to just illustrate the graph and keep the text to a bare minimum.

Needless to say, such a description is not a literary composition; but the prevailing counter-argument is that people who read survey papers are not reading them for their literary value. Granting that, we should still honor the fact that those people are still readers. Even if you are not expecting the quality of Lattimore's translation of the description of the shield of Achilles, shouldn't you expect to take some satisfaction in your act of reading? I suspect that the answer is, "Not any more;" and this, too, has a reason.

One way to view a survey paper is as a reference resource; and we no longer seem to expect literary quality when reading reference resources (even if this used to be a sign of the best of them). This gets me back to the problems I have with invoking the World Wide Web as the ultimate reference resource, be it for Wikipedia, Google, or even that wonderful composite, A9. The thing is that we do not really read these resources. We consult them, often in a highly fragmented manner. (How many times to you get your answer from Google in the excerpt from the hit, rather than actually linking to the hit itself?) We have come to believe that this is all we need; and, if a survey paper is a dry traversal of "one damned thing after another" that happens to be on-line, then Google will find the paper and then the find command will let us find the fragment of text we need. Why should the old-fashioned approach to reading be of any use any more?

One good reason is that the above scenario works best for experts. The people who still have a need for enough literary quality to make the act of reading worth while are the ones trying to come up to speed on a new topic. They often have a need for expository and descriptive texts that really are worth reading (and may be so through the skilled incorporation of argumentation and narrative). This is why "Dummies" guides are actually some of the best examples of writing currently on the market. The people who edit those series realize that their readers need to be provided with reading matter that is as good as the content being covered by the text. Nevertheless, I cannot help but fear that even these resources will eventually get sucked into (ensnared by?) the World Wide Web and lose that quality of writing style that made them so successful in their past. Then, unfortunately, we will have little more than Wikipedia and Google; and I cannot help but believe that our knowledge will suffer for it.