November is Academic Writing Month. We asked MNU’s Assistant Professor of English Dr. Daniel Schwabauer to provide helpful advice for writers. We hope you both enjoy and learn from his article. 

Jack’s Guide to Academic Writing: Three principles we can learn from C.S. Lewis

by Dr. Daniel Schwabauer

C.S. Lewis, aka “Jack,” is widely respected for his ability to explain difficult concepts in concrete and accessible ways. This achievement is remarkable because he wrote not just for a diverse reading public, but also for scholarly readers. Children have loved his Narnia books, theologians his works defending the Christian faith, and academics his extensive analysis of English literature.

Here are three principles we can borrow from a master communicator whose insight continues to engage and educate.

1. Befriend your audience. No one likes to be patronized. Readers quickly recognize when they’re being talked down to, even if the effect is unintended. Lewis avoids this not by using small words or small ideas but by focusing on what he and his readers have in common. Figuratively, Lewis walks beside his readers, not in front of them. For instance, he opens Voyage of the Dawn Treader with a brilliant narrative hook that immediately tells children he respects their values: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
2. Strive for clarity over nuance. This is difficult for academics because we tend to see the nuance in everything. We value accuracy and specificity, so our language easily balloons into precise formulations that are fat with excessive parentheticals and inflated jargon. Such nuance smothers clarity. And without clarity, nuance is wasted.

Lewis starts Mere Christianity, “Everyone has heard people quarrelling.” Which is a clever beginning, but is it quite true? Has everyone heard people quarrelling? What about the deaf? What about newborns? Surely there are exceptions. Still, are those exceptions in the minds of readers? Probably not. This is why nuance should not be our guiding principle; it is a microscope, not a map.

Clarity, on the other hand, is a limitation that makes the strategic use of nuance effective. When writing, therefore, aim to simplify your words and sentences as much as possible without sacrificing your core ideas.

3. Engage the reader’s imagination. Perhaps the most difficult of the three principles, this requires the use of examples and details based on sensory images—sights, sounds, smells, odors, etc. Academic prose typically relies on concepts based in fact and theory rather than on events grounded in bodily experiences. The essential difference is that the latter can be imagined, but the former can only be evaluated from a distance as abstractions.

It makes sense that we write this way; after all, we deal primarily in facts and theories. But prose bereft of images is almost always boring.

The key, then, is to enflesh concepts. Use active verbs and concrete similes and unexpected metaphors. Give readers not just something they can imagine, but something they must imagine, as Lewis does in his review of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “On the one hand, the whole world is going to the war; the story rings with galloping hoofs, trumpets, steel on steel. On the other, very far away, miserable figures creep (like mice on a slag heap) through the twilight of Mordor.”

Dr. Daniel Schwabauer is a faculty member in the Department of Arts and Humanities. Learn more about programs in the department at MNU at mnu.edu/academic-departments/arts-humanities-department.