This opinion by Norman Finkelstein on writing really spoke to me:
Yeah there’s definitely a place for style and creativity, for good writers it’s definitely an advantage to have. The problem is when – maybe this is going to sound patronizing – but when English majors decide they want to do politics and they have no background in the field of inquiry and that’s quite common. There’s a left-wing tradition of that and they have deep roots but the most obvious prototype was Trotsky who was a revolutionist part of the day and as he famously had done, as he’s under sealed train going to the front waging the civil war in Russia, he’s writing literary criticism. And Trotsky was both a brilliant political analyst and brilliant literary critic. He happened to combine both.
But most people don’t and what you have now is versions of George Packer, Paul Berman. There’s just a large number of people who know nothing about politics, don’t even think it’s important to do the research side. They simply substitute the clever turn of phrase. The main exemplar of that in recent times was Christopher Hitchens, who really hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. But what he would do is come up with three arcane facts, and with these three arcane facts he would weave a long essay. So people say, oh look at that. They would react in wonder at one or the other pieces of arcana and then take him for a person who is knowledgable.
People unfortunately don’t care very much about content. They care about cleverness. That’s the basis on which The New York Review of Books recruits its authors, you have to be as they say, a good writer. And the same thing with The New Yorker. Now obviously there’s a great virtue to being a good writer, but not when it’s a substitute for content.
He’s alluding to a general, not specific, problem. It isn’t just brilliant prose stylists who can pull a fast one. Engagement, and the ability to weave a good story, is one of the reasons why someone like Malcolm Gladwell is such a great success. But there’s a flip side: truth need not come in an obscure and awkward package. Great scientists such as Charles Darwin were also great communicators. The unfortunate reality though is that for far too many of the chattering class science as filtered through The New Yorker is science. The same with history, politics, and foreign affairs.
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