Introduction
Clarity in writing is a reigning taken-for-granted virtue (Barnard 2010). This journal, for instance, asks its reviewers to assess whether a manuscript under consideration is coherent, logical, well-written, and jargon-free. Disability & Society adopts a similar position, advising authors to avoid ‘cumbersome and over-technical terminology’ and submit work that is ‘written in a clear and accessible manner’. The journal further explains that it does not intend the journal’s readers to be ‘a small coterie of academics or professionals’, and thus suggests that ‘contributors ought to make every effort to ensure their work is accessible to all’. It also requires authors to provide a ‘Points of Interest’ section for each article that summarises the text in ‘plain English’ for lay readers. The International Journal of Disability and Social Justice goes a step further by providing ‘Plain English summaries’ for each published article. Many other journals – those within and beyond disability studies – have similar requirements that seek and proselytise the virtues of clarity.
In this article, I depart from the prevailing orthodoxies articulated above (and elsewhere) and trouble the imperative of ‘clarity’ in disability studies writing. Taking my cue from Ian Barnard’s (2010) ‘The Ruse of Clarity’, I suggest that clarity is a fiction that is freighted with ideological baggage. Barnard (2010) takes issue with clarity in the contexts of student writing, composition classrooms, and the attacks of ‘unclear’ work leveraged at critical theorists. I extend this discussion to the domain of disability studies, where the quest for clarity is particularly dominant amidst the politics of accessibility – in buildings, society, and language – that are particularly animated (Titchkosky 2011). Barnard (2010, 437) argues that the quest for clarity functions to celebrate or renounce some language (and ideas) over others, such that the ‘instantiation or recuperation of clarity has political motives and implications beyond the literal desire to enjoy “clear” writing’. As Barnard (2010) mentions, calls for clarity intersect with complaints pitted against particular theories, and we see this play out in disability studies where perspectives such as post-structuralism are chastised for their ‘obfuscating language’ (Hammell 2006, 93). I intend to show that clarity is not as self-evident as some might think, and that the ‘obviousness’ of clarity acts as a foil, and its promotion works to silence and/or discount some ideas over others.
The main objective of this article is not to praise or condemn writing that is clear or otherwise – all types of writing are appropriate in particular contexts, each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and ‘for or against’ arguments can be rather facile – but to, instead, trouble the politics under which attachments to ‘clarity’ are promoted or critiqued (Barnard 2010). While some may argue that clarity helps to democratise knowledge (Williams and Bizup 2017), I note that clarity is often a futile exercise that may help silence and/or discount knowledge. What is clear for one may be unclear for another, and clarity can obscure or restrict (Barnard 2010). I propose that ‘clarity’ may be more problematic than its taken-for-granted status suggests, and I speculate whether it may be more efficacious to champion work that sits outside of the ‘clear’ in its efforts of opening, rather than foreclosing, ways of speaking, writing, and understanding. The shift from ‘knowledge communism’ to ‘academic capitalism’ (Ding and Li 2022) – produced and co-implicated with (the injunction for) ‘clarity’, the democratisation of knowledge, open access, plain language, accessibility, and disciplinary silos – produces byproducts and (un)intended consequences, and this article seeks to tease out the injunction for clarity in disability contexts from a critical perspective.
In what follows, I start by surveying the literature – within and beyond disability studies – that promotes clarity in writing. Much of the rhetoric surrounding clarity stems from writing and style guides, academic norms, and the politics of plain language and accessibility within disability studies. I then trouble the quest for clarity by focussing on three overlapping observations. First, clarity is not objective but subjective, and thus, an inherently futile task. Second, clarity is overburdened by ideological baggage and often used as a vehicle to promote some ideas while renouncing others. Clarity thus works to police ideas. Third, while ‘unclear writing’ may be pitted as a form of ‘linguistic ableism’ (Row 2024), I make the counterintuitive claim that ‘unclear writing’ may, in fact, attend to the best parts of disabled onto-epistemologies. The quest for clarity is a normative and capitalist project (Acton 2023), and considering the ways that communication and disabled subjectivity are both messy, confusing, or ‘unclear’, it may be that diverse, multivocal, or ‘unclear’ communication attends better to the different registers with which people and understanding are comprehended. In other words, if clarity stands in for the ‘known’ and the ‘normative’, unclear writing may help chart new, different, and unconventional ways of understanding. The quest for clarity can be entirely legitimate but it is worth considering the ways in which it can be weaponised to serve particular ends. Turning to the quest for clarity helps capture the ways in which ideas may be delimited rather than liberated.
The Quest for Clarity
Borrow almost any book about writing and it will most likely advocate the virtues of clarity (Sword 2012). Grünfeld (2020) notes that many rules or principles in writing or style guides – such as readability, precision, or accessibility – interanimate with clarity. Strunk and White’s (2000) Elements of Style, for example, contain many writing rules and principles clustering around clarity: use the active voice because it is clearer; omit needless words to avoid confusion; be clear because writing is communication. Lanham (2003) likewise observes the three values central to prose style (clarity, brevity, and sincerity), while other texts promote the ‘three C’s’ (clarity, coherence, and concision; Haynes 2010). Sword (2012) identified 100 writing guides published between 2000 and 2010 to analyse the advice offered to writers and found more than 80% of them discussed clarity. Sword (2012) notes, however, that several other concepts overlap with clarity (such as ‘plain language’), demonstrating the near unanimity with which clarity operates as a key writing principle.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sword (2012, 27) also found that ‘[o]ne of the most damning findings of my research is that these principles are so often preached yet so seldom practiced’, which speaks to issues of objectivity/subjectivity, lack of agreement regarding how these values can be achieved, and the inherent futility of the task. Williams and Bizup (2017, 7) speculate that considerable work remains unclear because ‘[o]ur own writing always seems clearer to us than to our readers’. Lanham (2003, 2) notes that the ‘three C’s’ (clarity, coherence, and concision) are ‘difficult to confute in the abstract’ but nevertheless ‘prove marvellously unhelpful when you come to actually write something’:
[t]here are so many ways of being clear! So many different audiences to be clear to! When I tell you to ‘Be clear’ I am simply telling you to ‘Succeed,’ ‘Get the message across.’ Again, good advice but not much real help. I have not solved your problem, I’ve simply restated it. ‘Clarity,’ in such a formulation, refers to words on a page but to responses, yours or your reader’s. And the writer has to write words on a page, not ideas in a mind.
It is easier to find examples of scholars (and others) proselytising clarity and more difficult to find instances where they delineate precisely why it should be a virtue and how it can be achieved (Barnard 2010). There is nevertheless a general taken-for-grantedness towards the virtues of clarity and an inherent presumption that an idea can be transferred to all readers clearly (Lanham 2003).
Grünfeld (2020, 2) argues that ‘clarity is generally conceived as a self-evident favourable attribute of academic writing’, but some scholars do highlight why clarity should be virtuous. Strunk and White (2000, 79), for example, highlight the consequences of unclear writing: a ‘death on a highway caused by a badly worded sign’, or a ‘heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter’. Strunk and White (2000) thus conceive un/clear writing as consequential, and potentially even a matter of life and death. Williams and Bizup (2017, 6) claim categorically, without elaboration, that ‘[u]nclear writing is a social problem’. Yet the ‘how’ of clarity remains unclear; different rules and principles are promoted across these writing and style guides – such as whether jargon is acceptable or whether titles should be informative or engaging (Sword 2012) – suggesting there is little consensus regarding how clarity can be achieved.
Writing and style guides are either disciplinary-specific or multidisciplinary in scope. Sword (2012, 24) suggests that academia has a general taken-for-granted attitude towards the virtuousness of clarity, and that scholars generally source their guidance on writing from three sources: ‘memories of what, if anything, our dissertation supervisors told us about good writing; occasional peer feedback on our work; and examples of recently published writing in academic journals where we aspire to publish’. Sword (2012, 24) concludes that these sources ‘tend to be forces for conservatism’ within writing amidst academia’s cultures and norms. As Nathues, Leybold, and Nadegger (2024, 1) recently lamented, ‘writing is measured and molded, suffocating in a corset of norms and expectations in the neoliberal university’. Journals, including disability studies journals, likewise police the type of writing that is accepted and published, as I outlined in the introduction.
The push for clarity in disability studies derives from several sources. Notwithstanding the broader norms in academia and academic writing, disability politics is invested in access and accessibility, which refers to the ways in which various cultural, physical, environmental, intellectual, and financial/economic spaces and practices can be organised to ensure the inclusion or participation of disabled people (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006; Smilges 2023). In writing, the politics of accessibility often coalesces around ‘plain language’, which emerged heavily in the 1970s and still dominates the disability studies landscape (Acton 2023; Barnard 2010). Plain language and clarity in writing is seen by many within disability studies as an ethical and political imperative; as a praxis of openness that invites a wider range of readers into the conversation and particularly beyond academic circles (Dolmage 2017; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018; Shakespeare 1996). Dolmage (2017, 32), for example, cautions against ‘inflat[ing] our work’ with ‘theory’ and ‘difficult language’, suggesting that the ‘process of making academic writing more and more academic can be a process of ableism and it can reproduce ableism’. Inaccessibility and ableism are closely linked; unclear writing can be inaccessible, and accessibility is not too far from clarity (Lather 1996; Row 2024). As Acton (2023, 61) suggests, ‘plain language is all about communicating clearly and easily’. Dolmage (2017, 34) also connects inaccessibility with his conception of ‘academic ableism’: ‘[w]hen we think about access, we also need to understand that most of the scholarly conversation in academia is not at all accessible’. Much of disability studies and activism rests on the assumption that ableism is about access (Smilges 2023), and given that ‘unclear writing’ is conventionally seen as an access problem, clarity is conceived as a taken-for-granted, accessible, and anti-ableist goal.
Thinking from a critical access studies perspective, however, I question the ‘treatment of access as a “self-evident good”’ (Hamraie 2017, 13), and apply this in the contexts of ‘un/clear writing’ and the slippages between access and ableism. Without denying the importance of access (and clarity), I am concerned with the ways that ‘disability activism often frame[s] ableism as a collection of access problems’ (Smilges 2023, 3). As Mingus (2017) also notes, access for its own sake is not necessarily liberatory and may in fact reinforce the status quo. For Smilges (2023), accessibility does not automatically address ableism, and to suggest otherwise results in a form of ‘cruel optimism’. Originally conceived by Berlant (2011, 1) as a relation that exists when ‘something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’, Smilges (2023, 7) argues that an over-emphasis on access will ‘only end in disappointment when the access we demand merely shifts the variety of the ableism we face’. My concern with clarity, operating under the veil of access, is not so much its availability but its utility, and I worry that we are asking too much of clarity – as if it will solve all our problems (Smilges 2023). In other words, does the energy we invest in clarity provide the liberation we want it to?
There are certainly times when clarity is necessary. Just think, for example, of the COVID-19 pandemic and the urgent necessity with which information needed to be communicated clearly, and particularly for many disabled folks (Goggin and Ellis 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly its earlier phases, created disorientation and confusion for many people (Lupton and Willis 2021). Sign language interpreters were often missing from televised press conferences, the use of face masks caused communication issues for many disabled folks, critical public health messages were often confusing (or ‘unclear’ for some people), and the rules changed constantly (Butler 2022; Goggin and Ellis 2020; Thorneycroft and Asquith 2021). The exclusion of disabled people from the conversation is problematic and tantamount to the same exclusion faced in broader society. A lack of clarity can indeed create a range of risks and vulnerabilities, suggesting that clarity may indeed be a matter of life and death in particular contexts.
Troubling the quest for clarity in writing may thus appear frivolous, and particularly when the majority of disabled people live in the global South, many do not have access to education, and many are subjected to conflict, violence, poverty, and malnutrition (Goodley and Swartz 2016; Grech 2009; Grech and Soldatic 2016; Meekosha and Soldatic 2011). Goodley (2017, 19) argues that the ‘complexity of disability demands subtle, culturally specific and historically sensitive theories and forms of activism’, and it is worth acknowledging my (ambiguous) location in the global North (Collyer 2021). The reflections and arguments I am making from my location ‘may have limited value in the rest of the world’ (Goodley 2017, 20). This is why I do not discount the value of clarity in and of itself and instead subscribe to and/both rather than either/or logics, and focus on clarity’s utility rather than its availability. The contexts in which Barnard (2010) was writing are very different from my own, and particularly when disability has heterogenous and complex local and global dimensions. While the concerns raised in this article may not be global (or urgent) in scale, it is nevertheless worth intelligibilising the ways that ‘clarity’ is used, weaponised, and/or undermined in particular contexts. As deconstruction has taught us, speaking only of the extremities and margins of life and scholarly inquiry silences the middle that creates the extremities and margins in the first place.
The (perhaps increasing) demand for clarity may be indicative of the changing nature of universities. Once privileged as a bastion of research and ‘higher thinking’, universities are increasingly corporatised, metricised, and accountable (Connell 2019). Changing funding models increasingly demand research of ‘national interest’, connection with ‘industry partners’, and ‘outreach’ or ‘direct engagement’ with communities who are researched (Turner 2024). These shifts affect some disciplines and ideas in different ways (e.g., changes might leave engineering or science departments unaffected, while cultural studies experience existential crises). ‘Curiosity-driven’ research is vanishing, and the ‘democratisation of knowledge’ demands information packaged in a particular ‘clear’ way (Knöchelmann 2021; Turner 2024). Disability studies has dived into these trends amidst their focus on accessibility, activist orientations, the material reality of disabled experience, and the famous slogan ‘nothing about us without us’. Plain language, easy read, and participatory research all coalesce with ‘clarity’, even as many of these practices remain inaccessible or even ‘unclear’ (Chinn and Homeyard 2017). Despite the proliferation of plain language and easy read practices and guides, for example, research continues to suggest that information needs to be individually tailored, adaptable, and mutually reciprocal (Chinn and Homeyard 2017; Hurtado, Jones and Burniston 2014; Sutherland and Isherwood 2016). Standardised ‘clear’ messages in writing may play a part, but they do not solve the problem. Clarity, as Barnard (2010) notes, is a ruse. The following section troubles the quest for clarity by teasing out three possibilities: that clarity is a fantasy, a ruse that functions to legitimise some ideas over others, and a practice that may betray the disparate and multivocal nature of disability.
Clarity: A Fantasy?
The pervasive injunction for clarity in writing is presented as obvious and natural. As Barnard (2010, 436) notes, ‘clarity’s desirability is almost always taken for granted, and clarity is almost always spoken of as if its meaning were obvious (as if we all know if something is clear, as if what I find to be clear will always also be what you find to be clear)’. Culler and Lamb (2003, 1–2) note similarly, in the context of ‘bad writing’, which often stands in for ‘unclear writing’: ‘the striking feature of the accusation of bad writing is that it seems not to require explanation or demonstration, as if all one has to do is quote a sentence and people will instantly recognize how awful it is’. They note further that the allegation of ‘bad writing’ works through an ‘appeal to transparency that assigns badness to opacity’ (Culler and Lamb 2003, 2). ‘[I]f the most credible gloss for bad in bad writing is simply “unclear”’, they write, ‘doesn’t the word itself—as an unclear substitution for the word unclear—enact the same failure of clarity it decries?’ (Culler and Lamb 2003, 2, italics in original). Here we see the accusation of bad/unclear writing enact the very same problem it condemns. This illustrates the opacity of ‘clarity’ itself, and indeed, it may be that ‘bad’ or ‘unclear writing’ merely means exposure to that which is ‘unfamiliar’ (Culler and Lamb 2003). Clarity is thus used as a shorthand for instantiating an ever-increasing range of norms and expectations (in writing).
What is clear for one may be unclear for another, and this may change according to time, place, and context. Clarity is thus subjective rather than objective, and far from self-evident, and rather opaque and fantastical. Lather (1996) argues that writers should be suspicious of the idea that the delivery of a message, written in a generic or universal style, can ever be guaranteed because clarity is far from transparent. Acton (2023) reviewed 5 major ‘plain language’ disability studies guides and found 72 suggestions, yet only 14 suggestions featured in two or more texts. Some suggestions appear benign (e.g., use headings), while others create more questions than answers, such as ‘put your information in an order that makes sense’ – ‘makes sense’ for whom? Lather (1996, 526–527) suggests writers make a mistake if they believe language can assume ‘a mirroring relationship between the word and the world’ (Lather 1996, 526–527). Similarly, Butler (2015, 28) notes that ‘[t]here is no writing without the body, but no body fully appears along with the writing that it produces’, which suggests issues of interpretation due to the disconnection between the body, the writing, and the (eventual) reader. Clarity has become an imperative of writing, even as it remains elusive and perhaps unattainable (Barnard 2010).
Judith Butler’s scholarship has influenced pockets of disability studies despite their ‘notoriously obtuse writing style’ (Samuels 2002, 61), which has been critiqued extensively. In 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Butler first prize in their Bad Writing Contest for an obscure 94-word sentence clanger (Butler 1997; Culler and Lamb 2003). Responding to ‘critics and friends’ who likewise critiqued their style in Gender Trouble (1990), Butler (1999, xix) responded in the preface to the 10th anniversary edition that ‘style is complicated terrain, and not one that we unilaterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously intend’. Butler (1999, xix) elaborates that ‘one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice’. Butler (1999) also argues that writing and language are not politically neutral but normative projects that restrict thought and understanding. For Butler (1999), the rules of grammar constrain ideas.
Butler (1999, xx) also argues that ‘clarity’ can be obscure or duplicitous:
[t]he demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly ‘clear’ view. Avital Ronell recalls the moment in which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, ‘let me make one thing perfectly clear’ and then proceeded to lie. What travels under the sign of ‘clarity,’ and what would be the price of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival of lucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of ‘clarity’ and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does ‘transparency’ keep obscure?
Clarity is often cloaked with innocent purity, but it can in fact lie and distort. There is an obligation to question and interrogate the claims that clarity makes. While Row (2024, 90) notes that ‘simplifying difficult language may seem to be a democratizing, even generous practice’, it may paradoxically complexify or distort the meanings and intentions with which ideas are expressed.
What is inside/outside accessibility and clarity, and who is the judge? Acton (2023, 65, 69) notes that ‘people don’t agree on how to write plain language’ and ‘there is never one right way of being, doing, and communicating’. Guidelines exist but they are inconsistent, and research continues to suggest that ‘easy read’ is perhaps not that easy to read (Hurtado, Jones and Burniston 2014; Sutherland and Isherwood 2016). Through research with ‘easy’ information providers in Australia, Meltzer, Barnes, and Wehbe (2025) argue that ‘easy read’ and other variations, such as ‘easy English’ or ‘plain language’, are political and contested, and neither neutral nor self-evident. Perhaps ironically, they found a ‘lack of clarity’ in ‘easy’ information and conclude that no format will serve everyone (Meltzer, Barnes and Wehbe 2025, 4). For Lather (1996, 528), ‘clear and concise prose would be a sort of cheat’ because we often ‘need a density that fits the thoughts being expressed’. Clarity is a fiction because texts may only accumulate meaning as the text progresses, and writers have long known the ‘crisis of representation’ and the death of the author (Barthes 1977). Reception often takes on a life of its own, and might exceed what was intended (Lather 1996). Not understanding a text, or finding the text difficult to follow or understand, also becomes a site of power from which to criticise the text (Barnard 2010). Clarity in writing reflects a humanist realist project, yet such ideological positions are invisibilised through the alleged ‘non-political’ and ‘taken-for-granted’ virtues of clarity. The next section further illustrates the ways that calls for clarity are often far from innocent.
Clarity: Non-innocent?
Barnard (2010) argues that the reigning taken-for-granted ‘innocence’ of clarity in writing is, in fact, often cloaked by non-innocent ideological imperatives. For Barnard (2010, 437), the ‘instantiation or recuperation of clarity has political motives and implications beyond the literal desire to enjoy “clear” writing’, where the request for clarity ‘intersect with complaints of obfuscation in scholarly writing in the humanities’. Coupled with the rise of ‘plain language’ discourses in the 1970s and the ascendency of critical theory in the latter half of the 20th century, Barnard (2010, 437) notes that:
charges of willful obscurantism were hurled at theory from anti-intellectuals, from readers who found theory difficult and frustrating, from critics on the Right who felt threatened by the ideologies of postmodernism and poststructuralism, from critics on the Left who believed that theory’s density diminished its political efficacy, and from those inhabiting any combination of these positions.
Charges of unnecessary intellectualism and verbosity loom large; Williams and Bizup (2017, 7) claim that writers are sucked into the practice: ‘when we become confused by a complex style, we too easily assume that its complexity signals deep thought, and so we try to imitate it, making our already confused writing even worse’. Complex theories and ideas told ‘unclearly’ are rendered highly suspicious and perhaps even ‘try-hard’.
The taken-for-granted championing of clarity often acts as a foil for the celebration or condemnation of theoretical, philosophical, and political perspectives (Barnard 2010). Barnard (2010, 439) explains that ‘complex prose and vocabulary and difficult ideas get constructed as the antithesis of clarity, but theory itself becomes the object of attack’. One infamous example representative of these conflations is Nussbaum’s (1999) critique of Butler’s scholarship in ‘The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler’ published in The New Republic. Observing a ‘new, disquieting trend’ in American feminism, where Butler ‘shaped these developments more than any other’, Nussbaum takes Butler to task for their ‘lofty obscurity’, ‘disdainful abstractness’, and ‘dense’, ‘ponderous’, and ‘obscure’ writing style (1999, 38). Writing in a ‘teasing, exasperating way’, Nussbaum asserts non-academic audiences ‘would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose’ (1999, 39, 38). Nussbaum (1999, 39) argues that ‘obscurity creates an aura of importance’, and that such writing ‘bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought’ – echoing Williams and Bizup’s (2017) claims above. For Nussbaum (1999, 37), Butler is putting ‘fancy words on paper’ rather than utilising feminist theory for social change.
Yet it is in fact Butler’s feminist theories that Nussbaum (1999) is most interested in excoriating through a rejection of Butler’s ‘unclear’ writing. When drilling into Butler’s ideas, Nussbaum (1999, 39) claims they are ‘not especially new’ and rather ‘thin’, and thus, Butler’s ‘obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument’. Nussbaum (1999, 40) suggests Butler’s main theoretical idea is that ‘gender is a social artifice’. For Nussbaum (1999), Plato, John Stuart Mill, and others already told us this. Nussbaum (1999, 39–40) then proceeds to pit Butler against philosophy and instead situate Butler’s work within the ‘adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric’. Nussbaum (1999, 40) writes:
[e]ver since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others’ manipulative methods showed only disrespect.
On one side of Nussbaum’s (1999, 40) binary, there is philosophy that exemplifies good language and shows ‘respect for the soul’, and on the other there is sophistry and rhetoric and their ‘obscurantist sleight-of-hand’. The division is not logical but rather ideological – there is no explication (or evidence) regarding how or why these different disciplines embody or practice ‘clarity’ any more than another. What is more, Butler is well-acknowledged as a philosopher and rhetorician. Literature in philosophy, sophistry, and rhetoric can all be unclear or otherwise, and Nussbaum (1999) exposes the ways in which she has different degrees of tolerance for certain types of writing, much of which rests on the ideas and her palatability towards them.
Immediately following the indented quote I introduced above, Nussbaum (1999, 40) recounts feeling ‘fatigued’ by Butler’s writing on a long flight. Turning to a student’s drafted dissertation on ‘Hume’s views of personal identity’, Nussbaum (1999, 40) felt her ‘spirits reviving’: ‘[d]oesn’t she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride’. Ferguson (2003, 17) objects to this passage because it conveys an implied judgement that ‘Hume and the student writing “clear” prose…are morally superior to Butler because their writing styles (presumably quite different) are less fatiguing’. Nussbaum (1999, 40) then describes Hume as a ‘fine…gracious spirit’ because he ‘kindly […] respects the reader’s intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty’. Ironically, Hume is celebrated for exposing his ‘uncertainties’ while Butler is renounced for being too mystifying and abstract (Ferguson 2003).
Nussbaum criticises many aspects of Butler’s work – such as their (alleged) lack of focus on the material reality of women’s lives, or their (alleged) failure to identify a normative project of social justice – but Nussbaum (1999, 42) largely directs these complaints through the veil of Butler’s ‘abstract pronouncements’. The political differences between Nussbaum and Butler are evident, and the former does not have much patience with the post-structuralist imperatives of the latter, and as Barnard (2010, 442) notes, ‘demands for clarity often converge with covert resistance to poststructuralist epistemologies’. Nussbaum’s (1999) complaints about Butler’s prose are ideological reactions to the theoretical frameworks that Butler values.
Criticisms of ‘unclear’ writing in disability studies are not as detailed or exhaustive but they nevertheless exist, and much of it clusters (again) around charges against critical and post-structuralist thinking. Examining disability scholars exploring the sociology of the body, Hammell (2006, 93), cited in the introduction, condemns the ‘flights of fancy’ and ‘obfuscating language’. Hammell (2006, 93) criticises further that such theories are ‘difficult to read’ and ‘intellectually elitist’. Hammell (2006, 93) invokes Oliver’s (2009, 50) claim that scholars endlessly theorising (and not simply using) the social model are engaging in ‘intellectual masturbation’. Incidentally, Lather (1996, 528), in responding to criticisms towards their ‘unclear writing’ in Troubling the Angels: Women Living with HIV/AIDS (1995), notes that many accusations against ‘high theory’ are described as a ‘masturbatory activity’. The accusation of ‘unclear’ writing is undergirded with a non-innocent connotation of vacuousness, which itself is a cover against the ideas (and theories) themselves.
Shakespeare (2015, 3) describes critical disability studies as being ‘overly theoretical and lacking in political utility’. This latter critique – ‘lacking in political utility’ – is often levelled at post-structuralist or ‘constructionist’ writing; Shakespeare (2013, 5, 52) elsewhere notes these scholars ‘emphasise the role of discourse rather more than the impact of material forces’, or that ‘writers generally seem much more interested in texts and discourses then in the ordinary lives of disabled people’. After spending a chapter criticising the ideas with what he calls ‘cultural disability studies’, which he associates with Margrit Shildrick, Robert McRuer, Fiona K. Campbell, and others, Shakespeare (2013, 71) argues that these ‘texts are opaque. The language seems redolent of the heyday of French post-structuralist and postmodernist theory, and thus not just inaccessible but also rather dated. The reader is liable to get conceptual indigestion’. The charges of bad writing and political inefficacies collapse into each other.
Tremain (2002) also falls victim to the charge of ‘unclear’ writing, yet this charge is again conflated with their theories and politics. Vehmas and Mäkelä (2009, 44) write:
some points that certain disability scholars have stated about impairment on the basis of postmodern ideas, and the entailments thereof, appear to us as peculiar, confusing, and even unhelpful. What is one to make of statements such as the following: ‘impairment and its materiality are naturalised effects of disciplinary knowledge/power’ (Tremain, 2002, 34)?
Vehmas and Mäkelä (2009) posit non-realist disability perspectives as ‘unclear’. They write: ‘[n]umerous similar extracts can be found in the disability studies literature…that leave philosophers with realist leanings, such as us, perplexed and confused’. Again, on the one hand, realism and clarity, and on the other, non-realism and confusion. The quest for ‘clarity’ is thus not so much ‘matter-of-fact’ but rather imbricated with the renunciation of contrarian viewpoints (Barnard 2010).
The injunction for clarity may also ‘chill’ or silence particular knowledges – even if such knowledges are benign or non-controversial. For example, Walmsley (2001) valorises accessibility in disability studies research but worries that its materialisation may inadvertently silence particular discourses. Walmsley (2001, 202) writes: ‘[m]y fear is that inclusive researchers are so fearful of saying things which people with learning difficulties cannot follow that they say very little, leaving the field of theorising to others, including disabled scholars, with little or no commitment to inclusion’. Here we see how the push for accessibility and clarity in writing may actually silence discourse. Whereas some scholars imply that inaccessible language reproduces ableism (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018), this example illustrates that silence may inadvertently do the same thing. Even clear writing may contribute to the ableist project as well.
Clarity: Ableist?
This section progresses the counterintuitive argument that ‘clarity’ in writing may in fact be closer to ableism than disability activists and scholars might otherwise suggest. Acton (2023, 58) rightly notes that ‘[b]ig words and complicated ideas mean some people can’t be part of disability culture and activism. Plain language [and clarity] is a way to include those people’. And yet, following in the likes of Row (2024), St. Pierre (2017), and others, it may also be that clarity is at odds with disabled subjectivity and in fact reifies hegemonic ways of communicating. Eschewing alternative communication styles may not attend to disabled subjectivity, which is, after all, porous, messy, varied, relational, and unstable (McRuer 2006; Shildrick 2009). Noting the futility and ideological baggage associated with ‘clarity’, it may be that the politics of clarity subscribes to a singular and humanist notion of the neoliberal subject that privileges ‘master narratives’ that sideline non-normative ways of being and doing. The ‘virtues’ of clarity may also be implicated within a wider capitalist system that privileges time, productivity, linearity, and outputs – or in short, ‘clear’ language serves the communicative demands of the neoliberal capitalist project (Row 2024; St. Pierre 2017).
Drawing on the work of McRuer (2006), St. Pierre (2015, 2017), and Yergeau (2018), Acton (2023) suggests that ableist culture expects people to speak and write clearly, quickly, logically, univocally, and efficiently. Contemporary neoliberal society is imbricated with capitalism, master narratives, normativity, and objectivity (Shildrick 2019), and ‘clear’ communication services these logics. As McRuer (2006, 159) writes in the contexts of the composition classroom, ‘the demand for certain kinds of finished projects in the writing classroom is congruent with the demand for certain kinds of bodies’. Funding requirements also increasingly demand the production of plain language texts, which risks homogenising forms of communication that strip the complexity of thought. Clarity in writing may not be so much about bending writing to meet the needs of everyone, but about bending writing to meet the needs (and bodyminds) of the normative abled subject. Clarity in writing is promoted for being inclusive, but inclusion rests on an exclusive divide – on who and who does not belong, how inclusive practices for some people create exclusive effects for others, and how and what inclusion excludes (Butler 1990; Rasmussen 2003; Young 1990).
Earlier I mentioned I did not intend on celebrating or castigating different types of writing. Row (2024) observes that ‘simplifying language’ has become a key consideration concerning accessibility within disability studies, and Alice Wong’s ‘plain language translation’ of Disability Visibility (2020) is one example of this practice (Luterman 2020). In the foreword to the text, Luterman (2020, 4) notes that ‘[d]isability advocacy can be unfriendly to people who don’t know all the right words. Jargon, academic language, and policy speak are access barriers too many disability advocates forget’. Plain language is one mechanism in which accessibility can be pursued. But, as Row (2024, 90) argues, ‘rather than rectifying these hegemonies of belonging or excellence by simplifying language, perhaps we might take aim at the very construction of the norms of articulacy’. If clarity is futile and ideological, as argued above, and if clarity is part of the normative (and potentially ableist) project, then it may be more efficacious to trouble the politics of clarity and promote more diverse and democratic ways of communicating.
St. Pierre (2017) and Yergeau (2018) each seek to accommodate the generative aspects of non-normative communication. St. Pierre (2017), for instance, notes that fluency is a biopolitical and hegemonic technology that demands the ‘seamless’, ‘frictionless’, and ‘standardised’ flow of speech. In so doing, fluency is ableist because it prescribes a standardised way of being and doing centred around the normative subject which deems ‘non-fluent’ practices as problematic (St. Pierre 2017). St. Pierre (2017) introduces the term ‘dysfluency’ as a crip rejoinder, which refers to the often unruly, non-singular, unintelligible, and illegible communication styles that subvert normative demands. For St. Pierre (2017, 351), ‘disability politics are always, in part, a question of heterogeneous temporalities and differential rates of access that have been swept up in an unsustainable ableist beat’. The demand for clarity and intelligibility restrict alternatives for dysfluent people and dysfluency opens crip resources against normativity (St. Pierre 2017). Yergeau (2018) similarly troubles the normative demands placed upon non-normative bodyminds. Yergeau (2018) discusses autistic people’s usage of echolalia – the repetition of sound or speech – which is very rarely about the ordinary meaning of that sound or speech. Rather, echolalia features to convey a range of feelings and emotions and need not be tied to a singular meaning or relationship between the sound/speech and their ordinary meaning (Yergeau 2018). The use of echolalia thus creates multiple meanings beyond the literal and self-evident. St. Pierre (2017) and Yergeau (2018) seek to open alternative spaces in which different communication methods and meanings can materialise.
Each of the scholars discussed above suggest there is merit in recognising the multiple ways in which communication and understanding occurs. There is no universal standard of communication, and as Acton (2023, 69) notes, ‘[u]sually the best way to make things accessible is to have lots of different ways of communicating’. Clarity, in contrast, is rooted in normative expectations that seek to instantiate monoculturalism and erase multivalent and multivocal voices. Clarity is celebrated ostensibly for its connections with accessibility, but what if clarity perpetuates ableist practices? What if there is value in leaning into different ‘unclear’ pathways of communication?
Recognising ‘Unclear’ Communication
Sitting behind the quest for clarity is the preconception that ‘unclear’ writing (and communication) is problematic and improper. Rather than rely on this taken-for-granted and deficit-focussed approach, however, in this section I speculate the values of ‘unclear’ writing. While there is certainly a need for different types of writing in different contexts, ‘unclear’ writing may foster multivalent and multivocal perspectives and knowledges. The normative expectations placed upon ‘clear’ writing may obscure or foreclose alternative ways of doing, being, and understanding. As Butler (1999, xix) argues, it ‘would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself’. Elsewhere Butler (2003, 200) asserts that ‘one of the most important ways to call into question the status quo is by engaging language in nonconventional ways’. Sexuality and gender diverse and disabled populations, for instance, have often sat outside of intelligible language and discursive protocols (Butler 1990). Row (2024, 91) similarly notes that ‘[m]inority positions…and communication practices may not necessarily have an easy, clear ready-made form of expression in language’, while Acton (2023) notes that disabled communities have a reputation for (re)claiming and twisting language – such as ‘crip’ or ‘mad’, for instance. Barnard (2010, 447) similarly writes, ‘[e]xisting language and conventional language structures may be inadequate to embody ideas that often critique language itself and the power structures that inform conventional language’. Unclear writing may not be so much about ‘willful obscurantism’ (Barnard 2010, 437) but rather trying to penetrate something that seems worth knowing yet seemingly beyond the grasp of (intelligible) discourse.
There may be value leaning into difficult speech and expression (Barnard 2010; Lather 1996; Row 2024). Barnard (2010, 446) argues ‘sometimes writing that “doesn’t work” is still interesting and productive’: ‘[w]hy pretend that we aren’t sometimes entranced by writing that is mysterious or enigmatic or illogical – by writing over which the writer or reader does not always have complete control?’ Clear writing can produce predictable or unimaginative arguments, and I sometimes think back to a writing camp during my PhD and a professor who had the confidence to confess, ‘I often don’t know what I’m trying to say until I’ve written it’. Many scholars think through their writing and it may be worthwhile parsing more critically the many phases of the writing journey (reading, thinking, drafting, revising, rewriting, editing, restructuring, etc.) and the role that clarity serves during these stages – not to mention the imagined audiences (or reviewers) that influence and alter the drafting and redrafting process (Kaag and van Belle 2024). Why do we forget the difficulty and labour of writing and pretend that complex ideas can be expressed clearly and logically? Rather than demonise ‘unclear’ writing it may be worth recognising that ‘sometimes something that escapes clarity’s bounds gestures toward revelation’ (Barnard 2010, 447). Where clarity stands in for the ‘known’ and the ‘normative’, unclear writing may help chart new, different, and unconventional ways of understanding the world and each other.
For Row (2024), translating work into ‘clear’ plain language is not only clumsy but also ableist. Row (2024, 93) argues that such practices ‘distort’ or ‘cheapen’ the original meaning and that ‘conceptions of difficulty in communication are rooted in an ableist and hegemonic sense of what normal language ought to look and sound like’. Perhaps we also risk underestimating the enjoyment derived from reading unclear work or even underestimate the interests of ‘everyday people’ (Lather 1996); after all, Butler (1999) notes the popularity of their book, Gender Trouble, outside of the academy just before they acknowledge its criticisms of unclear writing within the academy. Dolmage (2017) similarly recounts the contradictory reception to his book, Disability Rhetoric (2014), which was both celebrated for its accessibility and criticised for its academic jargon. Row (2024, 105) conceives ‘plain language’ as a ‘band-aid’ and instead encourages us to embrace a ‘linguistic terrain that would be open to, even celebrate, the gains, weirdnesses, surprises and creativities of difficult communication’. Writing can be difficult, reading can hurt, understanding can be opaque, and ‘clarity’ is often a foil; perhaps there is more merit recognising the multiple and variable than containing the uncontainable.
Ending (Un)clearly
Disability studies is drawn to clarity and ‘clear writing’ through its connections with accessibility and plain language. Clarity in writing and plain language has thus become de rigueur in disability studies. This article has avoided interrogating plain language and easy read directly by instead prioritising clarity as an analytic of concern. I have sought to trouble the imperative for clarity by arguing that the quest is futile, that the injunction is often a ruse that seeks to silence and/or discount some ideas over others, and that clarity may in fact betray the multivalent and multivocal nature of disabled subjectivity. Just as disability studies often problematises the dis/abled binary (Goodley 2014; McRuer 2006), it is likewise my contention that suggesting something is ‘clear’ is a subscription to a division between ‘clear’ and ‘unclear’ that does not exist – to make a binary out of a spectrum or continuum (Barnard 2010).
There are certainly moments in which being ‘clear’ is important. Think back to Strunk and White’s (2000) exhortation that being unclear could be a matter of life or death, and this is particularly consequential in the contexts of disability where dis/abled people must rely upon the support of others. Clarity should not be unilaterally abandoned; context is critical, and it is important that a range of communication modes exist. Observing the fact that we can never assume something means the same thing to anyone, Hall (1980, 131) argues that what is ‘called “distortions” or “misunderstandings” arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange’ (italics in original). Equivalence is impossible given meaning, understanding, language, and discourse is imperfect and often impenetrable. Writing and communication is inherently messy as it tries to capture ‘reality’. Establishing ‘shared knowledges’ and communication styles is important, and the pursuit of clarity in particular contexts signals collective (ethical) interests in including certain communities into the conversation (Acton 2023). At the same time, a healthy scepticism towards clarity is warranted, and especially when it is weaponised to instantiate writing and ideas that exclude alternative forms and perspectives. There is ‘no degree zero in language’: ‘[n]aturalism and “realism” – the apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or concept represented – is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the “real”’ (Hall 1980, 132). Rather than consolidating communication through increasingly regulated norms and expectations, perhaps we should embrace a politics that encourages multiple ways of uncovering the ‘real’ through the proliferation of multiple modes, styles, and practices.
Different contexts often demand different types of writing, and all types of writing are appropriate in particular contexts. The goal, then, should not be to ‘close down’ particular communication methods – such as ‘unclear writing’ – but rather ‘open up’ a range of multivalent and multivocal texts. Plain language or the quest for clarity (whatever that entails) may be one way – not the way – to communicate. After all, clarity is often a ruse, used to discount and/or silence work based on ideological grounds, and sometimes unfaithful to disabled communication. ‘Unclear’ work can also be revelatory, and perhaps we need to remember that unclear, impenetrable, ephemeral, and strange writing and communication might have more meaning than we otherwise might like to think. It is thus worth questioning what it is that clarity provides. Is clarity liberatory or a ‘fake simplicity’? This article emerges from the (seemingly) ever-demanding injunction for clarity, and a critical suspicion to what that injunction serves and creates.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.