I'm reading The Truth About Conservative Christians, by Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout, which is, by a good measure, the worst and most frustratingly-written book I've read in a long while. It's a sociological picture of conservative Christians based on statistical analysis of recent survey data, but for some reason the authors decided to keep tables and charts to a minimum in favor of tossing most of their numbers directly into the text. Since tables and charts are actually the least confusing way of presenting numerical data, this makes the book a real slog.
That's precisely right. Charts and data, for reasons I don't totally understand, have a really bad reputation among writers, as if their very inclusion into a piece of prose will erase all the adjectives and muddle all the imagery. Recently, reviewing Tom Schaller's new book Whistling Past Dixie, John Dickerson complained:
Moreover, where Edsall is judicious about dealing with only what is useful in his notebook, Schaller's book makes you suspect there isn't a statistic, chart or study he has left off the page.
Tom's a bit of a data junkie, so the criticism isn't entirely wrong, but he's no more a data junkie than any number of wonky political writers (Jeff Faux, Jill Quadagno, Matthew Miller, Peter Beinart, etc). And let's not even get into historians, whose every paragraph is made up of facts. What Tom is getting nailed for is his temerity in organizing his data into tables and charts for graphical representation, making the dump of information obvious rather than implicit. That Tom's book is also a lot clearer and easier to reference than most is, apparently, of little concern. He included the trappings of academia, of wonkery, of expertise, and for reasons I prefer not to speculate on, many writers take a stance of principled opposition to such things.
