In May of this year John McWhorter, in The Daily Beast, posted a column: Why Kim Kardashian Can't Write Good. The column didn't deal solely with Kardashian. For me, the most interesting part dealt with Cornel West:

Crucially, this trend towards orality is by no means limited to less educated persons. The issue is actually germane to, of all things, Cornel West. The takeaway point in Michael Eric Dyson’s notorious takedown of West is not Dyson’s almost curiously comprehensive filleting of West’s person and accomplishments. Rather, Dyson lays down that Cornel West is a revered public intellectual who has not written academic books in a quarter-century now, does not write published refereed academic articles, and overall does not like writing and does as little of it as possible. His foundational trade book Race Matters is now over 20 years old. During West’s famous clash with then-Harvard president Lawrence Summers when the latter questioned West’s academic achievements of late, West responded that he was in fact at work on three academic books. Fifteen years later, those books do not exist, and it’s fair to say that they are not forthcoming. Writing is not what West does.
Rather, West talks. More to the point, Cornel West is a public intellectual cherished not for what he writes but for the way he sounds. In his speeches, his intonations and gestures are as central to his message as its content, as if Chris Rock were talking about democracy and dropping references to Chekhov—a kind of verbal jazz, as Dyson puts it.