How to write like a professor. Yes, really, academic writing on tap. Four clicks and a PhD seems tantalizingly in reach courtesy of the Virtual Academic at the University of Chicago. Thank god for the internet. My three creations:"The eroticization of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the politics of the specular economy."
"The epistemology of civil society opens a space for the historicization of the nation-state."
"The illusion of normative value(s) invests itself in the authentication of exchange value."
And yes, after year's of editing an academic journal I can attest that such sentences appear all the time - in fact I'm so attuned to them that these seem entirely plausible to me! (they probably are)
Thanks to The Bunburyist for the initial link.
3 comments:
Oh, this is hysterical!! Thanks for sharing them. I've seen my share of "academese," too...
And remember to put your report in a plastic folder! - it makes all the difference ;)
Calvin and Hobbes is one of my favourite comic strips.
Wonderful. I have to hand a book entitled 'Academic Reading', a companion to 'Academic Writing', both by edited by Janet Giltrow of the English faculty at the University of British Columbia. Coming upon these books was the first I knew that we have English departments teaching students to write prose like this, and then, seemingly afterward, teaching them to understand it. One premise of 'Academic Reading' is that "...students can find (the scholarly) community's ways of reading and writing mysterious, unpredictable, and intimidating." Well, that must be true enough, given that members of that community sometimes have the same problem. Ask any traditional historian trying to make sense of our new post-modernists' outpourings.
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