Bebe,

This might be a good resource for the writing lab.

This is OK but what I need is a sentence generator that uses initials and jargon for academic content so I can be as opaque as those computer nerds. E.g., "As anyone knows, the OED beats the FMEU for archaic usage, but neither the MLA nor the APA can hold a candle to the CMS, especially for digital content that Turabian completely ignores."

The culture of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the engendering of the nation-state.

Still, Loshi, the systemization of normative values opens a space for the reification of agency.

I am very tired of folks that presume strong academic writing happens at the level of the sentence, and that the inability of an unfamiliar reader to make sense of a single sentence is some kind of evidence of pomposity.

Here's a nice sentence fom an award winning paper in economics:

While Instrumental Variable (IV) estimation represents a theoretically appealing way to deal with the two potential endogeneity problems and the errors-invariables problem, in practice finding a credible instrument in this context is
typically a difficult task.

Without context, it's hard to make sense of it. In context it's fairly clear, especially if you're an economist.

The generator is cute, but better as a measure of readerly arrogance than scholarly pomposity.

The difference is that the economics statement is logical. I don't know what Instrumental Variable (IV) estimation is, but when I read the sentence I can clearly see that the author is talking about a mathematical procedure that is useful for dealing certain types of problems. Mathmaticians, scientists, economists, and others use jargon, but their jargon refers to real things, and the jargon is useful. It is easier for a doctor to say "Let's take an MRI" instead of "Let's put him in that big machine that makes the cool pictures of the inside of the body."

On the other hand, mostmodernists use jargon, not to make things clearer, but to obfuscate the meaning of the sentence. This is why the Alan Sokal hoax worked. Nobody knew what he was talking about, so it must have been deep. Postmodernism is mocked because it deserves to be.

Eschew adumbrative obfuscation and platitudinous obnubilation.

q

The function of academic jargon is the same as street slang: one word packs the same meaning as a whole sentence. It actually makes things clearer.

However, a side effect is that it also makes it easier for the user of either to appear to be something they are not to those unfamiliar with either culture.

Well, let's look at some actual sentences by postmodernists, then:

"From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs[...]Here one must think of writing as a game within language" (Of Grammatology 50).

"The theoretical urge is a recurrent phenomenon within the present organization of American literary studies. Within that discipline, explicating individual texts remains the privileged activity, and, historically, this primary task has always brought in its wake a secondary one: critical practice inevitably leads to its self-conscious justification in critical theory" (Mailloux, Rhetorical Power, 4).

"It is obvious that the archive of a society, a culture, or a civilization cannot be described exhaustively; or even, no doubt, the archive of a whole period. On the other hand, it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak, since it is that which gives to what we can say...its modes of appearance" (Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, 130).

It seems these people are speaking in useful and fairly lucid ways about "real things" like documents, photographs, paintings, constitutions, penal codes, novels, and books about literature.

And are we so confident in our arbitrary division between "mathematicians, scientists, [and] economists" and "postmodernists?" Are there really no postmodern physicists, like, say, Andrei Linde at Stanford? No postmodern computer scientists?Can't we recognize the utility and social benefits that we receive from scientific inquiry while also suggesting that other forms of discourse have some right for a hearing?

I remember that I stopped attending university programs regularly, or at least I ceased aspiring to apply to university degree programs, in the later 1970s, when I could no longer understand the meaning of academic English, when delivered in a professor's lecture or written out in a journal's article. It is still difficult for me to understand what I saw in universities in the first place, especially in graduate school, when I could have saved a pile of money and accomplished more in life by just hanging out in public libraries and used bookstores, while taking care to earn a regular living.

How about this sentence?

"But, for us, what does this general relativity represent, the one that is the law outside of the nuclear power plants and that questions our bodily inertia, vital necessary condition?"

ASFad

@12052592 re: "The function of academic jargon is the same as street slang: one word packs the same meaning as a whole sentence. It actually makes things clearer."

I must disagree. I think the desire to communicate compactly is an impetus to the development of jargon but not its use once the idea becomes established. Rather, the purpose of all jargon - street slang, jazz slang, academic jargon, industry jargon - is gatekeeping. It marks some people as being in the club and some as being outside it. That's why people hate it - it is a verbal manifestation of snobbery.

In response to cleverclogs,
Need we say more? Thank you!

If only academics (including English faculty) could write as simply as Hemingway, we'd all be better off.