Shit Academics Write

Samples of exceptional academic writing

[shitacademicswrite-blog]

"In short, the degree to which the alternative life would have been better than her actual life relative to the values that would have informed it is greater than the degree to which her actual life is better than the alternative life relative to her actual values.

Wasserman, David T., Robert S. Wachbroit, and Jerome E. Bickenbach, eds. Quality of Life and Human Difference: Genetic Testing, Health Care, and Disability. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

It's no "Has anyone really been as far even...", but it does raise an excellent question:

(Submitted by someone who will remain anonymous until he/she gets his/her info to us)

[shitacademicswrite-blog]

Lakoff and Johnson have argued persuasively that cognitive science should rethink the fundamental assumption that to reason is to construct and manipulate symbolic representations in a language of thought and should adopt instead a naturalist stance which takes evolutionarily adaptive perceptual and performance systems to have been co-opted as the ground for symbolic and abstract conceptual thought.

Potts, C. “Metaphors of Intent.” Requirements Engineering, 2001. Proceedings. Fifth IEEE International Symposium on. 2001. 31-38.

That was one sentence.

[shitacademicswrite-blog]

But because [the] Diversification [model] leverages fewer capabilities than the other models, companies need to find synergies to create shareholder value.

Ross, Jeanne W. “Forget Strategy: Focus IT on Your Operating Model.” CISR Research Briefing 5.3C (2005): p 2.  

MIT School of Management: proving that academics can also wield buzzwords since 2005. Bonus points for the sentence's conjunction kick-start, though.

[shitacademicswrite-blog]

...the joystick game controller is an explicitly phallic device, evocative of male sexual excitement and potency. It reinforces the macho cultural values of shooting and driving games, which are structured around pressured individual performance...

Murray, Janet H. “Inventing The Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice.” The MIT Press, 2011. p 29.  

This one is relevant and timely - a bold claim without any citations, and just yesterday I bought a new gaming mouse (not a joystick).

Now I have no worries about my performance.

[shitacademicswrite-blog]

If you can't do, teach. If you can't teach, publish.

We've all read that one professor's long-as-shit article on the "ontologies of speculative realism and correlationism in self-directed narratives" or something equally riveting that was obviously a significant contribution to some sub-niche or another. Parts of it may have been coherent but the bulk of it was – pardon the crassness – simple intellectual masturbation. Sometimes academics will rebut such accusations by claiming that their domain requires some measure of jargon or that their profoundly novel ideas can't be bound by conventional terseness, but c'mon. There's a line between actually needing words and pursuing self-affirming grandiloquence. We've seen it crossed too many times.

So the following may come as a surprise to you, dearest published boffins: not everything you write has real academic merit or scientific rigor. We lowly students know full well that you pad conference papers with pneumatic, bullshit abstracts. We're painfully aware of the citations you throw in to inflate your colleagues' ISI cite counts. And it's clear to everyone that whatever portions you don't finish go into a most convenient catch-all: the "Future Work" section. Oh, the good ol' "future" work...

Yeah, we also know about those articles that escaped the spell-checker (looking at you, Harvard Business Review). After all, grad students have only so much time to copy-edit once they've written your masterworks, right?

This blog isn't about giving shit writing a fair shake. It's about calling out crap because it's crap, and picking up where peer review leaves off. Myopic, unfounded, biased, and otherwise just plain spacey work now has a place where it can be put on a pedestal. And then promptly shredded to pieces.