Subscribe Feed (RSS)Jokes.
We’ll never admit it, but when we are marking essays, it is actually a delight to find a decent joke among the reams of turgid dross that we have to plug through. A couple of words of caution, however.
First. NEVER, EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, repeat the professor’s jokes. He has used that joke at that point in the lectures for the past twenty seven years. He doesn’t want to see how pathetic it is. He already knows.
Second. Academic papers often include fusty academic jokes. It is best to avoid these unless you are a fusty academic, and you probably aren’t.
(You can check your fustiness here.)
Freshman Gothic.
Intelligent teenagers go through a sesquipedilian phase in which they express themselves in extravagant and involuted polysyllabic terminology. This was an essential part of your vocabulary development, but you should have got over it by now. If not, your instructor will grumble “freshman Gothic” and put up with it. “Better late than never”, he/she/it will think. Nonetheless, you should try to keep your writing clear and straightforward. Eschew obfuscation.
(If you have never been through such a phase, you are an unlettered peasant. Go back to shovelling agricultural by-products.)
Scholarly Latin.
Latin is great for intellectual intimidation, which is why it is so prevalent in the professions. Latin is the language for expensive legal processes, loathsome and incurable diseases, and astonishingly expensive house plants that will shrivel up and die as soon as you get them home (Beard, 2004).
If you can put a Latin phrase or two in your essay, it will probably terrify Dr. Blenkinsop into adding a point or two to your grade.
Warning: You must get it absolutely right! Some of us actually know Latin, and if you get it wrong, our scorn will be terrible to behold. (And probably in the subjunctive.)
Beard, H. (2004) X-Treme Latin. London, Headline Book Publishing.
Formal Logic.
Most of us took a course or two in Formal Symbolic Logic when we were undergraduates, but as soon as the exams were over we forgot it all (except for the upside down E thingy, whatever it means) and have never used it since. This means that cunning philosophers who do remember formal logic use it to confound the rest of us. At strategic points in their papers, they like to insert a formalization of the argument so far, and declare it valid. This means that the rest of us, transfixed by this cluster of spiky symbols, struggle to see whether it really is valid, and so totally fail the notice the unwarranted assumptions, shaky premises, and screaming amphiboly that make up the rest of the paper.
If you can include a formalization of your argument in your essay, Dr. Blenkinsop will probably give up and give you an A without further ado. Polish notation will get you an A+.
Warning: Again, you must get it absolutely right. There are instructors who understand Formal Logic, and perhaps even more of them than know Latin. Some even like it. Saul Kripke played with it when he was a sesquipedelian teenager, and published a seminal paper on the subject in The Journal of Symbolic Logic when he was just nineteen. Everybody hates him.
I bet he knows Latin, too.
