Wednesday, 2 December 2009

Make Your Own Academic Sentence

This is such fun to play with (thanks to Dr. Syntax's books and publishing blog). Here are two sentences I generated earlier:

The reification of post-capitalist hegemony replays (in parodic form) the historicization of pedagogical institutions. The epistemology of normative value(s) functions as the conceptual frame for the discourse of the gendered body.

It comes from the University of Chicago's Writing Program where you can also find examples of real academic gobbledegook.

Here's one for generating business jargon.

3 comments:

Gayle said...

I love this. As a recovering academic, I occasionally have to wean myself off these sorts of terms. Generally I try to go for the short Germanic word rather than the long latinate (or worse, Greek) one. Because, you know, hegemonic discourses are symptomatic of ideological state apparatuses that foreclose access to panoptical power structures. Or something.

Ruth said...

Ha! I was about to explore the delightful distraction of Dr Syntax when I spotted that the blog the link comes from is written by the editorial director of Bloomsbury in New York. This is the very company who are expecting my latest, delayed and still unfinished opus on 31 December. I guess Dr S will have to wait till next year...

(Maybe I'd have been better to get him to write the whole thing?)

Carla said...

Hard to say which is the more impenetrable, management-speak or academic-speak. In a few centuries linguists will probably wonder if they were entirely different languages.