How to write academic papers

You just need to know the jargon

WATCH OUT, PROF! Universities all over Asia are clamping down on lecturers. Unless they get research papers published at regular intervals, they’ll be thrown out.

Aiyeeah. Your humble narrator, who works from an office at a university, asked whether newspaper columns and books counted.

“No,” said Syed Siddique, a reader who has been a professor for more than 20 years. They have to be works in “academic-style writing” published in “learned journals”.

But what exactly does that mean?

Reader Denise Luk tried to help by showing me a paper published by top academic publisher Routledge. It opened with this line in the introduction:

“Since thought is seen to be rhizomatic rather than arboreal, the movement of differentiation and becoming is already imbued with its own positive trajectory.”

I read the sentence three times but could not make sense of it. And I’m supposedly a writer. “Is it English?” I asked.

She replied, “No, it’s ‘Professorspeak’, the world’s most baffling language.”

(Chamin and adoring students)

To the rescue came reader Chaminda Da Silva, a Tokyo-based research fellow in computer science. He offered to give me lessons, saying:

“The title has to follow a certain pattern. 1) Short baffling phrase. 2) Colon. 3) Long boring phrase. For example, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone would become PotStone: a Study of Harry Potter's Experiences Related to the Sorcerer's Rock Specimen."

Hmm. I tried it myself.

Batman would become: Going into Bat: A Narrative of a Tycoon in a Pointy-Eared Mask Inspired by the Aerial Winged Rodent Chiroptera.

It wasn’t as hard as I thought. I decided to compile tips from academic types I know.

As a service to the thousands of university lecturers across Asia worried about this, here are Top Tips from experts.

After you’ve made a hypothesis, done some experiments to see if it is true, and then written up your notes, edit your phrases as follows.

• Instead of “I think” you write “It is widely believed””.
• Instead of “Me and my friend think” you put “It is universally accepted that”.

But beware. Some tricks are too well known, Denise said. For example, the phrase “The lead researchers would like to acknowledge the assistance given by students” is known to mean “I made my students do the work and then stole it.”

And sentences such as “We selected three examples at random” inevitably mean “Out of 2,368 attempts, only three results supported our hypothesis so those are the ones we here record.”

If you want to sound really smart, the final three steps are these.

1. Rewrite your sentences to be in the passive voice, so that “I lit a fire” becomes “The fire was lit by I.”
2. Remove easy words and substitute hard ones. So “I lit a fire” becomes: “The conflagration was ignited by a two-legged mammalian animal of the species humanus academica boringus.”
3. As a final step, true academics go through their papers and replace every occurrence of the word “I” with the word “we” however absurd it sounds.

“On the day of the experiment, we woke up, blew our nose and kissed our wife. Our experiment was delayed when we dropped our test tube on our left foot after we were distracted by our departmental secretary, who sat on our lap.”

If all the above sounds too exhausting, take a break and read a comic book.

I recommend Aerial Winged Rodent Chiroptera.

Technorati Tags: lecturer,professor,academic humor,university,how to write a paper,how to write an academic paper

Comments

[ape]

So readers here are 'conducting a longitudinal study of the random literary skills of a homonid who is named after mashed and pulpy fruit?

[mike]

Jam-time: A Study of the linear correlation between digitally based essays of a comedic perspective and the decline of workplace productivity in an urban setting.

[rafanjr]

oooh well done Hominidae

[Pete Pete]

He's not a homonid he's married with children

[peter wei]

An academic paper would be a mere piece of paper with words only if you stick to it verbatim without thinking!

[Dora]

Suggest your title to be: "Watch out, Prof!": A qualitative study of successful published academic papers through a professional perspective of an non-academic author

[Dora]

typo: successfully

[Lift Lurker]

When professor Chamin punish the Japanese children do he force them to write 100 times on the blackboard:

"One is not to be inordinately audible in the learning enclosure"

or

"Boogers are not to be ingested anymore."

[Karuna]

Had a consultant work with me to apply for some fund from our government technology department. The first advice from the consultant was to change the project name. So the product which was efficiently named with 3 words was changed to 15 words !! Apparently most of the successfully funded projects have long winded names.

[A. Lecturer]

damn, u blew my secret.....well, got to do honest job now....

[Chamin]

Thanks a million, I was waiting for somebody to write about humanus academica boringus :o)

[Mace]

It's distinctly possible that I willl be awake half of the night catching up on your posts, Nuri.

Loved the Feng Shui Detective, and enjoying your postings.

:-{) Mace in Melbourne, Australia.

[Lift Lurker]

I do not understand why even the professors who teach marketing are also writing so dull papers.

Very surely they know how to spice up academic papers, to make everyone want to read them.

Some suggestions:

- Put half-naked photos of female researchers in the paper.

- Publish teaser papers (like movie trailers): "This Summer... Discover the key behavior difference Between Financial Accountants and Managerial Accountants")

- Use superlatives. "Most Awesomest Study Of All Conclude Sleep Deprivation May Make One Sleepy."

- Use Comic Sans (it always make things easy to read)with blinking effect.

- Use celebrities to endorse the result of study. "Tom Cruise Agrees! Parallel Processing Algorithms Improve Performance By a Stunning 0.5%. "

- Trash the other papers. "Our Experiment Blows Dr Faust's Silly Childish Experiments Out of the Water'

- Do not be wishy washy: Do not say "Study show butter may potentially contribute to increasing chance of possible heart attack in some cases.

Say: "Had Butter For Breakfast? You are dead tonight"

[grandpa]

Hey guy you are complicated .
Why don't you use plane talk like everybody else:

Nobody may, unless undistracted by staff required by department regulation 10.2 (f to h),located on a horizontal plane, blow his nose, if pressure, reported at sea level under ISA conditions, is less than the outside pressure corrected to equivalent altitude in inches above mean sea level, provided the test tube required by rules 11.1.2.3 (from g to q) conforms to the tests established oct,2,1901, corrected by experiment 22 alinea b,c and d approved by amendment dated oct,21 ,1989, lest the test tube may result in impact with the ground or any object or any part of the carrier, if the part (which must comply with rules 10.2.0 , 10.5.01 and 11.5.012) is located within a radius of 10.250 mm from the vertical projection of the center of gravity of the abovementioned staff, if this staff is covered by 1)less than 30 % of its lower area or 2) not more that 70 % of the whole area,with fabric in 1) is less than .0022Lb/Sq inch but not in excess of .0028 Lb/Sq inch.

Failure to comply may result in the drop of abovementioned tester from mar i tal status....unless sais tester is protected by rule 22.1254 a) to f)

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