10-second review: A student sets out to write a paper on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, realizes she doesn’t know enough about the play and therefore sets out to produce academic bullshit. How did she do it?
Title: “Bullshit in Academic Writing: A Protocol Analysis of a High School Student’s Process of Interpreting Much Ado About Nothing. Peter Smagorinsky, et al. Research in the Teaching of English (May 2010), 368-405.
Quote: “When students are put in a position of having to sound more learned than they are, they often bullshit their way through their assignments to create the appearance of knowledge according to scholarly specifications, even in its considerable absence. Their writing often is garbled in what Macrorie (1970) called Engfish: the spuriously elevated language seemingly endemic to school writing.”
Quote: “I absolutely did not think of my actions as a deliberate deception, but rather a filling of space with the inconsequential.”
Quote: “The theorists…conclude that bullshit is not possible without a receptive bullshittee.”
Comment: You’ll have to read the article to learn the details of Susan’s method of bullshitting. Delighted with the title of the article, and conscious that I have completed a few bullshit assignments in my time in college, I thoroughly enjoyed the article, but still am not completely sure that this article was not a “put-on.” RayS.
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