Manual of Style
by Erika Price
You’ve done it. Thousands of words of bleary academic jargonese. You’ve mastered the form. I.e., lots of hyphens. Lots of “effect” used as a verb, and “affect” as a noun. Lots of “he or she” and “him or her”. Very careful, very politically correct; damnably grammatically wrong. Only in the academy is “integratively” a word. Is “impacted” a modifier of anything besides teeth. No fragments allowed. I still don’t know what the fuck ‘self-complexity’ is.
Surnames and dates abound, with no modifiers. Papers are scrubbed of signs of gender, age, race, religion, and lack/ambiguity thereof; The writing is free of ideology, safe from self-referential idiosyncrasy, neutral in tone, and missing signs of the authors’ immature, “individuating” body modifications and personal style/lack of style (see, e.g., Ottati, Renstrom, & Price, 2012).
Seriously, see it. Google Scholar that shit. Every word like water squeezed from a rock.
Four people will read your paper. Perhaps twenty will cite it. There is no shared variance between those two populations.
Under review. In press. Cited in (Eds). Passive voice is the law. Colorful adjectives are proscribed. Redundancy’s ok. It is unclear whether it’s correct to say “myriad influences” or “a myriad of influences”. Even now.
The temptation toward Lexilalia is not, shall we say, socially adaptive. Counterfactual thinking: In an equivalent time span, you can write (could have written) hundreds of thousands of puffed-up words of pretty (?) bullshit about “fake” things. I.e. Fiction.
Punctuation [sic]. Self-sickness purely an affectation. Both types of writing are fun, actually, for me the present author.
Cognitive dissonance can be a real cunt. Time is fungible. Are words?
Do you write to put air back in people’s lungs, or to knock it out?
Big group hug, Erika. You’re not alone. It’s all just a way to an eventual freedom to make it what you want. You’re strong. (I feel it.) They won’t break or numb you down.
forgot to add. and not why I wrote.