Oh look! It's an academic faux pas!

Jul 19, 2011 13:02

Here's an email I just sent, with some explanatory emendations ( Read more... )

academia, higher ed, random

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cordelia_v July 19 2011, 19:05:34 UTC
Heh. The editors should have caught that, IMO.

At his age, I was unduly impressed with all earlier publications, esp. the good stuff by more senior scholars. I would describe almost all secondary lit (the first time I cited it) as "extremely useful," "insightful," "groundbreaking," etc. (that last wasn't hard, given the state of gender history in those days).

My editors made me take almost all of the adjectives out. It made me sound like a noobie, they said. I guess they were right.

Airconditioning is proof positive that God loves us, btw.

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lolaraincoat July 19 2011, 19:44:41 UTC
Oh yeah, the editors should have caught it! I feel that I am now owed a beer by several people.

And I'm constantly removing adjectives from my students' footnotes. That's just normal. But this was more like a paragraph-long and highly inaccurate description of my article, topped off by saying "Prof. Raincoat's structuralist argument prevents her from seeing the obvious explanation for this event, which is ..." where a. my argument in this article is post-structuralist as all get out and b. his "obvious explanation" is in fact the same one I ended up with. ARRRRRRGGGHHHHH.

Airconditioning may well be proof of God's love. But weather that requires this much airconditioning is proof that God is a passive-aggressive SOB.

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cordelia_v July 19 2011, 20:02:28 UTC
Well, too much teleology always makes me break out in a rash, but I always figured that other parts of the ecosystem needed the hot weather. I mean, it's not all about us. But the airconditioning was a (historically belated) makeup call for humans, on God's part.

You are indeed owed a beer by the editors. Didn't they read through the articles they included?

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lolaraincoat July 19 2011, 20:15:48 UTC
Me, I just get heat rash. Not so much the teleological kind ( ... )

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cordelia_v July 19 2011, 20:25:42 UTC
they needed the blurb RIGHT AWAY OMG six weeks ago, and I said I would do it but only after reading the ms. (they asked me to blurb based on the table of contents, can you imagine?) and then they ignored my warning about the postal strike here and sent me the ms by post

Wow. So much stupid there that any comments would be gilding the lily. Except that I have to add that after all that, the fact that they now have no blurb is total karmic justice. What goes around, comes around: my own summary of Aquinas's First Proof, although the cosmological argument is always my favorite.

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lolaraincoat July 19 2011, 20:47:32 UTC
I don't know if it's universally true, but certainly in academic life, what goes around comes around. Plus also too, stupidity is its own reward.

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