Writing is a serious business. We writers have a moral and spiritual obligation to our peers and our readers to strive for the utmost sobriety of tone and to stick to the facts clinically and empirically without unnecessary rhetoric digression or lack of intellectual focus and rigour.
So I’m told.
Anyway, if you’re a student and you’ve just started a course filled with seminars…which you may very well have just done, since it’s Freshers Week here in York…here’s a fun thing you can do that will add spark, zest and zither (is that the word?) to your discussions.
1. Everyone gets together a week before seminar contributions. This is the difficult part. Many students write their seminar contributions a few hours before they’re due to present them. (Hence, tutors and lecturers, the following Fun Thing To Do may be disrespectful, but it will help people prepare in advance).
2. Everyone picks a slightly silly word or phrase. Say, “German sausage”. Or “sprocket”. Or “swonnicle”.
3. Everyone writes their seminar contributions with that word carefully used in a way that it is as far within context as the laws of academic composition will allow. Ideally, it should be seamless.
4. Seminars take place. Tutors blink at recurring words or phrases – then twig what is going on, but don’t mind because everyone has done a bang-up job on the topic, having prepared for it well in advance (which is the only way to write something academic that seamlessly contains the word “swonnicle”).
5. All students meet in the pub afterwards, and votes are cast for the most inventive use of the word or phrase. The winner has their drinks bought for them for the rest of the evening.
At this point, I’d like to raise my imaginary glass to the year above me when I was studying BSc Archaeology at York, who set themselves the formidable challenge of working “mashed-potato mountain” into their Environmental Archaeology seminar sessions. Kudos, guys.
Anyway, the other day I wrote a sober and serious post about new cities that are being built from scratch over at WebUrbanist - and a few paragraphs in, to my complete surprise and entirely within context, I found myself talking like a pirate.
(Arrr).
Talking like a pirate is one of the great joys of life, and everyone should put time into their busy schedules to do it. But I didn’t think I’d ever find myself waxing piratical in a professional freelance context, and so it surprised me.
(Shiver me if it b’aint so).
And just for a second I was back in a seminar room, on the edge of my seat, waiting for someone to say the wrong thing. It felt lubberly.
Image: Nick Humphries
My daughter does this to me every year on some Pirate Day thingummy. It’s very irritating, you know.
B’aint.
Hi Mike – as it happens, I spotted the ‘mashed potato mountain’ reference and (atypically) kept a straight face throughout the seminar. Boring academics do much the same, setting each other ‘challenges’ to get such-and-such a word or phrase into a published work. ‘Aardvark’, ‘irriguous’, ‘Kermit’ and ‘pigs broken down by age and sex’ come fondly to mind…….
Hi Terry.
Thanks for popping by.
And…superb. I’d always hoped that senior academics were normal people as well, despite a few rumours / essay marks that suggested otherwise to me. But this certainly proves it. “Pigs broken down by age and sex” is the work of a glorious mind.
I have it on reliable authority that a gentleman called Anth*ny H*skins (name altered to maintain his dignity) was involved in the mashed potato incident, possibly in a ring-leading capacity…?
Strangely some lecturers write the lectures and seminars the night before. This explains the use of phrases beloved by theoreticians: ‘the post-modern hermeunutic of finite lithic analysis in a tertiary eco-niche environment blah blah blah’, Mashed potatoes are more fun it has to be said. Working phrases from Star Wars into PhD theses was more the stly in my day.
You should’ve been there for the Pirate flag at BOD… Crews of small yachts were staring at it with binoculars. But what else would you have on ‘a typical Viking pirates lair’ (that’s a quote you know).
Is anyone else a little disturbed to find Terry posting on this blog…?
I’m not the least bit disturbed – in fact I’m delighted, for 2 reasons.
1) Terry’s presence lends my website a veneer of respectability it doesn’t deserve, and quite frankly, I’m all for that kind of thing.
2) His arrival catapults my blog audience either into or excitingly close to double figures.
Ah, the Dark Side. How seductive it is, with its filthy mugs of pestilential brew, its secreted hip-flasks and its muttered “oh, that’s close enough”-style comments hunched over a planning frame. How I miss it.
Typical pirate lair, you say? What was the evidence for this?
We never did the phrase thing, but we did have a running competition over who could say the most ridiculous thing in a philosophy seminar and have it picked up for further discussion by the tutor. Winner was ‘my aunt’s cat’s got three legs,’ with an honourable mention to ‘God may be a chicken for all we know’ which was disqualified on the grounds that the student in question was trying to make a serious point. I got through most of mine with the phrase ‘I think the answer’s somewhere on a continuum’ which, now I come to think of it, has served me well in real life too.
Oh, that sounds like fun. Not ‘alf. Philosophy is a bottomless bag of opportunities. All those analogies to plunder.
What exactly is a continuum? Some kind of extended hoover? Like stretch-limos, or those buses with the connecting collar?
My house needs a damn good tidy and I have some things piled up on my hoover, so I can see what you’re saying, definitely.