"I was just bullshiting"
I can't count home many times I've said this about a paper or an answer to a test I just took. However, what does this mean, and was I really bullshiting? I think of bullshiting in academea as writing that is used to fill up space in order to try and get a good grade. I do this when I'm not sure of were to go with an idea in a paper, or trying to get partial credit on a writing question on a test in other classes.
What does this constitute. Basically throwing vocab words and definitions out, pure memorized things, to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about. Quotations of lines from a book can take up a lot of space. You can then explain what the quote means and give and example of the quote. This can take up half to and entire paragraph at times. Totally bullshited information that has little substance but to prove and opinion.
This quote explains what I mean by bullshited information in a paper, "So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. . . . If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories,...."
It's funny how ridiulous this sounds, but you could proable get a good grade on a paper if you argue your point correctly, even though the author of the book had no intention of Moby-Dick representing the Repbulic of Ireland.
Is all acedemic writing bullshit? No, but some definatily is. If acedemic writing is based on something with substance, say scientifically proved information, it has some backing; so it's not bullshit. But arguing things such that Moby-Dick reprsents the Repbulic of Ireland, bullshit.
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I don't know about the standard that only "scientifically based" academic discourse is not BS. In the humanities and social sciences, hard "science" is not applicable, but that doesn't mean that all literary criticism is BS, does it?
ReplyDeleteI’m sure that all of us have had the experience of not knowing an answer to a question and then trying to use pure reason to try to make some kind of half-way intelligent answer. This is, in many instances, the only solution other than leaving the question blank. I use to be the master of this in high school and I’ll admit I’ve employed it with varying degrees of successes in college. I’ve always defended this practice using the logic that skill deserves to be rewarded, regardless of how that skill is used. If someone has the ability to pull answers out of the air, why shouldn’t they be rewarded for their cleverness? Now, I’m not saying that this is an ideal solution over actually knowing what you are talking about, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Bullshit becomes more of a problem when people that posses some kind of actual authority are using this strategy, and I would be the first to admit that if anyone was using my bullshit as some kind of guide for anything of any real relevance, I would not be proud of that, regardless of any other useful benefits I may have received from this. I know a large amount of the general population thinks that anything involving the words “correlated activities” or anything similar to this is obviously some kind of bullshit, and I believe that this criticism is unfair. Granted, academic writing at times may be a bit more embellished than strictly necessary for clear communication, but that is the style that it is dealt in. I honestly thought that this was a very interesting article, especially the way it talks about the use of corporate bullshit and how aggravating it can be to be forcefully placated by unskillful bullshit, especially the aggrandizing of their concern over our well being. I’ve always been annoyed by such transparent concern and it was a relief to see it so clearly
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