We often rag on our students for their poor writing abilities, but here’s a tool from the Writing Program of the University of Chicago that pokes fun at the (sometimes) incomprehensible and bloated writing of academics:
Make Your Own Academic Sentence
After playing around a bit, I came up with “The (re)formation of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the systemization of the nation-state.” Excellent! I can’t wait to put that into my dissertation!
You can spend some good time procrastinating on your actual writing by making sentences containing random phrases like “history as such” and “poetics.” The site also has some excellent writing sources for students and academics alike, such as The Sentence of the Week, where a published sentence is thoroughly critiqued for its positives and negatives, giving us a great sense of what makes a well-written sentence. There’s also this guide to college writing that I’ll surely point out to my students.
But, if procrastinating with random word generators is more your thing, you can always play with the classic Wu-Tang Clan name generator.
Yours,
Tha Eurythmic King of Nowhere
This is amazing. And I feel pretty sheepish, since I suspect I could drop one or two of these computer-generated sentences into certain paragraphs of my dissertation prospectus, without disrupting the tone or even the logic.