Citing McGall’s recent work – seminal in the intersection of nexus thought and academic meta discourse – this paper outlines strategy for furthering one’s linguistic execution in the context of undergraduate scholarship. Positing a reductive angle, sharpened by a pragmatic approach, this article cuts through the academic noise and offers advice both in the abstract and the real.
See what I did there? I’m only a third-year BA student so I’m not even the most university experienced on the editorial team, but I still thought I’d share some of what I’ve learnt from my time submitting assignments. So, to break up all the political reporting, here’s an editorial that will hopefully help you with academic writing.
In my pretentious intro, you probably noticed a bunch of nerdy words. That’s my first tip, cosplay as an academic with your vocabulary. Jargon is basically the specific words used by a certain group of people, like engineers or musicians, for example. Each field has jargon, like media students might say cultural capital or sociologists might talk about class consciousness. It’s important to use the jargon of the specific field you’re writing for but remember these words often stand in for ideas or even entire theories so make sure you understand them. Jargon in the humanities tends to be more fluid and you can use ideas from philosophy or psychology in media studies, for example, while STEM papers usually use more rigid jargon. TLDR; in STEM it’s more important to know what you’re talking about. Thankfully there’s also overarching “academic jargon” that you can learn and throw in for any assignment. A bunch of general academic jargon doesn’t mean anything complicated or represent an entire theory (like “discourse” or “paradigm”) so can be an easy way to convince the marker that you deserve a good grade. So go read some abstracts and get some fancy words under your belt because using the right language can really help your grades. Sounding smart is more important than being smart when all your marker has is your 3000 words in front of them.
Because we’re all getting fucked by assignments right now I hope some of this is helpful. Use fancy words and know what they mean. I had more to say about applying frameworks, personal voice, and fitting stuff into a field, but I’ve run out of word count. So if this is useful to you, email [email protected] to let me know and I’ll write some more advice.
