Entry tags:
Adventures in essay research
* Dear paper authors: You are writing in English for an English-speaking audience. As such, I really wish that you wouldn't liberally fill your papers with random French and Latin phrases. It doesn't make your arguments any better and in fact only makes you look like a pretentious snob who only wants their paper to be comprehensible to other pretentious snobs.
* Me to my friends: "I was asking because some people theorise that the pseudo-knots in RNA are analogous to the way transformational grammar moves things around in sentences, like moving the auxiliary in questions. Morphology can be likened to viruses and transformational grammar to the immune system. And that's not just a wanky Arts analogy, they actually have some evidence for this!" (It sure does sound like a wanky Arts analogy when you try to explain it though...)
* Half these authors constantly reference their own papers, which seems a little like cheating, almost. It's like if you can get the same or a similar argument published enough times, it makes you more likely to be correct? At least, that's what it feels like, since referencing usually makes it look as though your research is all backed up by other research. It would be like if I claimed constantly for the last five years that pigs can fly, and then used the fact that I've been saying it for five years with various different justifications each time as proof that they really can. Having said that, it's pretty useful being able to see which of their previous papers relate to the same topic.
* Don't suppose anyone knows any really good papers about how features spread from language to language (or between dialects)?
* Why yes, I *am* writing this post as procrastination, why do you ask?
* Me to my friends: "I was asking because some people theorise that the pseudo-knots in RNA are analogous to the way transformational grammar moves things around in sentences, like moving the auxiliary in questions. Morphology can be likened to viruses and transformational grammar to the immune system. And that's not just a wanky Arts analogy, they actually have some evidence for this!" (It sure does sound like a wanky Arts analogy when you try to explain it though...)
* Half these authors constantly reference their own papers, which seems a little like cheating, almost. It's like if you can get the same or a similar argument published enough times, it makes you more likely to be correct? At least, that's what it feels like, since referencing usually makes it look as though your research is all backed up by other research. It would be like if I claimed constantly for the last five years that pigs can fly, and then used the fact that I've been saying it for five years with various different justifications each time as proof that they really can. Having said that, it's pretty useful being able to see which of their previous papers relate to the same topic.
* Don't suppose anyone knows any really good papers about how features spread from language to language (or between dialects)?
* Why yes, I *am* writing this post as procrastination, why do you ask?