I just finished a long and tortuous translation about turbine oil, so I decided to entertain myself by reading my blogroll. And this is the very first thing I encountered:

Basically, being a hunter-gatherer is about as good as it gets for most of human existence. . . Industrial society produces better medicine and goods, but we work harder and have vastly more chronic disease even at the same age, and industrial society includes as its concommitent things like the widespread rape in the Congo and African poverty: that’s a requirement of our society, is not incidental.

Forget about the idiocy of what he says, just look at how horrible the writing is. Do I not get enough of this crap from my Freshmen?

Can somebody tell me why I’m following this pompous fool? I know, it’s because I’m what this post’s title says I am.

Dear Dame Eleanor Hull,

thank you for the card you send me with the words of kindness and compassion. I got it right when I needed some extra support. This was the first time I ventured onto campus, so this was a very difficult moment.

Thank you, dear friend.

For my return to campus, I have chosen the most unrelieved black I could find in my closet, complete with a black headband with black ribbons, a black handbg, black shoes, and even a black notebook I’m carrying in my hand. If people don’t clock on to what this means and don’t just let me be, I don’t know what else can be done.

I have already scared the postman when I opened the door to sign for a package. Now it’s time to traumatize everybody on campus. I’m trying to handle this with a degree of levity to relieve the stress, if you haven’t guessed.

My yearly ethics training just informed me that there is no penalty or retaliation for whistleblowing. Do the creators of the test realize how stupid they look at this particular moment?

The most difficult thing is doing stuff for “the first time since everything happened”, which is how I put it to myself. Today I will go to campus for the first time since. I know from experience that it’s doable. Everything is doable. But oh, it’s hard.

It has to be done because I will go back to work on November 4 and I need to get used to being back on campus before then. It will not do to be an emotional wreck as I walk into the classroom. Teaching is exercising control, and how can one exercise control over others when not being in control of oneself?

I just stole the following list of writing mistakes from Undine’s blog. Sorry, Undine, I just really like it and I couldn’t control myself.

Let’s see which of these things I do on a regular basis.

• Basically. Why is it basic, and if it’s basic, why do you have to tell the reader it’s basic? I don’t do this and I HATE it when students do. For some reason, they seem to adore their “basically”s and “actually”s.
• Also. Go ahead–I dare you to do this: copy & replace every “also” with nothing (I say to myself).  Does it make a difference? If it does, you didn’t need it. I don’t do “also”, but I’m very enamored of “at the same time.” Do you, folks, believe it is as bad as overusing “also”?
• In particular. Can’t you see that it’s a particular example? I don’t do this.
• Attempts to serve as, attempts to prove.  It does or it doesn’t. Get off the fence and make this a more definite verb. God, I do this all the time. But Undine is right, this is bad, weak writing. I need to let it go.
• Is also evident in. How about “informs,” a more definite verb? I don’t remember doing this.
• Dashes and semicolons. Think about how your eyes glaze over when you see a semicolon-laden sentence, however nicely parallel the clauses are.  What are you, a writer or a mouse?  If you need a new sentence, start one. I use a lot of dashes in personal writing (I’m a Russian-speaker, after all) but almost never in academic writing. I actually thought there was something wrong with me if I never used any semicolons so it’s nice to see somebody who is anti-semicolon.
• Way in which. Is anyone really going to care if you say “how” instead? Yes, I’m totally a “way in which” person. 
• Trendy words–er, important critical terms like “discourse.” Do you really need these words? I don’t think I do this all that often. Am I kidding myself, though? I use “discourse” and Co a lot in oral communications but only when I’m trying to be funny.
• Thus.  If the inference really does logically follow what you’ve said, do you need to signal it? “Thus” is important when you’re presenting a paper, but is it a signpost that the written paragraph really needs? My thesis director scared me away from “thus” many years ago.
• Just as . . . so too and Not only . . . but also.  Apparently First Draft Undine loves these parallelisms, but Subsequent Drafts Undine should learn that she is not the 21st-century Henry James of sentence stylings or Milton in writing epic similes. Every Single Draft Clarissa LOVES these, as well. I need to get rid of these tributes to Spanish writing style.
• This doesn’t even count the places where I add in a critic who maybe wrote something that referred in passing to a text in 1992 and who I see in my imagination glaring at me and crucifying me in reviews if I don’t cite him or her. I can’t tell you how often I do this. My reason for doing it is not the same as Undine’s, though. I mostly just feel like I need to demonstrate my erudition. It’s a bad idea every single time but I can’t control myself.

I’m going to do a lot of academic writing in the coming year, so I need to read as many posts like the linked one as possible.