Back-to-School Special II: Oh, how I hate MS Word Thesaurus.

Happy Wednesday, everyone--today marks about a month to the day from my own first day of school (new job! new students! pencils with my name on! etc!), but many of you are already tush-deep in Fall Semester. So in honor of you who are already back to school, I have my official First Intervention of 2011-2012, and it's one I know my fellow faculty will be cheering.

Here's the scenario: you're writing your first paper for Intro to Amazing Humanities Under Siege and you have, let's say, 53% of an idea what you're talking about. You have a reasonably interesting idea and you're on a roll writing when suddenly you're not happy with your writing. "I've used the word 'argues' seven times in this paragraph!" you realize, or, "The word 'conflict' doesn't sound fancy enough for an academic paper!" So, as you were probably (erroneously) taught to do all through school, you right-click and see what good ol' MS Word Thesaurus has to offer.

This is for your own good:
STEP AWAY FROM THE RIGHT-CLICK OR I WILL REACH OUT THROUGH THIS SCREEN AND SMASH YOUR KEYBOARD.

I mean it. Put. The robot-thesaurus. Away.

Here's the truth: 99% of the time you use a robot-thesaurus, it's going to give you a list of words that might be synonyms for your word in some context, but will definitely not be in your context. The resulting sentence is going to look straight-up bananas at best, and we might not even know what the eff you're talking about at worst.

Don't believe me?

All right. Here is an actual sentence from my actual dissertation, mangled beyond recognition by MS Word Thesaurus:

The undemanding riposte to this is that logical verbal communication and literary idiom are not the unchanged article, and the Tractatus as a exertion of analytic language theory deals with logical and not literary language.

That, people, is straight-up gibberish. Here is the actual sentence from my dissertation (which still has some lame vocab in it, in hindsight, but, as you can see, my intended meaning of most of the words I right-clicked (I've put them in bold) is much, much, much, TOTES different than the "synonym" I used:

The easy answer to this is that logical language and literary language are not the same thing, and the Tractatus as a work of analytic language theory deals with logical and not literary language.

This sentence, and 10,000 just like it, was good enough to earn this gal a PhD from an actual university, and look at all the small, unimpressive, easy-to-understand words it has! If language like this is good enough to earn someone a PhD, it is definitely beyond good enough to earn you a good grade in an undergraduate course. So step away from the Thesaurus, NOW. Here's what you should do instead:

1. For words you repeat too much, like "argues" or "says," rather than right-clicking, circumlocute a little bit. 

Example "bad" paragraph (which I still think is a ton better than some right-clicked monstrosity):

Swift argues that by eating the babies of the poor, Ireland will solve both overpopulation and hunger. Because he argues this, many of his critics jump to the conclusion that he actually advocates on behalf of this action. In reality, his argument is meant to be satirical, arguing instead that it is exactly this sort of poor-blaming attitude that is the problem.

Now just fix this up using only words you already know:

Swift argues (keep the first) that by eating the babies of the poor, Ireland will solve both overpopulation and hunger. In arguing this (changed tense=related but not repeated), he causes many of his critics to jump to the conclusion that he actually advocates on behalf of this action. In reality, his argument (keep) is meant to be satirical, pointing out (simplify even more!) that it is exactly this sort of poor-blaming attitude that is the problem.

2. For prose that doesn't seem fancy enough--leave it, it's fine. I mean it. 

For your papers, you should be writing exactly like you would write an email to the parent of a new boy/girlfriend you are trying to impress. No "like," no curse words, no stupid slang or text-message abbreviations, proper capitals and punctuation, and that. is. it.

Why? Because the most important person who absolutely must understand your paper is you. You are making an argument, you are backing it up, you are taking a position on a topic or issue, and you need to know what you're saying--because if you don't, I absolutely guarantee you nobody will.

BRASS TACKS: a paper that is written 'too casually' but has amazing insights may get an A- instead of an A, but a paper that is written with a bunch of crap you yourself don't understand will get (or at least deserves) a C.