BULL%*#@!!!

Hi! First week of school down.... hope everyone had a great weekend!

" As scholars of rhetoric and writing, the most we can hope for is to avoid making the problem of academic bullshit larger than it is." - Eubanks and Schaeffer

I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on this one... maybe it was my complete inability to understand this article, but I felt that, if anything, it only made my understanding of

" academic bullshit" even more cloudy. I felt like trying to explain and define something as broad, and as widely used as bullshit, just made it more confusing. Also, for an article that included a whole section on elevated diction and its role in bullshit, I felt like the vocabulary was a bit rough...egregious, apotheosis, opprobrium? Call me stupid, but I was confused. I felt like the bullshitty nature of the article itself detracted from the argument it was presenting. I feel like there are some things that are undefinable and too difficult to explain. Yes, there are a lot of bullshitters out there- who hasn't bullshitted on a paper or in class discussion? It is a necessary and expected element of daily life- why try to define something in such academic and confusing terms, when in reality it is a very simply and automatic part of our behavior. Who is really every 100 percent genuine all the time? You have to adopt to your audience... personally, I would love to write a whole paper in internet/text talk, but I would get a terrible grade, so I guess that everything i've ever turned in is complete bullshit.

I was very confused when I finished reading this article, and this made me think back to the previous weeks reading on rhetoric... I didn't think this article was the greatest example of rhetoric- I think it focused too much on the subject and not enough of the audience- I couldn't really follow the article at all. It brought it too many different topics in an unorganized manner. There was the defining of bullshit and its role in academic writing, which I thought was interesting, but then they also brought in the salesman idea, gender roles, and something about a fish? I just felt like this article was everywhere and nowhere at the same time... maybe i just failed miserably at reading it...maybe it made a lot of sense to you guys, but I felt it lacked straightforwardness and sincerity for an article whose purpose was to explain bullshit.