How to Write Consistently Boring Academic Technology Articles

I got a link from Alan Wolf to an article giving advice about how to write consistently boring scientific literature. The author advises that you follow ten simple steps to guarantee a vibrant publication record and career success. At the very least you will likely avoid reviewers making statements such as "I was alarmed that the authors believed this to be a final draft" or "although purporting to be about Subject X, I feel like this article is a subtle and indirect criticism of my pet Project Y, which is Beyond Reproach and against which I can brook no criticism so I will grind this article into the dust and make it disappear into the void." Not that I have ever received comments like that, but maybe the uninformed members of the hoi polloi amongst you have.

The advice is the following:
1. Avoid focus
2. Avoid originality and personality
3. Write l  o  n  g   contributions
4. Remove most implications and every speculation
5. Leave out illustrations, particularly good ones
6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning
7. Use many abbreviations and technical terms
8. Suppress humor and flowery language
9. Degrade species and biology to statistical elements
10. Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements

Many of these obviously transfer directly to writing about academic technology so we can immediately put them into practice and go forth writing more unfocused, non-original and logic-leaping screeds. But in the spirit of the exercise, I feel obliged to write my own Top 10 list (why be original, repeat!). And besides there are some ways in which we in academic technology are peculiar unto ourselves. Here goes

Top 10 Ways to Write Boring Academic Technology Articles

1. Write only about the hot topics of the moment. Right now you have to write about MMOGs or gaming. Even if you don't know and have nothing new to say about either.
2. Write only in a breathless sort of style.
3. Use the word neo-millenial as often as you possibly can.
4. Write from the first-person perspective of an undergraduate student at an R1 university in the US. then extrapolate madly from that in the final section to cover all students at all universities, everywhere.
5. Bury the fact that your study was based on a small n of interviews and a survey with 4 faculty members deep in a footnote late in the article. Certainly don't mention that in the title, the introduction or your discussion of the limitations of your study.
6. Wherever possible write about studies you did where you compared learning in one class with learning in another class. The classes were taught by the same professor who loved using a particular technology in the one class and hated not using it in another.
7. Frequently make statements about how faculty are bad at using technology which enrages students who are all neo-millenial tech savvy neo-millenials.
8. Use brand names when talking about technologies. That is not a course management system that you're analyzing, its Blackboard!
9. If you must insist on writing a solid, engaging article, preferably try to publish it in a venue where they will print your 15 pages of text over 75 advertisement interspersed pages such that any reasonable reader needs to take Ritalin in order to get through it.
10. The more obscure and irrelevant the little aphorism at the top of each section the better.
11. Write excruciatingly detailed reports for example about how faculty use course management systems.

Comments

[Lanny Arvan]

I liked the course management system paper --- not for the novelty of the idea but simply to confirm with data what we knew intuitively.

The rest was a good chuckle.

[Glenda Morgan]

Lanny, that's very kind. I think the course management system report was a necessary step and am fairly proud of it. But I did want to make it clear that I was poking fun at myself as much as anybody.

Morgan

[colleen carmean]

Hey, I resemble that! Can I add to number 3? Digital native, generation x/y, e-anything, and my new favorite: affordances. Oops. There's the abstract for my latest paper.

[Alan Wolf]

OH NO! Digital natives has escaped educational technology publications to business technology publications

http://midmarket.eweek.com/article/Digital+Natives+Will+Drive+Web+20++into+Your+Business/215574_1.aspx?kc=EWKNLMMS092007STR1"

[Alan F]

Brilliant!

[Morgan]

So my friend Danny was going to ask me to link to him on his LinkedIn account when he noticed that all my friends are called Alan. He, logically, concluded that he would not fit in, being Danny and all. My blog comments are starting to look somewhat similar.