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The Hash-Slinging Slasher

By Karen Kelsky | October 3, 2014

This fall, a new phenomenon has emerged in job documents—the slash/dash addiction.

I think, if you read the examples below (which are shared with permission of the authors), you’ll see the problem.  In a way, it’s just another manifestation of desperate cramming , and a very close cousin to list addiction and dyad addiction.

When you resort to tactics like this to wedge in additional words,  it’s an undignified attempt to cover all bases out of fear of seeming inadequate. While you might imagine it looks sophisticated, you really come across as indecisive, a sloppy editor, desperate, and in some cases a poststructuralist poseur.

If a word is worthy of mention, it should get its own dedicated spot in a sentence.  If it is interchangable with another word, then it is not a word worth utilizing.  Editing means making these hard choices.


My work unpacks ongoing shifts in ecological/rural development approaches.

My primary areas of specialization are rhetorical theory, composition theory, discourse analysis, service-learning, and embodiment/affect studies.

I displace subjectivity, identity/identification, and sex/gender difference as the primary frameworks through which to conceptualize XXX.  [sex/gender is obviously a well-established and substantive formulation; identity/identification, however, is not].

For example, I asked them to relate/link Donatello’s David with the description of young men in the comedies. When it was the turn of Michelangelo’s David they had to compare the two representations and then assess/understand/explain the statue through the lens of a/the suddenly changed political scenario.

In highlighting the forms of women’s participation in the XXX movement’s crusade for social reform, it moves away from the women-as-objects-of-social-reform model of historical analysis. In foregrounding the discourse and activities of women and about women in the Movement, it unsettles the nationalist-women-as-chief-articulators-of-women’s-reform model of feminist history writing. In providing a region-specific focus on activism in the cause of women’s reform, it underscores the diversity of experience under colonialism in India and dislodged Bengal-as-the-norm model of colonial history writing.

Similar Posts:

  • List Addiction, Cont’d: The Dyad
  • Desperation, Addiction, and Your CV
  • Ph.D. Debt Survey Revisited
  • Banish These Words, 2014
  • Gerund Addiction and Word Repetition–Two More Scourges

Filed Under: How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Writing

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. D says

    October 7, 2014 at 7:17 pm

    ok/that-was-really/annoying-to the extreme/end/blah. simply ridiculous.

    Is this really a trend? do you have more than one example? that would be sad.

    Reply
    • Karen says

      October 8, 2014 at 4:10 pm

      those were all from different individuals’ documents.

      Reply
  2. Squidward says

    September 27, 2015 at 2:52 pm

    “…and the lights/illumination will flicker on-and-off!”

    Reply

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