Trigger warning: a rant. Not only a rant but the rantiest of rants that you will ever see on Pepper.
Okay, so I’m annoyed about the books in my reading list. I love my degree, I love what we discuss in the seminars, I love theory. But I hate the reading. Like, truly hate the reading.
“I mean, the concepts are great and I love to see how they engage with the bigger questions in International Relations, but they are also often littered with jargon, over complicated sentence structures, and don’t get me started on the unnecessary connectives. At the beginning of the year, I found myself spending 4 hours on a 9-page article because I couldn’t find the main point – I was digging through language that served no purpose at all. To display the extent of this problem, I could even say that Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes gives off a clearer message, and he’s writing in 1651 (literally 40 years after the Bible was published in English).”
I get it. You’re an academic who has spent a good portion of your life researching, critiquing and trying to understand your extremely niche field of study that only about 12 other people in the world care about. You want to be the alpha of that pack of academics, trying to crack into the problem and throttle your intellectual opponents. But have mercy on ordinary students like myself, who just need one summary point from you for their essay. Be concise.
I’ve decided to take it upon myself to start tearing down inaccessible arguments. If you want to be pretentious, prepare to meet my pettiness. I started doing this last term and actually got my highest grades ever – after all, nothing motivates a grumpy student like doing things out of spite 😉
-Pepper
