Academic Language

‘Academic’ Language Abuse

Trying to sound smart often sounds silly

Most words on this list are “real” and serve a purpose when used judiciously, but they have become trendy in academic publications, often stretched beyond their original meanings.
Once a word is trendy it becomes an academic buzzword, expected in the texts of some disciplines. The resulting academic prose descends into an unintended parody of itself. There is a reason the New York Times mocks the Modern Language Association conference paper titles: MLA paper titles are ridiculous.

Good academic writing captivates and informs. Most academic writing reads as artificial, inflated, and absurd. The key to composing good academic writing is recognizing when and how to use these terms. Restraint helps you avoid losing readers.

We know academics claim they need new words and phrases to define new concepts. We can debate the “newness” of most of these concepts; in our experience, academic publishing wants to be fed new versions of old ideas to survive. (The journal industry is the sad result of “publish or perish” tenure logic.) When you need new words, the results are generally tortured versions of existing words. Even common examples of this lexical torture make us cringe, such as “problematize” when the text likely means “examine the implications or assumptions more deeply.” 

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– A –

absquatulate – (misused) flee or leave. Dictators absquatulate to another country. Use flee or another common term. The misuse we’ve encountered, meant as humor, is that an elected official having lost office does not absquatulate. Such a use is not effective hyperbole, because we doubt most people know the term.

academicize – to turn into an academic topic or discipline. Why not state that you want to study something?

adjunctification – the conversion of teaching posts to part-time adjunct positions.

– B –

belongingness – (buzzword) (1) how well an item fits within a larger grouping. (2) how a person perceives his or her place within a group.

BIPOC – grouping “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color” together is reductive. Some members of these groups believe this acronym suggests a non-existent set of shared interests and experiences. 

– C –

commodification – (misued, buzzword) in business, a commodified product or service is so widely available that pricing is difficult to maintain. When too many similar products are on the market, commodification occurs. Academics don’t limit themselves to clear meanings. Commodification has been appropriated to mean cheapen.

community – (buzzword) any group, even if there seems to be limited connections among members. This is a buzzword in the humanities, rendered meaningless via overuse. If you thought you knew what a community was, you haven’t read an academic paper. Entire books have been written trying to define community.

“Community is descriptive and prescriptive, local and global, spatially bound or boundaryless, public or private, organic or mechanical, intentional or accidental, purposive or aimless, oppressive or liberating, functional or dysfunctional…” (Fernback 2007)

Clear English:

Community means too many things.

concretizing – (1) to give an example. (2) to convert a plan into actions. People understand giving a “concrete example,” but simplify to example in most cases.

conflict transformation – (1) to end a conflict. (2) to change a conflict from physical to intellectual… though most physical conflicts begin with differences in thought.

conflictual – having to do with conflict. This word could be confused with others because it is uncommon.

counter-hegemonic – (buzzword) challenging norms or authority. see hegemony

counterpublics – any group opposed to dominant ideas or norms. In academia, counterpublic generally applies to “left-leaning” groups with social justice agendas.

– D –

deconstruction / deconstructing – (misused, buzzword) traditionally, deconstruction is an approach to philosophy. Academics appropriate terms from other disciplines, sometimes with odd results. Unfortunately, everything is now deconstructed by humanities professors. Understand a term before using it.

delegitimated – use delegitimize in most cases.

discourse community – (buzzword) in composition and rhetoric, this phrase is applied to any group communicating internally. We would use this phrase only to describe groups of academics, for clarity. Unfortunately, this can be every community the humanities have defined. see community

discursive – (misused) (1) based on reason rather than intuition. (2) rambling, digressive, wandering from one topic to another. Misused as a synonym for explanatory.

discursive strategy – how one writes or speaks. This is a fine phrase, when used sparingly.

“He employed
an unconscious discursive strategy when conducting public discourse.”

Clear English:

He used proper English when delivering a public speech.

disempowering – (buzzword) (1) oppressing, dominating. (2) anything that reduces one’s standing. (3) making dependent on others for success or survival. We suggest rewriting any sentence with this buzzword to clarify what is being done and to whom.

– E –

enculturation / enculturalization – the slow acquisition of the traits of one culture by another. The term enculturation is misused to imply forcing one culture’s norms upon another culture. Enculturation leads to hegemony in critical theory. These terms are associated with Western Marxism.

essentialized / essentializing – (1) stereotyped, reduced to a caricature; the process of reducing a person or group to a set of perceived common traits. (2) (misused) confused for naturalized, making something seem unavoidable and natural.

existential – (misused, buzzword) dealing with the nature of humanity, especially matters of free will and self-determination within an absurd universe. Overused in both academic and popular writing. As with deconstruction, philosophical terms resist simple definitions.

extra-institutional – (buzzword) beyond the official campus realm.

– F –

feministing – (buzzword) to actively use a situation to promote the cause of feminism.

– G –

global sexualities – universal “truths” about sexuality and gender.

glocalization – the desire to think of global concerns in terms of familiar, local norms. Supposedly a term from Japanese marketing texts, now used in sociology. We cannot even label this a buzzword.

– H –

hegemony – (buzzword) to have power or domination over others in a culture. There is always a dominant power, therefore always a hegemony, yet never accuse academic disciplines of having a hegemony.

heterodoxy – (misused) means heretical, skeptic, departing from the usual beliefs. The horrendous misuse we’ve encountered was intended to mean hetero-orthodoxy, as in heterosexuals dominating the world (see heteronormative). More often used to critique Western culture, but we would at least like to see the correct term used.

heterogeneity – (buzzword) used for diversity or variety in academic writing.

heteronormative / heteronormativity – normalizing heterosexuality at the expense of other sexualities or gender identities. Use when appropriate, but avoid generalizations that something cultural is heteronormative without evidence. 

– I –

informed by – (misused) standard use means to have been suggested by or based on. For example, a preference for a brand is informed by past experiences with the brand. 

initialism –

instrumentalization – to use a test or measure; to set a metric. 

intellectualize –

interactiveness –

interdisciplinary – Also see transdisciplinary

intergenerational – (misused) standard use means between or connecting generations. Unfortunately, we have read this misused to mean skipping a generation.

intertextuality –

– J –

justice – not everything is a matter of justice; use when appropriate, but refrain from hyperbolic claims of seeking justice. 

– K –

– L –

Latinx – a majority of Spanish speakers surveyed, as of 2024, prefer Latino and Latina over various options, including Latiné and Latinx. Do not impose a label on a community that largely rejects that label. 

legitimation –

– M –

meme – (buzzword, misused) technically, a meme is a norm passed among members of a community, regardless of species, by a non-biological means. It is not an email that spreads virally. Memes are imitations, such as the rich wearing jeans, which were at one time a symbol of the working class.

metageography – the “culturally accepted” misrepresentations of abstract territories. In fiction, creating a parallel world. In composition studies, diagramming concepts, such as programming flowcharts or network diagrams.

metonym –

– N –

naturalized –

neoliberalism –

– O –

overdetermined – (misused)

– P –

paradigm / preparadigm –

pedagogy – (misused) the science and art of teaching. We have encountered misuses, including “teaching pedagogy” and “the pedagogy of teaching.” The first is correct if one is teaching about teaching, but usually, it appears in sentences such as this from a journal article:

Silly example: The teaching pedagogies explored in this article represent best practices
in second languages classrooms. The pedagogical implications of the
strategies discussed should influence teaching approaches across the language arts.

The authors of this paper should have written, “The pedagogies explored…” and the second
sentence is an example of trying too hard to sound authoritative.

performativity –

polysemous – a fancy way of saying a word or phrase has several meanings.

positionality – how the position, physical or otherwise, of a group or individual relates to the self, the group, and others.

positivism –

postcolonial – (buzzword)

postmodern – (buzzword) seldom used with clarity, now meaningless. Suffers the same fate as “existential angst.”

post-postmodern – We are not sure what was meant by this, but we have seen this in print.

prediscursive –

prescientific –

problematize / problematization / problemize –

public – sometimes used superfluously in academic phrases. Example: public culture (as if culture isn’t public).

– Q –

queer [quare | kuaer] theory – the LGBTQ+ community generally prefers “queer” without any creative spellings. The identify words preferred by a majority of a community should be used. 

– R –

reappropriate / reappropriations –

reasonableness –

reconceptualize / reconceptualizationing – among the many ways of saying “rethink” in academic papers, reconceptualizationing might be the longest. Some advice: Any word with more than one prefix and more than one suffix is not a common word.

rearchitect / repurpose / reimagine / rethink / reimaginings – (buzzwords) adding the prefix “re-” to a verb does not make it more impressive, nor is there a requirement that one of these must appear in a paper. 

– S –

social construction – (buzzword)

socioemotional – (sometimes hyphenated) 

structuralist / structuration –

symbolic interactionism – an academic way to state that the mind and body each affect each other. Credit (blame) the Chicago School of Interactionists for this phrase.

symbolization –

– T –

technologizing – to make something natural seem technical or mechanical.

territorialization – (1) staking a claim on a concept or field of study. (2) thinking of a space, real or virtual, regarding a territory to settle.

transdisciplinary – see interdisciplinary

transformative – (buzzword) not every study or text can be transformative. Reserve for research, works, events, and people who have significantly changed the direction of a field or human history.

transgressive – 

transnational – across national borders or global. Be more specific and use common terms: use “global” or “multinational” when possible.

– U –

unproblematizes – (buzzword) explains.

– V –

– W –

webify / Webify – (buzzword) to find connections between concepts. The capitalized version refers to making conceptual connections online using the World Wide Web. Other texts use the term to mean Web-ready content.

– X –

– Y –

– Z –

zeugma – (misused) from grammar, a zeugma is when one word modifies two others, often in two different meanings. We have seen the term misused to mean a complex situation, with both good and bad potentials. A proper example is:

Both his stock holdings and his yacht sank in the same horrible week.