Your essays are really pretentious

Ever write those long, over-complicated and over-indulgent sentences in essays to disguise your actual lack of knowledge and research? Those with big words and little meaning? Those that sound smart but don’t make any sense?

Yeah you do. I know you do. I do. We all do.

Although complete rubbish, these are an important part of the essay writing process. They’re the sentences you throw in at 3am when you just need your meisterwerk to be able to reach the minimum word count.

Here are some of the worst examples I could find.

For starters, I have my own efforts:

“Captain Ahab and the Pequod are organic forces like the ocean and the cliffs, they are naturally compatible and belong together.”

“The “marvelous tricks” Nora promises to perform is unsettling in its covertly sexualised but at the same time child-like way; it shows the natural wrongness of Helmer’s way of infantilising his wife, his sexual partner.”

This guy has some interesting thoughts on evolution

History third-year David Cowlishaw certainly has strong opinions on both the Mongols and the war in Iraq:

“The supposed neo-con zenith, namely the war in Iraq, exaggerates what the war on terror actually was.”

“‘It is not wholly unsurprising that attempts to co-ordinate a nomadic warrior race from the steppes of Asia with their counterparts from Christendom did not prove to be fruitful.”

Final year Bob Palmer has no doubt delighted his English tutors with these fine efforts:

“Turn-taking, speech acts and politeness strategies are used primarily to highlight the personalities and social skills of the main characters in this extract from the CBS television show The Big Bang Theory.”

“This Italy-within-Italy effect summarises Shakespeare’s use of Italy as has been highlighted so far in this essay – Italy as an idea is a fictional Italy, a fantastical counterpart to everyday English life.”

“I wonder how I can rip this off?”

Fellow English student, first-year Jake Leigh-Howarth occasionally strays into erotic fiction when there isn’t much else left to write:

“When the poplar tree’s shadow ‘fell upon her bed’ it is evokes the sense that the instrument needed to satisfy her is teasing her, increasing her agony.”

Pretension isn’t limited to arts students either, here’s 4th-year medic Michael Grant:

“Since evolution is a continuous process – I feel the discontinuous nature of the clade system is an incompatible paradigm, rendering accuracy arbitrary.”

History of Art student Poppy Cory-Wright has finally answered the big question of what art actually is, I can’t believe nobody told us:

“So, art is the all-important life preserving creation that makes the horrors of this world, which is constantly in flux, tolerable. The Apollonian throws an obfuscating veil of deception over the truth that life is no more than the state of becoming and destructing. This provides some sort of coherence for the human who might otherwise consider his existence as null, or indeed ‘nihil’.”

As we can see, no matter what subject you do or what year you’re in, an upcoming essay deadline can really bring out our terrible efforts at attempting to be Oscar Wilde. You know it’s guff, and so does your tutor, but look back at how showy you’ve tried to be in your most recent essays and you may even crack a smile. Then cringe, a lot.

Or, in the words of English and Film second year Sam Howlett: “The moment we allow someone else to make our decisions, our identity is destroyed.”