Trying too hard to sound smart sounds silly
Most words on this list are “real” and serve a purpose, but for some reason they ended up trendy in academic journals. After a word is trendy it becomes an academic buzzword, expected in the texts of some disciplines. The result is academic writing descending into an unintended parody of itself. There is a reason the New York Times mocks the Modern Language Association conference paper titles: it is easy humor.
academese - An artificial form of communication commonly used in institutes of higher education designed to make small, irrelevant ideas appear important and original. Proficiency in academese is achieved when you begin inventing your own words and no one can understand what you are writing.
Academic writing can be interesting and informative, but it can also sound artificial, inflated, and even absurd. The key is to know 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, but it's our experience that the academic publishing industry needs 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 what generally results are tortured versions of existing words. Some examples of the lexical torture make us cringe.
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?
belongingness - (buzzword) (1) how well an item fits within a larger grouping. (2) how a person perceives his or her place within a group.
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.
... I regard Academic English not as a dialectal variation but as a grotesque debasement of Standard Written English, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherences of Presidental English... or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak ... and in support of this utter contempt and intolerance I cite no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago had Academic English pegged as a "mixture of vaguemess and sheer incompetence" in which "it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."
– Harper’s Magazine, April 2001
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)
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 