Instead of, “Me and my friend think,” you put, “It is universally accepted that”.

T

eachers, accountants and other professionals: do you want more respect and more pay? Want to be called “Professor”? Now you can. Simply write academic papers and your career will be magically enhanced. Do enough of them and you can offcially get the title “Doctor” and can moonlight with a bit of surgery. It can’t be that diffcult. I carved a leg of lamb once. But what does one have to write? Will my Facebook entries do?

“No,” said Syed Siddique, a reader who has been a professor for more than 20 years. They have to be works in “academic-style writing” published in “learned journals”. What exactly does that mean? Reader Denise Luk showed me a paper published by top academic publisher Routledge, opening with this line: “Since thought is seen to be rhizomatic rather than arboreal, the movement of differentiation and becoming is already imbued with its own positive trajectory.” OK. Right. What?

To the rescue came reader Chaminda Da Silva, a Tokyo-based research fellow in computer science. He offered to give me lessons, saying: “The title has to follow a certain pattern.”

1 Short baffing phrase.

2 Colon.

3 Long boring phrase.

He explained: “For example, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone would become PotStone: a Study of Harry Potter’s Experiences Related to the Sorcerer’s Rock Specimen .”

I tried it myself. Batman would become: Going into Bat: A Narrative of a Tycoon in a Pointy-Eared Mask Inspired by the Aerial Winged Rodent Chiroptera .”

That wasn’t so hard. As a service to academics who want to be head teachers, doctors, masters, professors, etc., here are other Top Tips from academic readers. After you’ve made a hypothesis, done some experiments to see if it is true, and then written up your notes, edit your phrases as follows:

Instead of “I think,” you write, “It is widely believed”. Instead of,“Me and my friend think,” you put, “It is universally accepted that”.

How to write

the perfect academic paper

Education is not just for kids:

adults can enhance their careers with academic magic, says father-of-three Nury Vittachi .

If you want to sound really smart, the fnal three steps are these.

1 Rewrite your sentences to be in the passive voice, so that “I lit a fre” becomes “The fre was lit by I.”

2 Remove easy words and substitute hard ones. So it becomes: “The confagration was ignited by a two-legged mammalian animal of the species humanus academica boringus.”

3 As a fnal step, true academics go through their papers and replace every occurrence of the word “I” with the word “we”, however absurd it sounds.

Example: “On the day of the experiment, we woke up, blew our nose and kissed our wife. Our experiment was delayed when we dropped our test tube on our left foot after we were distracted by our departmental secretary, who sat on our lap.”

If all of the above sounds too exhausting, take a break and watch a movie. I recommend The Aerial Winged Rodent Chiroptera Rises .

Nury Vittachi writes a regular humour column at

www.mrjam.org .

But beware. Some tricks are too well-known, Denise said. For example, the phrase, “Researchers would like to acknowledge the assistance given by students” is known to mean “I made my students do the work and then stole it.” And sentences such as “We selected three examples at random” inevitably mean “Out of 2,368 attempts, only three results supported our hypothesis, so those are the ones we here record.”

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