No, really: Why did you write it? Why did you stay up two days before the extended dead­line, typ­ing furi­ously and graph­ing these arbitrary-​​seeming charts and wrestling with the lay­out soft­ware and the pub­lish­ers’ vanilla tem­plate so you could wait for some of your peers (read: “bet­ters”) to thumb through it desul­to­rily, look­ing for obvi­ous gram­mat­i­cal gaffes or mis­spellings, only then to rub­ber stamp it? Why did you feel the need to travel to [rel­a­tively dis­tant for­eign city] to stand in this ill-​​fitting suit and mum­ble about it in front of this not-​​quite-​​reconciled slide deck which, counter to most of our under­stand­ing of how com­put­ers work, is actu­ally out of order and miss­ing some pic­tures?

Was it to inform us? The easy targets—your the­sis advi­sor and chair­man and dean and edi­tor and even unto your spouse and parents—they already pretty much know all they need to about this stuff. Every­body out­side that social cir­cle within tele­phone reach, odds are, doesn’t care.

Was it to pro­mote your field? Past your the­sis advisor/​chairman/​dean/​editor, who actu­ally has read every word of your paper?

Not I.

Was it to travel? To sell some­thing? To demon­strate to what­ever com­mit­tee cur­rently con­trols your life that you have spent the last few months “pro­duc­tively”? To build your CV, or make a splash in the thrilling field of [your field here]? To get your next job?

If you wanted to inform us, why didn’t you just tell us? All of us. There is email. There are blogs, avail­able for free. Tell us.

Have you con­sid­ered that you are trans­form­ing the library (pos­si­bly, but rarely, libraries) where the scarce phys­i­cal copies of your work will be stored into mere County Cour­t­houses, where birth and death records are main­tained in per­pe­tu­ity for legal rea­sons and the occa­sional ama­teur genealogist?

If you wanted to build your field, or tout and expand your par­tic­u­lar spe­cialty, why not just tell the peo­ple most likely to adopt your inno­va­tions? This thing here, it smacks of spam; it says you can­not be both­ered to iden­tify col­leagues, and instead must rely on ran­dom suck­ers. By telling this to five inter­ested, salient peo­ple, I bet you could spread the word in a way that would ensure its dominance.

Or have you not both­ered to learn the other influ­en­tial and recep­tive peo­ple in your own field? Think on that a moment.

If you wanted all along to do some­thing else you’re not telling me… hey, I’m will­ing to believe and sup­port that. Your paper was a ticket, in that case, or an adver­tise­ment. And that modal­ity has a long and thriv­ing pub­lish­ing his­tory in the sci­ences and in engi­neer­ing fields around the world.

This paper then is a piece of instant ephemera, isn’t it? After you’ve trav­eled, got­ten your next job, patented that cool new wid­get: this is the ticket stub in the pub­lic scrap­book, the snap­shot they make of you and your one-​​time boyfriend at the top of the log flume in the amuse­ment park, and offer to sell you at the exit.

Could you maybe stamp that at the top? “I had to write this down so they would give me $175 so I could afford on my wages to travel to some far off place and broaden myself, and maybe have some fun, by meet­ing oth­ers just like me.” “I had to prove to some dude that I could ape his sen­si­bil­i­ties.” “I had to get the fifth entry on this scav­enger hunt of a resumé.”

Those might be good things to place in the paper itself, maybe between the abstract and the use­less key­word list, for the casual reader’s benefit.

Or did you write this with delight? Delight in your work, in your progress, in your field and its implications?

Did you write it to tell me, not in these fuck­ing gran­ite stone steps of words, worn dan­ger­ously round by years of pas­sive use by monks through the ages, but in poetry? In your choice of haiku, psalm, pentameter?

So where are you, in this?

Did you write it to efface your­self? To blend in against the throngs of nearly iden­ti­cal agents of abstraction?

Mm hmm. I think you maybe did.

Yeah. That worked.

Oth­er­wise, do this: Sit down now, hav­ing writ­ten this thing, this scrap, this bone that implies no dinosaur but rather a com­mon cow, and start again. Make me laugh. Make the god­damned hairs stand up on my arms. These are words, which do not exist in a cul­tural vac­uum but instead reach across the ages in links to Plato and Byron and David Fos­ter Wal­lace, to Tolkien and Dar­win and Jesus Christ. To nov­el­ists, poets, essay­ists, preach­ers, and all man­ner of com­mu­ni­ca­tors of delight.

Where are you, in these words? No, wait—I don’t really care. Where is the delight in these words? Make me see that, and you may follow.

You are not allowed to keep delight to your­self. Moron. This, above all the other things, is the thing the Acad­emy has lied you into mis­un­der­stand­ing, with its delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tions and post­pone­ments of your life: Delight, kept secret, always fades to nothing.

You are being trained to disappear.

But I think maybe you, this reader, because you have made it this far, you still have a gleam of curios­ity in you, some spark of delight left burn­ing and warm­ing you.

Say it. Invoke the muse we still pos­sess, out here in the world. Say it in too many words (though care­fully cho­sen), be too long (there are no page lim­its), be wordy, be florid, and above all be engag­ing.

More peo­ple will read your work, given some fla­vor or some spice or some inter­est and even one god­damned joke—per­haps even a scrap of that body-​​filling awe that drew you to this work yourself—than will ever sit squirm­ing in the chair at the con­fer­ence, or dive deeper than your pub­lished abstract.

Oth­er­wise, you and your delight are lost. Look at the mar­riage and death records in the County Cour­t­house, and tell me where you see the love, the grief, the joy and pain in them.

Your paper is headed to the cour­t­house of your scant soci­ety even now. I will not see it again.

Make us another one. Build your­self one in which you can live.

This con­ven­tion of unread­able, dis­tant, self-​​effacing, four-​​page, two-​​column, Times Roman fact is not a bow to “real­ity”, you know. Real­ity doesn’t give a damn what you say about it, or how many words or pages you use.

It is, rather, the very mech­a­nism by which your career makes you its prey. The sound of droning-​​but-​​succinct aca­d­e­mic “prose” is the sound of your soul’s bones being chewed by your Institution.

Those other words, the long-​​form prose, the writ­ing skills you should have learned in your “breadth” train­ing, when instead some­body made you start focus­ing on your spe­cialty: those are the only sword you are afforded, with which you might, pos­si­bly cut your way free.

Oth­er­wise: you’re institution-​​poop for sure, child.

Sing, or fade. Sing, or die.

Write bet­ter.

Now.