Sentenced to Death

As someone who teaches academic writing to college students, I am always struck by how much difficulty they seem to have with the most basic sentence formulae, such as "According to _____," or "__________ argues that . . ." Now the University of Chicago Writing Program has created a tongue-in-cheek sentence-generator called "Make Your Own Academic Sentence" that will create an overly wordy theoretical string of words for "your next article." I like the fact that the first choice on the first pull-down menu is "the public sphere" and that the revisions actually work grammatically as well. I think this produces much more elegant results than the similarly themed Postmodern Essay Generator, which I write about in this essay and in the Virtualpolitik book.

Thanks to Siva Vaidhyanathan for the link!