{"id":98,"date":"2021-11-22T19:27:27","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T19:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/chapter\/excellent-academic-writing-can-be-funny\/"},"modified":"2024-04-30T20:19:50","modified_gmt":"2024-04-30T20:19:50","slug":"excellent-academic-writing-can-be-funny","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/chapter\/excellent-academic-writing-can-be-funny\/","title":{"raw":"Excellent Academic Writing Can Be Funny","rendered":"Excellent Academic Writing Can Be Funny"},"content":{"raw":"I vividly remember my 5th-grade student government elections, even now, almost a decade later. Why you may ask? One particular campaign brought chaos to our halls for almost two weeks. I vividly remember the halls being lined with posters saying \u201cVote for Carrot!\u201d Some even had little scribbled drawings and stock photos of carrots. No name. No face. Just Carrot. Students found it hilarious. People would walk down the halls, knowing Carrot was among them. People in the halls whispered, \u201cWho do you think Carrot is?\u201d \u201cCarrot is going to be president!\u201d When our election speeches finally came, Carrot revealed their mysterious identity\u2014a girl with bright red hair. She won the election in a landslide. Her comedic campaign allowed her to harvest a win (get it?) So why, then, is using comedy seen as a pathway to failure in academic spaces? Why is it considered too risky to use in academic writing?\n\nAcross our academic careers, the concept of seriously utilizing comedy in academic writing is widely ignored. (Ironic, isn\u2019t it?) If anything, we are taught that comedy \u201cdumbs down\u201d our work. Comedic writing is often considered unprofessional, lazy, and unsophisticated in academic settings. Presently, we as students may feel that writing one or two shaky jokes is the most<\/em> that we can use comedy in our work. And we\u2019re often too much of a scaredy-cat to write them in the first place. We are driven by this fear of our audience throwing tomatoes at us when they read our work, or hearing the boos when we hand our paper in. But not all hope should be lost.\n\nTeachers aren\u2019t just being meanies when they reject our knock-knock jokes and plays on words\u2014they are simply passing down the anti-comedy baton from the meanies who taught them. The thousand-page college textbook Everything\u2019s An Argument<\/em> spends a mere six pages on humor. Six! Amongst those pages is one overarching theme, \u201cit\u2019s usually better to steer clear of humor.\u201d This idea sticks with teachers and therefore sticks with the next generation of students. Yikes. But, surprise surprise! Adding comedic elements into our academic writing has a lot of benefits that most educators have yet to explore. First and foremost, introducing comedy in our writing encourages us to explore our writing style. Style is one of the most difficult aspects of writing to learn. Using humor requires us to examine our language choices as closely as we can. One wrong word choice and we\u2019re back to those rotten tomatoes. It also gives us a chance to look at sound and rhythm in our writing. How often do you pay attention to the syllables in your words? Probably less than you pay attention in class (at least I hope). As Michael Theune says<\/a>, \u201cIn comedy, it\u2019s not word choice, but the hunt for the choicest word.\u201d When your writing is comedic, you are setting everything you write up for the punchline that\u2019s going to knock the socks off of your readers. It requires skill, patience, and maybe a few \u201cgalaxy brain\u201d moments.\n\nUsing humor in our writing can actually make us more creative thinkers in the classroom. This idea that students should<\/em>\u00a0explore comedy in their writing is reinforced in other works that focus on teaching humorous writing in an academic setting. And while these texts are directed at current and future teachers\u2014education majors, I\u2019m looking at you\u2014they give us great insight as to why establishing comedy within our academic writing benefits us as students. As Cheryl Nason mentions in \u201cHumor, Learning, and Retention\u201d, \u201c...in a school climate increasingly concerned with convergent thinking and finding the right answer, humor challenges students to think divergently, creatively, and to welcome an array of possibilities.\u201d By welcoming comedy in the classroom, we are opening up to new possibilities and perspectives. Author of Comedy Writing Secrets<\/em> Mel Helitzer tells his readers to ask the question \u201cWhat If?<\/em>\u201d We all know there\u2019s nothing students love more than rhetorical questions. (I mean, really, don\u2019t you just love rhetorical questions?) As he explains, \u201cWhat if?<\/em> imagination allows you to realign diverse elements into new and unexpected relationships that surprise.\u201d Comedy gives us the liberty to flip the script and turn the tables. In a place where our writing is practically strangled by rules and codes for academic success, we get to invent the way that we write with comedy. Educators can no longer shape our style like merchandise on a production line when we invent new ways of saying things through humor.\n\nWhile support from our current academic superiors may be lacking, we can gain support from our fellow writers\u2014our peers. Comedic writing, by nature, is collaborative. (Think writers room in 30 Rock<\/em>). But really, working together allows us to bounce ideas off of each other and work through our comedy to gain a sense of confidence. I feel like I\u2019m betraying my age by bringing this up, but think about how social media works. When we post to an audience of people who are interested in what we have to say, it is like having peers look over our work before we hand it in. Paul Sturges wrote an article that was published in Sage Journals<\/em> that explored this relatively new review of comedy in digital media. In the article, \u201cThe Production of Comedy: The Joke in the Age of Social Media<\/a>\u201d, Sturges explains that \u201cExposing new jokes via social media has two values\u2014it is both an invaluable testing ground for material and a means of building up a profile with a potential audience.\u201d I\u2019m not saying that we should necessarily go around posting our best material on our Instagram stories to gain a million likes and drop out of school to be an \u201cinfluencer.\u201d (But if that\u2019s your lifelong dream, I won\u2019t be the one to stop you.) It is simply an example of how collaboration can improve the comedic process. In the same way that posting a joke on Twitter might receive one pity like (it\u2019s happened to all of us), our classmates might have a poor reaction to the comedy in our academic papers. Because of that feedback, we can work on improvements. We can use others to decide if our comedy is effective and humorous. We\u2019ve all told a joke before that we think is hilarious but then no one laughs. Collaboration with other writers in the same boat prevents that from happening in the more \u201chigh-stakes\u201d academic setting.\n\nYou might still be wondering, \u201cif serious academic writing is the accepted standard, why should we stray away from it?\u201d If you\u2019re anything like me, straying away from a guaranteed \u201cA\u201d is extremely difficult to do. Basically, Mission Impossible. Bev Houge, a professor at Marietta College, answers that looming question with research based on a non-fiction writing class that she taught. Throughout the semester, she examined the work of her students in a class that focused on putting humor in their writing. One of the fears of utilizing comedy in academic writing is that our writing might sound too much like a small-town comedy club routine\u2014stale and uncomfortably casual. However, Houge found that \u201c...the final papers were polished, sophisticated, and often very funny\u2014but still recognizably research papers.\u201d She observed that her students were \u201ccoloring outside the lines to create their own new and effective forms of expression.\u201d In her opinion, a select few students \u201ccreated final papers that approached art.\u201d Could exclusively serious academic writing accomplish the goal of creating \u201cworks of art\u201d with words? Students who utilize comedy effectively in their works are successful\u2014despite what we\u2019ve been told.\n\nAs with anything, there must be rules to keep our comedy \u201clively and productive\u201d, as Theune calls it. But that does not mean we should pretend that only a few types of \u201cclean\u201d humor exist. Some \u201cYo Mama\u201d jokes are very well crafted. All types of humor teach us important lessons. An article published in The English Journal<\/em> by Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don L. F. Nilsen, named \u201cThe Straw Man Meets His Match: Six Arguments for Studying Humor in English Classes<\/a>\u201d\u00a0provides two major takeaways. One, that \u201chumor is a good tool for teaching about censorship\u201d, and two, that \u201cHumor is a communication tool that can be used for either building or tearing apart.\u201d What we learn can then apply to real-world situations. We\u2019ll be able to call out jokes that are just plain disrespectful and applaud jokes that require a stroke of genius\u2014because we would then understand how much effort it takes to invent a well-written joke.\n\nThe best way to learn about how humor works is to write it ourselves. Unfortunately, there is no set way to add comedy into our writing. (Cue boos from the audience). To gain the best results from our comedy, we need to keep our purpose and audience in mind. Who<\/em> we are writing to should alter what<\/em> forms of comedy we introduce. As Mel Helizer mentioned before, it\u2019s all about those \u201crelationships that surprise.\u201d It\u2019s about the Ba-Bam! The Pow! But it\u2019s not always that easy, there\u2019s always a catch. As students, we may find ourselves in a situation where our educators believe strongly against the idea of comedic academic writing. Consequently, there may be times where our humorous writing is high quality but unacceptable in academic spaces. The best way to use comedy in our writing is to remain respectful and thoughtful in our comedic choices. (Knock knock! Who\u2019s there? Not knock-knock jokes in a paper!) If a professor is highly against comedic writing in their classroom, we can respectfully encourage them to research the benefits of comedic academic writing, but it isn\u2019t the \u201cend all be all\u201d if they cannot be swayed. Rather than all drop out of school and become stand-up comedians, students can gradually help to change the accepted standards in the classroom by propelling the cause. Well-written comedy has no reason to be rejected because it enhances our writing. If students don\u2019t ever experiment with classy jokes or puns that make our eyes roll, teachers have no reason to believe that comedy benefits creative academic writing.\n\nThere\u2019s no doubt about it, comedy is power. We as students are holding ourselves back from a writing style that is detailed, thorough, and just plain funny. Our fear of those darn rotten tomatoes keeps us from even taking the stage. We\u2019ll never know if we\u2019re actually the Jerry Seinfeld of the academic world if we pretend comedy doesn\u2019t exist there. So, as academic writers, our mission is to reintroduce comedy as a positive aspect of our style. For future teachers, your job is to make your classroom inclusive of comedic writing styles. If our teachers don\u2019t let out a muffled chuckle at least once when reading our papers\u2014one solid LOL\u2014then our mission is incomplete. In a time when laughter is truly the best medicine, then perhaps it should be prescribed to cure the ails of academic writing. Be the class clown that we don\u2019t just need, but deserve!","rendered":"

I vividly remember my 5th-grade student government elections, even now, almost a decade later. Why you may ask? One particular campaign brought chaos to our halls for almost two weeks. I vividly remember the halls being lined with posters saying \u201cVote for Carrot!\u201d Some even had little scribbled drawings and stock photos of carrots. No name. No face. Just Carrot. Students found it hilarious. People would walk down the halls, knowing Carrot was among them. People in the halls whispered, \u201cWho do you think Carrot is?\u201d \u201cCarrot is going to be president!\u201d When our election speeches finally came, Carrot revealed their mysterious identity\u2014a girl with bright red hair. She won the election in a landslide. Her comedic campaign allowed her to harvest a win (get it?) So why, then, is using comedy seen as a pathway to failure in academic spaces? Why is it considered too risky to use in academic writing?<\/p>\n

Across our academic careers, the concept of seriously utilizing comedy in academic writing is widely ignored. (Ironic, isn\u2019t it?) If anything, we are taught that comedy \u201cdumbs down\u201d our work. Comedic writing is often considered unprofessional, lazy, and unsophisticated in academic settings. Presently, we as students may feel that writing one or two shaky jokes is the most<\/em> that we can use comedy in our work. And we\u2019re often too much of a scaredy-cat to write them in the first place. We are driven by this fear of our audience throwing tomatoes at us when they read our work, or hearing the boos when we hand our paper in. But not all hope should be lost.<\/p>\n

Teachers aren\u2019t just being meanies when they reject our knock-knock jokes and plays on words\u2014they are simply passing down the anti-comedy baton from the meanies who taught them. The thousand-page college textbook Everything\u2019s An Argument<\/em> spends a mere six pages on humor. Six! Amongst those pages is one overarching theme, \u201cit\u2019s usually better to steer clear of humor.\u201d This idea sticks with teachers and therefore sticks with the next generation of students. Yikes. But, surprise surprise! Adding comedic elements into our academic writing has a lot of benefits that most educators have yet to explore. First and foremost, introducing comedy in our writing encourages us to explore our writing style. Style is one of the most difficult aspects of writing to learn. Using humor requires us to examine our language choices as closely as we can. One wrong word choice and we\u2019re back to those rotten tomatoes. It also gives us a chance to look at sound and rhythm in our writing. How often do you pay attention to the syllables in your words? Probably less than you pay attention in class (at least I hope). As Michael Theune says<\/a>, \u201cIn comedy, it\u2019s not word choice, but the hunt for the choicest word.\u201d When your writing is comedic, you are setting everything you write up for the punchline that\u2019s going to knock the socks off of your readers. It requires skill, patience, and maybe a few \u201cgalaxy brain\u201d moments.<\/p>\n

Using humor in our writing can actually make us more creative thinkers in the classroom. This idea that students should<\/em>\u00a0explore comedy in their writing is reinforced in other works that focus on teaching humorous writing in an academic setting. And while these texts are directed at current and future teachers\u2014education majors, I\u2019m looking at you\u2014they give us great insight as to why establishing comedy within our academic writing benefits us as students. As Cheryl Nason mentions in \u201cHumor, Learning, and Retention\u201d, \u201c…in a school climate increasingly concerned with convergent thinking and finding the right answer, humor challenges students to think divergently, creatively, and to welcome an array of possibilities.\u201d By welcoming comedy in the classroom, we are opening up to new possibilities and perspectives. Author of Comedy Writing Secrets<\/em> Mel Helitzer tells his readers to ask the question \u201cWhat If?<\/em>\u201d We all know there\u2019s nothing students love more than rhetorical questions. (I mean, really, don\u2019t you just love rhetorical questions?) As he explains, \u201cWhat if?<\/em> imagination allows you to realign diverse elements into new and unexpected relationships that surprise.\u201d Comedy gives us the liberty to flip the script and turn the tables. In a place where our writing is practically strangled by rules and codes for academic success, we get to invent the way that we write with comedy. Educators can no longer shape our style like merchandise on a production line when we invent new ways of saying things through humor.<\/p>\n

While support from our current academic superiors may be lacking, we can gain support from our fellow writers\u2014our peers. Comedic writing, by nature, is collaborative. (Think writers room in 30 Rock<\/em>). But really, working together allows us to bounce ideas off of each other and work through our comedy to gain a sense of confidence. I feel like I\u2019m betraying my age by bringing this up, but think about how social media works. When we post to an audience of people who are interested in what we have to say, it is like having peers look over our work before we hand it in. Paul Sturges wrote an article that was published in Sage Journals<\/em> that explored this relatively new review of comedy in digital media. In the article, \u201cThe Production of Comedy: The Joke in the Age of Social Media<\/a>\u201d, Sturges explains that \u201cExposing new jokes via social media has two values\u2014it is both an invaluable testing ground for material and a means of building up a profile with a potential audience.\u201d I\u2019m not saying that we should necessarily go around posting our best material on our Instagram stories to gain a million likes and drop out of school to be an \u201cinfluencer.\u201d (But if that\u2019s your lifelong dream, I won\u2019t be the one to stop you.) It is simply an example of how collaboration can improve the comedic process. In the same way that posting a joke on Twitter might receive one pity like (it\u2019s happened to all of us), our classmates might have a poor reaction to the comedy in our academic papers. Because of that feedback, we can work on improvements. We can use others to decide if our comedy is effective and humorous. We\u2019ve all told a joke before that we think is hilarious but then no one laughs. Collaboration with other writers in the same boat prevents that from happening in the more \u201chigh-stakes\u201d academic setting.<\/p>\n

You might still be wondering, \u201cif serious academic writing is the accepted standard, why should we stray away from it?\u201d If you\u2019re anything like me, straying away from a guaranteed \u201cA\u201d is extremely difficult to do. Basically, Mission Impossible. Bev Houge, a professor at Marietta College, answers that looming question with research based on a non-fiction writing class that she taught. Throughout the semester, she examined the work of her students in a class that focused on putting humor in their writing. One of the fears of utilizing comedy in academic writing is that our writing might sound too much like a small-town comedy club routine\u2014stale and uncomfortably casual. However, Houge found that \u201c…the final papers were polished, sophisticated, and often very funny\u2014but still recognizably research papers.\u201d She observed that her students were \u201ccoloring outside the lines to create their own new and effective forms of expression.\u201d In her opinion, a select few students \u201ccreated final papers that approached art.\u201d Could exclusively serious academic writing accomplish the goal of creating \u201cworks of art\u201d with words? Students who utilize comedy effectively in their works are successful\u2014despite what we\u2019ve been told.<\/p>\n

As with anything, there must be rules to keep our comedy \u201clively and productive\u201d, as Theune calls it. But that does not mean we should pretend that only a few types of \u201cclean\u201d humor exist. Some \u201cYo Mama\u201d jokes are very well crafted. All types of humor teach us important lessons. An article published in The English Journal<\/em> by Alleen Pace Nilsen and Don L. F. Nilsen, named \u201cThe Straw Man Meets His Match: Six Arguments for Studying Humor in English Classes<\/a>\u201d\u00a0provides two major takeaways. One, that \u201chumor is a good tool for teaching about censorship\u201d, and two, that \u201cHumor is a communication tool that can be used for either building or tearing apart.\u201d What we learn can then apply to real-world situations. We\u2019ll be able to call out jokes that are just plain disrespectful and applaud jokes that require a stroke of genius\u2014because we would then understand how much effort it takes to invent a well-written joke.<\/p>\n

The best way to learn about how humor works is to write it ourselves. Unfortunately, there is no set way to add comedy into our writing. (Cue boos from the audience). To gain the best results from our comedy, we need to keep our purpose and audience in mind. Who<\/em> we are writing to should alter what<\/em> forms of comedy we introduce. As Mel Helizer mentioned before, it\u2019s all about those \u201crelationships that surprise.\u201d It\u2019s about the Ba-Bam! The Pow! But it\u2019s not always that easy, there\u2019s always a catch. As students, we may find ourselves in a situation where our educators believe strongly against the idea of comedic academic writing. Consequently, there may be times where our humorous writing is high quality but unacceptable in academic spaces. The best way to use comedy in our writing is to remain respectful and thoughtful in our comedic choices. (Knock knock! Who\u2019s there? Not knock-knock jokes in a paper!) If a professor is highly against comedic writing in their classroom, we can respectfully encourage them to research the benefits of comedic academic writing, but it isn\u2019t the \u201cend all be all\u201d if they cannot be swayed. Rather than all drop out of school and become stand-up comedians, students can gradually help to change the accepted standards in the classroom by propelling the cause. Well-written comedy has no reason to be rejected because it enhances our writing. If students don\u2019t ever experiment with classy jokes or puns that make our eyes roll, teachers have no reason to believe that comedy benefits creative academic writing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no doubt about it, comedy is power. We as students are holding ourselves back from a writing style that is detailed, thorough, and just plain funny. Our fear of those darn rotten tomatoes keeps us from even taking the stage. We\u2019ll never know if we\u2019re actually the Jerry Seinfeld of the academic world if we pretend comedy doesn\u2019t exist there. So, as academic writers, our mission is to reintroduce comedy as a positive aspect of our style. For future teachers, your job is to make your classroom inclusive of comedic writing styles. If our teachers don\u2019t let out a muffled chuckle at least once when reading our papers\u2014one solid LOL\u2014then our mission is incomplete. In a time when laughter is truly the best medicine, then perhaps it should be prescribed to cure the ails of academic writing. Be the class clown that we don\u2019t just need, but deserve!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"menu_order":1,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":["garnerc"],"pb_section_license":"cc-by-nc"},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[92],"license":[56],"class_list":["post-98","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry","contributor-garnerc","license-cc-by-nc"],"part":96,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/98\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/98\/revisions\/99"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/96"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/98\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/books.chrisfriend.us\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}