New Words

I’m officially making up these new words, because they correspond to activities that I do on a regular basis and that I need to convey to my students. I hope that by giving these concepts their very own words, they will lose the threatening overtone that these remarks usually come with — because students will realize that these are all very common problems indeed!

• cuteX, cuteXing — the art of wordsmithing a LateX document with the sole purpose of reducing the number of pages. Example usage: “ok, everyone, the deadline is in 1 hour and the paper is 2 pages too long. Time to cuteX!”
• parinvert, parinverting — inverting the narrative of a paragraph or of an entire section so not to reflect the actual sequence of events, but to state the bottom line first. Example usage: “you need to parinvert this block of text, because the reader doesn’t care what you went through; they want to know what you found out.”
• logicate, logicating — the art of putting together seemingly random sentences according to some logic that will be clear to the reader. Example usage: “I see this paragraph, and the sentences aren’t false or incorrect, but you need to logicate them”
• purposify, purposifying — giving a block of text a purpose for being there. Example usage: “Why is this paragraph here? You need to purposify it.”
• plowp, plowping — explicitly writing down an unwritten assumption or piece of information that clarifies confusing statements. Example usage: Me: “Why did you say this?” Them: “Because x, y and z” Me: “Plowp it!”

This is an evolving post. I’ll add more words to this list…