Professor Van Ry

When I first tried EssayTyper, for just a moment it chilled my blood. Of course, it’s just a little joke; but I hope students everywhere will be sophisticated enough to see that, because a person who was unusually naive, lazy, and ignorant just might mistake it for a computer program that will enable you to type out custom-designed essays on selected academic topics, even topics you know nothing about, even if you can’t type….

..You can type in a replacement for “American Civil War”; whatever you please: “praseodymium” or “eagles” or “Cole Porter” or “phonetics” or “Chronicle of Higher Education” or “lingua franca”—anything you could imagine someone being expected to write an essay on.

If then you click on the pencil icon on the right hand side, you get what appears to be a word-processor page with a centered header providing a fashionably absurd postmodernist title for your essay: “The Fluidity of Praseodymium: Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the Study of the Modern ‘Praseodymium,’” or maybe “Truly Eagles? The Modern Eagles: a Normative Critique.”

All you have to do after that is type. Type anything. <Read more.>

Via Geoffrey Pullum, The Chronicle of Higher Education.