Thursday, February 15, 2007

Your academic work condensed into haiku

This is the awesomest idea ever. Obviously you might need to be extra anonymous if you plan to use the title of a published or otherwise googlable work for your haiku. But if you're leaving them in Jim's comments, I guess you can always not sign your pseudonym.

Here's mine:

The grammaticalisation of discourse markers in relative clauses

Words like "so, you know"
glue onto pronouns; grammar
from faded meaning.

Towards a diachronic typology of relative clauses

The more I research
this, the more certain I feel
that Lehmann was right.

alternatively:

The relative clause:
parasite, steals its form from
other constructions.

(Yes, these titles do make me googlable. If you care, and find out my identity, please don't post it here.)

Update: Ooh! Ooh! I have another one (also for the dissertation):

Towards a diachronic typology of relative clauses

From the bruised syntax
of mangled constructions, rise
these zombie clauses.

(Yes, I have just spent most of the afternoon writing haikus, not only about my own thesis but also on most of the journal articles I've read lately and a whole heap of the fundamental works in my field. It's a fun game! And not at all a sign of impending insanity.)

PS: I'm going to do one for each chapter next. (Carried away? Who, me?)

4 Comments:

Anonymous said...

right before I defended it, I took a day and rewrote my dissertation proposal as a sestina. :) I'm totally going to try some haiku next. except I'll warn you...I suck at haiku.

Lucy said...

These are going in your finished thesis, right?

StyleyGeek said...

Anastasia: Like I don't!? I didn't stop me, anyway.

Lucy: I wish.

ZaPaper said...

thanks styley, i so had to go post one!