Back in the old days, everybody was a fool — They Were Idiots Then (TWIT).
We know that unfailingly, for the simple reason that they didn’t think like us. They were stupid and stodgy and superstitious and held all sorts of irritating views.
And it’s true. You can take absolutely any book from a hundred years ago, and find infractions on almost every page. The past is a different country, where everybody is a knucklehead.
Here’s how to write a TWIT: You take a yellow marker and highlight every time somebody in the book makes a blunder, according to our current rules of decorum this week. Trust me, you won’t even have to read the whole book. Within a chapter or two, your book will have more yellow highlights than Nicki Minaj’s hairdo.
Now you’re ready to roll.
You write up the infractions like it’s a district attorney’s indictment. But here’s the key — you must give it some fancy name. You can’t just call a twit a twit in your TWIT paper; you have to refer to your harangue as a critique or an exegesis or a deconstruction, starting with the title — which should be something like “A Critique of Phallogocentrism in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw“.
Once you get the hang of this, it’s as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. There’s just one problem — everyone else in the class is also writing TWIT papers. It’s the most popular thing on campus since the invention of the senior admin job. So you only get a B on these. Or maybe B+ if you throw in a few French words (for example, inserting différance whenever you’d normally say difference).
Ted Gioia, “The 4 Types of College papers for English Majors”, The Honest Broker, 2023-02-27.
June 3, 2023
QotD: The four types of college papers for English Majors – 2. The TWIT (They Were Idiots Then)
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