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Topic: I hope I don't swear too much.
Posted: 2004-08-19 @ 12:17:16
Bear with me, it's my first time.
I shall start by explaining something; at the time of writing this, I've been at college for exactly three days, and I have received my first piece of homework. This is both a shock and a wonder for me, as due to a rather odd series of events, I hadn't done any homework for near three years. It's nothing too difficult, a mere word document detailing four different portable audio systems available on the market at the moment, a small test of English skills and word processing finesse. Fine and dandy, thanks to the wonder of the internet, I just have to look up four music players at Argos.co.uk and bullshit my way through to four or five pages.
It's at this point I hit a block. I sat and stared at my computer screen, alternating between OpenOffice and the Argos website, and I could not get one single word done. I realised, with mounting horror, that I had been out of practise for too long. I was too used to teachers telling me what was expected. The new found freedom of an open ended college assignment bitch-slapped me around the face and made one thing very clear to me:
I had forgotten how to bullshit.
The mechanics of it completely eluded me. I could only make myself write sentences that almost seemed like bullet points; short, sharp and to the point. It was a college student's worst nightmare, as bullshit is pretty much relied on to please lazy teachers who merely look at the number of pages and the font size to judge a student's level of work. I was buggered. So, I forced myself to stop sobbing and to look at things analytically, by examining how I used to bullshit.
We all have had to bullshit at some point. The fine art of taking a small amount of actual relevance and spreading it to a very large amount of pure waffle. A prime example would run:
Actual content: "The Sony WMEX631 cassette player has 68 hours of battery life."
Bullshit: "Cassette players are the oldest form of audio system on the market at the moment, and as such is obviously restricted in it’s capabilities. The Sony's playback time is good, but not nearly as much so as the other systems available. And although the long 68 hour battery life means what you are playing will last the journey, you are likely to be listening to the same songs on repeat towards the end."
Bullshitting could be mistaken for detailed descriptive writing, I suppose. The difference, in my opinion, is that descriptive writing is, well, a description of something that exists or that you can picture in your head; something that pretty much needs a description for the reader to understand what it is. Bullshitting isn't. It's, like I said earlier, waffle. Unimportant to the overall message you're trying to get across. Of course, it isn't restricted to words; a fantastic example of spreading the load would be my friend's enthusiastic use of pictures of said product in his own assignment.
Jammy bastard.
Okay, so I've been out of practise for too long. What on earth can I do? That's when I discovered an absolutely amazing way of getting into the bullshitting groove, while sitting in a free period in class. I copied from my friend, rearranging sentences and product names to fit, for maybe a paragaph or so. It was incredible, it was almost like "Bullshitting Lite". All the extension of the basic facts had been done for me, but the need to shuffle about words got me into the right frame of mind, and at that point it was just flowed out of me.
It was almost like a laxative.
So, now what? I got done and on with the assignment. I managed to turn four pages of bullet points - see here for an example - into five pages of actual English. I guess waffle is like plain writing; a blank page can be daunting and starting can be difficult, but once you get going, it's hard to stop.
Actually, you know, a lot of this 'article' is bullshit. I got across the points central to the tale - I forgot how to bullshit, panicked, remembered - but look at the length it's run to. All this in the gist of 'entertainment'. And you read it. (3)Comments
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