The winner is Judith Butler, literary theorist, who in 1998 took first place in the Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature for the following ninety-four-word sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.--From Jennifer Howard, "Missing Ears," The Times Literary Supplement (December 21 and 28, 2012), p. 29
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My students are always impressed by this kind of writing. They think it is "academic" and therefore something to which they should aspire. I ask them, 'do you understand it?' They reply, 'no, but it sounds good.' So what's the point? I advise my students to strive for clarity and precision. Never use seven words when one will do; think about punctuation; and never make up words (which seems to be a trend in the critical theory-type fields). To be honest, I hate this kind of writing.
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