Early Abstract Revisions
The second week was mostly spent in revising the short abstract that you wrote in order to focus/pinpoint what you will be writing about for the rest of the semester.
Most of you have done a good job with this, although some further tweaking of the initial output will be required. Overall, the thing that most of you have to watch out for is "wordiness," and also the usage of complicated, or esoteric academic jargon that can very easily be replaced with simpler, cleaner forms of expression. Although there will be times when academic terms will have to be used, in most of the cases that I pointed out to you today, this usage was unnecessary. What you have to say is much better expressed in words that are "your own." Another thing that it will be good to watch out for are overlong sentences, that can easily be broken into shorter ones.
A good story in this context is the famous Sokal Affair: This was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether such a journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
The article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," published in Social Text's Spring/Summer issue in 1996, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. On its date of publication, Sokal revealed that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics."
And another good place to look as a lesson in avoiding the excessive usage of academic jargon is the PostModernist Text Generator that will construct a new academic text composed out of gibberish every time you refresh the page. The generated text sounds legitimate simply because it uses the cliches and wordiness of academic discourse but is nothing but abject nonsense if you actually try to read it.
So - clean, short, clear, and simple wherever you can do so. And academic terminology only where it is absolutely needed. The important thing is the content of your text and that is based upon your own thoughts (which you will substantiate through a good literature review and references, of course). No amount of verbiage will make up for a lack of content. In all of what you showed in class there is good content! So, no need whatsoever to hide it behind jargon!