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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Ten Commandments As Secular Historic Artifact Or Sacred Religious Text: Using Modrovich V. Allegheny County To Illustrate How Words Create Reality, Ann N. Sinsheimer Jan 2005

The Ten Commandments As Secular Historic Artifact Or Sacred Religious Text: Using Modrovich V. Allegheny County To Illustrate How Words Create Reality, Ann N. Sinsheimer

Articles

In his essay, The 'Ideograph: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology', Michael Calvin McGee proposes that our system of beliefs is shaped through and expressed by words. We are consciously and unconsciously conditioned and controlled by the words we hear and use. Words carry ideology and convey and create meaning. Like Chinese characters, words are 'ideographs that 'signify' and 'contain' a unique ideological commitment', that is frequently unquestioned. McGee also suggests that by understanding that a single word can carry ideology and that ideology can be expressed in a single word, we are better able to expose and evaluate ideology …


Bad Writing: Some Thoughts On The Abuse Of Scholarly Rhetoric, Jethro K. Lieberman Jan 2005

Bad Writing: Some Thoughts On The Abuse Of Scholarly Rhetoric, Jethro K. Lieberman

Articles & Chapters

Like most kinds of writing, academic writing rarely shines, but far more often than ordinary writing scholarly prose is murky and impenetrable. This brief jeu d'esprit considers several forms of bad writing, rejecting the claim, increasingly made in academic quarters, that "difficult writing" is necessary to the scholarly enterprise. Bloated, foggy, and enigmatic prose masquerades as profundity that escapes conventional mental grooves. In fact it is useless, unethical, and taken far enough, evil.