How to Fail Brilliantly: A Satirical Guide to Bad Scholarship
How to Fail Brilliantly: A Satirical Guide to Bad Scholarship Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ February 25, 2026 Introduction What if the single most reliable way to guarantee your work is unread, misunderstood, or memorably mocked is to follow a precise, time-honored recipe for how not to write and publish? This essay proposes that there is an art to failure, a craft to catastrophe, and a scholarly method to making your prose both academically unpublishable and spectacularly viral for all the wrong reasons. Consider this a playful manual, an academic satire, and an esoteric meditation on the rhetorical pleasures of error. Why aim for clarity when confusion is so much more interesting? --- The Premise At the heart of our experiment lies a simple premise: to demonstrate the anatomy of bad writing by deliberately assembling its parts. If one wishes to produce a text that will be misread, misquoted, and misused, one must first understand the building blocks of such a masterpiece. These blocks incl...
