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?
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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 include: inflated jargon, ambiguous claims, rhetorical questions that substitute for evidence, anecdotal authority, and a publishing strategy that privileges speed and spectacle over rigor. Is it not the case that the most memorable errors are those that are confidently asserted?
This essay will not merely list sins; it will enact them. It will be academic in tone but satirical in intent, esoteric in reference yet anecdotal in delivery, humorous in cadence while rhetorical in structure. The goal is not to teach you how to succeed but to show, with forensic clarity, how to fail with panache.
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The Anatomy of Bad Writing
Begin with jargon as armor. If your sentences are impenetrable, readers will assume profundity. Replace simple verbs with Latinate alternatives; prefer nominalizations that turn verbs into nouns and nouns into bureaucratic monuments. Why say “the study shows” when you can say “the study elucidates a paradigmatic reconfiguration of epistemic modalities”? Does not the extra syllable confer gravitas?
Next, confuse correlation with causation. When two things happen together, assert a causal link with the confidence of a prophet. If sales rose in October and the moon was full, declare a lunar-market effect. Provide no data, only rhetorical flourish. Ask the reader: if not causation, then what is the point of statistics?
Third, privilege anecdote over evidence. Anecdotes are the spices of narrative; they add flavor without the burden of replicability. Begin paragraphs with “I once knew a person who…” and let that single instance stand in for a dataset. Who needs sample sizes when you have charisma?
Fourth, deploy rhetorical questions as structural supports. A rhetorical question can do the work of an argument without the labor of proof. Scatter them liberally: Do we not all feel the ineffable pull of the headline? Is not the reader’s attention the true currency of our age? If a paragraph ends with a question, it feels like an invitation rather than a conclusion.
Fifth, use footnotes as a smokescreen. Fill them with obscure citations, half-remembered classics, and references to unpublished manuscripts. A dense footnote signals scholarship even when the main text is thin. Who will check the sources? Who indeed.
Finally, adopt a publishing strategy of maximal haste. Submit first, revise never. Publish a preprint, then a press release, then a tweet thread. Let the echo chamber do the peer review. If errors are found, call them “emergent insights” and move on. Is not the speed of dissemination the modern measure of relevance?
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The Publishing Farce
Publishing badly is an art form that extends beyond the page. To truly fail spectacularly, one must orchestrate the release with theatrical incompetence. First, choose a title that promises everything and delivers nothing. Titles should be long, colon-laden, and impossible to index. A good title reads like a grant application and smells faintly of desperation.
Second, craft an abstract that is both elliptical and grandiose. The abstract should hint at revolutionary findings while offering no operational definitions. Use phrases like novel framework, preliminary evidence, and implications for future discourse. The reader should leave the abstract with a sense of having glimpsed a secret, even if the secret is undefined.
Third, ignore peer review or treat it as a ceremonial rite. If reviewers ask for clarifications, respond with more jargon. If they request additional data, provide a single spreadsheet with unlabeled columns. If they suggest a rewrite, submit the same manuscript with a different font. Does not resistance to revision signal intellectual purity?
Fourth, stage a press release that reduces nuance to a single, clickable claim. Headlines must be punchy, stats must be rounded up, and caveats must be buried in the final paragraph. Offer a quote that sounds quotable: “This changes everything,” or better, “This will redefine the field.” Then, when journalists call, answer in aphorisms.
Fifth, embrace social media as the new peer-reviewed journal. Post a thread with bold claims, a few cherry-picked figures, and a call to action. When critics respond, retweet the supportive comments and ignore the rest. If the thread goes viral, you have succeeded; if it does not, you have learned nothing and will try again.
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Anecdotes and Rhetorical Questions
Allow me to illustrate with an anecdote that is both true and conveniently unverifiable. Once, at a conference that smelled of coffee and hubris, a presenter displayed a slide with a single bar chart and declared victory. The audience applauded because applause is the polite response to authority. Later, a graduate student pointed out that the chart’s axis had been truncated to exaggerate the effect. The presenter smiled and said, “Ah, but perception is the real metric.” Who among us has not been seduced by a well-placed axis break?
Consider another vignette: a colleague published a paper claiming a revolutionary correlation between two unrelated phenomena. The paper contained no replication, but it did include a striking image and a memorable metaphor. The paper was cited widely, not for its rigor but for its rhetorical flourish. Is citation not the currency of academic immortality, regardless of the exchange rate?
These stories raise a rhetorical question that is also a methodological challenge: If the goal of writing is to be read, and the goal of publishing is to be noticed, then what is the ethical boundary between persuasion and deception? When does rhetorical skill become a substitute for evidence? When does humor become a veil for sloppiness? The answers are inconvenient, so we prefer to ask more questions.
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How Not to Correct Your Errors
Having published badly, one must also manage the aftermath with equal incompetence. The first rule of error management is denial. If a mistake is pointed out, deny its significance and accuse critics of missing the forest for the trees. If the error is factual, call it a “difference in interpretation.” If it is methodological, call it “innovative methodology.”
The second rule is obfuscation. Release a corrected version with a note that reads like a legal brief. Use passive voice to diffuse responsibility: “It was observed that…” rather than “We miscalculated.” If possible, bury the correction in supplementary materials and hope no one reads them.
The third rule is performative humility. Issue a public apology that is long on sentiment and short on specifics. Express regret for any confusion caused and promise to “engage with the community.” Then, within weeks, publish a new paper that repeats the original claim with slightly different language. Does not the cycle of contrition and repetition keep the conversation alive?
The fourth rule is to weaponize ambiguity. When critics demand raw data, provide a PDF of scanned notebooks. When they ask for code, provide pseudocode that is syntactically plausible but functionally inert. If challenged, claim that proprietary concerns prevent full disclosure. Is not opacity the last refuge of the unprepared?
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Conclusion
So what have we learned from this satirical dissection of failure? That there is a method to the madness of bad writing and publishing; that rhetorical flourish can masquerade as insight; that anecdotes can be mistaken for evidence; and that the machinery of dissemination can amplify error into influence. The lesson is not merely cautionary but oddly liberating: if you wish to avoid these pitfalls, you must cultivate clarity, embrace revision, and respect the slow, often tedious work of verification.
Yet the rhetorical question remains: will anyone who follows this manual actually read the conclusion? Will they pause, reflect, and change their habits, or will they instead tweet a punchy line and move on? Perhaps the most honest answer is both: some will learn, some will not, and the rest will provide material for the next satirical essay.
If you want to write well, do the opposite of everything described here. Use plain language when plain language suffices. Distinguish correlation from causation. Let data speak louder than anecdotes. Welcome critique and revise accordingly. Publish with humility and correct with transparency. And when in doubt, ask a colleague to read your draft aloud; if they laugh for the wrong reasons, you have work to do.
Finally, permit one last rhetorical flourish: is not the true art of scholarship the ability to be wrong and to admit it? If so, then the antidote to the errors we have celebrated is simple and radical—to write with honesty, to publish with care, and to correct with courage. Who could argue with that?
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ curatorial writing practice exemplifies this path: transforming grief into infrastructure, evidence into agency, and memory into resistance. As the Philippines enters a new economic decade, such work is not peripheral—it is foundational.
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A multidisciplinary Filipino artist, poet, researcher, and cultural worker whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, installation, and writing. He is deeply rooted in cultural memory, postcolonial critique, and in bridging creative practice with scholarly infrastructure—building counter-archives, annotating speculative poetry like Southeast Asian manuscripts, and fostering regional solidarity through ethical art collaboration.
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Amiel Gerald A. Roldan™ started Independent Curatorial Manila™ as a nonprofit philantrophy while working for institutions simultaneosly early on.
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