Stephen Tyler from American University wrote: “It thus relativizes discourse not just to form — that familiar perversion of the modernist; nor to authorial intention — that conceit of the romantics; nor to a foundational world beyond discourse — that desperate grasping for a separate reality of the mystic and scientist alike; nor even to history and ideology — those refuges of the hermeneuticist; nor even less to language — that hypostasized abstraction of the linguist; nor, ultimately, even to discourse — that Nietzschean playground of world-lost signifiers of the structuralist and grammatologist, but to all or none of these, for it is anarchic, though not for the sake of anarchy but because it refuses to become a fetishized object among objects — to be dismantled, compared, classified, and neutered in that parody of scientific scrutiny known as criticism.”

I think that this piece of writing stinks. First of all, it is extremely difficult to follow what the author is trying to say. He repeatedly uses dashes in his sentences, which all appear to be run-on sentences, to explain what he is saying, but it is only complicating his topic more. In one sentence alone he used three sets of dashes (6 dashes total), and I found myself lost in the sentence because I could not remember if I was in between dashes or reading the rest of the sentence. Dashes are a very useful tool in writing when used properly, however, Stephen Tyler does not use them correctly because it makes his work look and read jumbled. In Steven Pinker’s, he states “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, he states, “A considerate writer will also cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms…a writer who explains technical terms can multiply his readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters…Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all.” In this quote from Pinker’s writing, he is saying that explaining the terms or ideas you’re using in your writing is helpful, which is essentially what Stephen Tyler was attempting to do. However, the way he did this, by using far too many dashes, took away from his writing so much that it became even harder to understand what he was saying despite the fact that he was explaining parts of his sentences.