Let Us Publish Your Dissertation!

A Letter from the Advertorial Editors

As a devoted reader of SpecGram, you are aware that we publish satirical linguistics of only the highest quality. No second rate humor for us! As a grad student, you are also naturally worried about the academic rat race that inevitably will follow your graduation. The cap and gown are nice, but they don’t get you tenure. What you need are publications—and the dissertation is an easy target for a big one.

J. Yellowlees Douglas, 2001, The End of Books—or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives, University of Michigan Press. Chiasmus of the Month February 2016

Here’s where your interests intersect. SpecGram has provided the relief you’ve needed through these years of graduate school, enabling you to survive the rigors of the academy and to emerge (pretty soon, we hope) with a dissertation that is the pride of your department. Now, your comfortable old friend can help you take that next step toward academic respectability, transforming your work from a mere thesis into a book. You are about to become an influencer within the field.

The first question that people in your situation always ask us is this: “How long will it take?” This is natural; you know that you’ll be busy in your new job, and you’ll need to crank out some new research alongside publishing your old work.

Do not fear! We have found that the average dissertation requires less than one week of full-time editing, in order to bring its absurdity level down to SpecGram standards. With your dissertation advisor safely out of the picture, you can remove the most extreme parodies and the most laughable claims, and retain only that essentially funny core of the work that attracted you to the project in the first place.

So stop worrying! Defend your dissertation (try not to laugh during the defense), file it, take a month off, and then set aside a week to revise the thing. Whole chapters will fall away as you remove the ornamental chaff. The ridiculous will be easily reduced to merely humorous, timing will be infinitely improved, and by the time you are chuckling through your Friday morning coffee, you will be ready to send us the masterpiece of linguistic satire that you wanted to produce all along.

We’ll look forward to hearing from you.

	The Grapholinguist—Davis Prickett
	SpecGram Vol CLXXV, No 2 Contents