Paraphrastic Academese: When the Camouflage Becomes the Voice
The plagiarism allegations surrounding Jason Arday have already been examined at the level of textual overlap. Nathan Cofnas, among others, has published side-by-side examples from Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis and earlier work, particularly Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 dissertation, arguing that substantial passages were reproduced with limited alteration.
But there is another question that interests me more.
What happened to the language when Arday changed the copied passages?
The alterations are not random. Again and again, relatively clear source prose is converted into something denser, more abstract, more ceremonially academic — and often less precise. The process is distinctive enough to deserve a name:
paraphrastic academese.
I do not mean ordinary bad academic writing. Nominalisation, Latinate vocabulary and excessive abstraction are common throughout the social sciences. Nor am I claiming that every awkward phrase in Arday’s work derives from plagiarism. The interesting phenomenon is narrower: in passages already identified as closely dependent on earlier sources, the changes themselves repeatedly take the same form.
Six techniques recur.
1. Nominalisation
Actions become things.
People cease to use, reflect, develop or work together. Instead we encounter utilisation, reflective processes, development and collaborative endeavour.
The grammatical subject gradually disappears. Human beings stop doing things; processes begin facilitating other processes.
2. Latinate upgrading
Simple verbs acquire more prestigious substitutes:
use becomes utilise;
help becomes facilitate;
start becomes initiate;
show becomes demonstrate.
Sometimes this merely makes the sentence longer. Sometimes it changes the meaning slightly. But its most consistent effect is tonal: the sentence sounds more recognisably “academic”.
3. Abstraction stacking
One abstract noun rarely travels alone.
A simple reference to teaching practice may become a discussion of pedagogical constructs, reflective discourse, professional development, conceptualisations and processes.
The curious result is that the more conceptually important a sentence sounds, the harder it can become to identify its actual proposition.
4. Metaphorical agency
Abstractions begin behaving like people.
Themes underpin.
Concepts illuminate.
Contexts navigate.
Processes facilitate.
Perspectives inform.
Discourses permeate.
This is common enough in academic writing, but in excess it creates a peculiar world in which the researcher almost disappears and the abstractions conduct the research among themselves.
Arday’s published prose elsewhere displays the same tendency toward elaborate conceptual vocabulary combined with unstable syntax: one abstract describes a “Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling method”, “ways in racism unfolds”, and racism operating “within in the Academy”.
5. Meaning dilution
This may be the most important effect.
A clear source statement is not simply paraphrased. It is often wrapped in more elevated language until its meaning becomes less definite.
A phrase such as put knowledge to work and try it out becomes something closer to knowledge being revealed and implemented.
The new wording sounds grander, but the original epistemological point — testing knowledge in practice — has become fuzzier.
The transformation adds academic atmosphere while subtracting semantic resolution.
6. Incidental grammatical damage
And occasionally the alteration simply makes the English worse.
One particularly revealing kind of change is an unnecessary substitution in an otherwise retained sentence — for example, changing a perfectly idiomatic preposition into a less idiomatic one.
This matters because genuine paraphrase normally changes language in pursuit of clarity, concision, emphasis or precision.
Alteration for its own sake has a different signature.
When the copied sentence remains structurally recognisable but a small replacement makes it less natural, one reasonably wonders whether the purpose of the change was communicative at all.
There are important caveats.
First, this is a close reading of selected passages, not an exhaustive quantitative analysis of both dissertations. The frequency of each technique would need to be established systematically before claiming that they characterise every instance of overlap.
Second, much of what I am calling paraphrastic academese is also field-typical academese. Education studies, critical pedagogy and adjacent disciplines already favour abstract nouns, agentless constructions and Latinate vocabulary. Arday did not invent this register. It may have supplied him with an unusually forgiving environment in which these transformations looked normal.
Third, grammatical weakness has several possible causes. Poor supervision, hurried writing, imperfect command of formal academic English or other individual difficulties could all contribute. One should therefore distinguish the observable textual pattern from speculation about the writer’s conscious intentions.
But that leaves an intriguing possibility.
Suppose someone repeatedly learns to transform scholarly prose in the following way:
copy a sentence → alter its most conspicuous wording → add abstraction and jargon → repeat the technique.
At first, that may simply be a method of disguising dependence.
But language is habit.
Repeat the transformation often enough and the transformation itself may become internalised.
Eventually one no longer needs a source sentence in front of oneself. One begins producing original prose using the same machinery.
The genealogy would then look like this:
borrow scholarly prose → alter it → repeat the same disguise techniques → internalise those techniques → produce new prose in the same register.
At that point the camouflage becomes the idiolect.
This remains a hypothesis. Proving it would require comparing three bodies of text systematically: the demonstrably overlapping passages, the apparently independent passages of the 2015 thesis, and later published writing.
But it would explain something otherwise rather puzzling about the voice.
Even where no source has yet been identified, the prose can feel as though it has already passed through a paraphrasing machine.
Consider the difference between:
People learn by talking to colleagues.
and:
Collaborative dialogical endeavour facilitates the development of reflexive professional conceptualisations within pedagogical practice.
The second sentence does not merely communicate the same idea more pompously. It belongs to a different linguistic economy.
Its function is partly propositional — but partly credential-signalling.
Before the reader has worked out what the sentence says, the sentence has already announced what it is:
scholarship.
That may be the most interesting lesson in the Arday texts. A writer can learn what academic language looks like before fully mastering what good academic language does.
And if the techniques originally used to disguise borrowed prose become habitual, the final irony is considerable:
the effort to conceal another writer’s voice may eventually produce a voice of one’s own.
