Grad School Writing Sample
Sorry for the months long inactivity y’all! I got caught up at work and “writing” my application. That is to say, I would leave work and think about writing instead of actually writing.
Now that I have nothing to elevate my baseline anxiety anymore, I should be able to focus more on this blog. One of my new year’s resolution is to either write one big blog post a month where I do research or one short blog post a week where I just say what I want to say.
This blog post is the former. I present here my writing sample for grad school. This is a heavily modified version of my undergraduate thesis. My thesis was larger in scale. I explicated three different theories of dogwhistles and how they. My explanation of representational dogwhistles was devoid of any mention of relevance theory—as I was not then acquainted with it—, but my original account was not too far off from what I explicate now. Originally, I had a section on how to negate representational dogwhistle, but that was axed to save space.
How I would improve it
If I was given more than twenty pages for my writing sample (or actually followed my writing schedule and finished it earlier), I think I would have written a paper notably different from the one I did. For one, I would have written more on the relation between dogwhistles and social norm–violating beliefs. This would have required I do some more reading in the epistemology of conspiracy theories. This minor change would also enable me to produce a better rebut to the ostensive-inferential account I lay out (which is my least favourite part of my sample).
What I like most about this version was how I focused on what just one theory. I liked going in to what Khoo and how this theory in particular is incapable of explaining representational dogwhistles. I also liked reading on relevance theory and just explaining why it’s so good at explaining representational dogwhistles (and as a general theory of communication).
But enough talk. Here is exactly what I submitted. Judge it if you must.
—Florens