How to write a 2500-word essay on a critical theorist

1. Begin with an analogy that has little to do with your topic:

The mathematician who subscribes obstinately to her branch of the discipline, with its specialist premises, exclusionary methodology, and rigorous traditions, is often the first mathematician to denounce a radical theory, to disregard a disparate analytical perspective or denigrate the revolutionary scientist whose work might undo or surpass her own.

However venerated she may be in her own field, she severely handicaps her capacity for horizontal research, her consideration of possible paths of application, and her role in an expanding discipline. Nevertheless, she does remain rooted in her own niche and is regarded with respect within her own circle—but only at the cost of an impressive debilitation. She is bound by fixed rules that will only allow for movement in an already set direction, rules that merely proliferate sets of progenitive ideas that only appear to differ from one another.

2. Employ and mimic the obscure style of writing used by the theorist himself:

But their incestuous conception, their limits, will be exposed by their homogeny, for it precludes any real novelty, and their homologous lineage only spawns ever more lines of defective cogs or ideas; however, these cogs, when placed into a self-proliferative and self-contained machine, function perfectly and exactly as they are meant to, that is, they become the streamlined ideas of perfect docile bodies to which Foucault refers.

3. Begin the concluding paragraph with 'therefore', to make it seem as if you had actually come up with a coherent thesis:

Therefore, the most constrained members of society are those members who are utterly abiding, those who submit to the system, even if they are ‘succeeding’ or ‘thriving’ within that system.

4. Extend your analysis with the word 'thus' and use several internal and obfuscating clauses to conceal the emptiness of your argument:

Thus, I propose that, contrary to belief (and by necessity, this proposition must be contrary to belief), it is the marginalized, and not the mainstreamed or ‘problematized’, that are the least constrained, for they, by their very nature and liminal position, are suspected, expected, and hold the possibility of revolution.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 for your next essay.