A Reply to Arfang Sillah’s Conjectural and Charged Emotive Arguments
“Haranteh deggaa mungi si feheey haam balaah nuiy deff daara” – Wollof Proverb
Good try, but sadly, you jump into the optics of illusions as if you smoked expired weed and whirling as a cultist propagandist and high on the “kush” of foolery. At the same time, you descend from mid-air in cloud 84 without your safety landing gear and with haste without reason to discredit an endorsement intentionally, with a preconceived mind, and classify it as an academic article when it is not, in the first instance.
This is an outright violation of the established protocol on academic writing because instead of seeking guidance and explanation, you went loose with a seething rage, fuming profusely and combatively with self-deception and withered on tongues. In other words, you failed to draw a line or distinguish between personal/formal and academic writing. This is a sign of hooting like a night owl, hooked with the Hookah Shisha of ‘doff doflou ak mah teyy,’ further validated by the fact that you read without understanding and reacting based on your perception, emotions, and sentiments. An adage in the Wollof parlance semantically captivated it beautifully: “Laata Ngay deff daara, Njekkalah deglou ngir haam.” This translates as “Before you react, listen to understand.” A desire for validation fuels this craving blunder and does not lead to a recommendation because it is sheer dishonesty called the practice of mercenary maneuver in futility. In the deficit view, this indicates that you are hurting, bruised, and tortured by anger, ego, emotionality, and arrogance, which influenced your reactionary decision to my endorsement letter for Dr. Tangara’s candidacy for the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. This is evident when someone becomes a prisoner of bitterness and bias, indoctrinated and conditioned with partisan fervor and using personal attacks through emotional response and anger to ostracize others who share different perspectives – a manifested discomfort, self-doubt, and low self-esteem. Sadly, this places the person under delirium and cognitive dissonance, arresting their reasoning abilities and wandering in lost.
Secondly, I was going to provide you with a fitting response as to my strong endorsement of Dr. Tangara’s candidacy in defense of excellence by challenging the narratives and providing the contextual, historical, and theoretical background of his contributions in quantitative terms if my writings were a scholarly essay. However, that is not worth my time. You have decided to go personal, irrational, and enraged like the mad man of “Kerr Doff Yi” spewing venom without a second thought and with an unthinkable imagination fired up by abstract romanticizing ideas with ego-fulfilling desires, as a rogue and pseudo-intellectual hiding behind the keyboards of Facebook. That highlights the state of your delusional mind and behaving like an adult in diapers as the currency of your arguments.
Additionally, you failed the academic writing test with the annoyance of Serrekunda by intentionally bringing it to the public discourse with a misrepresentation of facts. Despite that, conscience, humility, and maturity remind me that you erred and need help understanding the context and nuances between personal/formal and academic or scholarly writing. How is a personal endorsement letter a ‘‘scholarly disgrace’’ or an intellectual chicanery? How will an endorsement letter limit the substance and form of public discourse and engage scholarship in enhancing intellection and intellectual engagement in The Gambia? What is the correlation between a personal endorsement letter and academic writing? What construct measurement did you use to qualify a personal letter as a scholarly interrogation? When has it become an uncontested view that a personal endorsement of Tangara’s candidacy will erode public trust in Gambian intellectuals? Why use anecdotal evidence and so much unnecessary energy in taking a personal offense on an endorsement letter using emotive arguments rather than logical and objective reasoning to agree to disagree against someone’s line of thought or perspectives? Why use subjective labels of stigmatization and prejudice to those who have different perspectives or opinions from you and classify them as “people with no moral mores or integrity”? Caveat: Let me digress and remind you that my previous paragraphs return the favor to you, implying that I can all take off my professional and intellectual hats and return the same punches of derogatory adjectives to those who attack my person. Focusing on the subject. How do you come to the logical conclusion on classifying individuals by their viewpoints? Does bounded rationality blind you? These questions will help you reason, understand, examine, explicate, learn, unlearn, and relearn about academic/scientific writing dynamics and critique rules.
Consequently, you argued that my endorsement letter had not presented any evidence; however, your counterarguments do not provide any substantive claims to dismiss or disapprove of my thoughts on Dr. Tangara’s uncontested contributions and achievements throughout his public service career. Providing a counterargument on Tangara’s candidacy is critical and a consideration you failed to utilize in your wishful and dismissive arguments. The reasoning is that you allowed political bias, conjectural constructs, clouded judgment, and negativity bias to take control of your reasoning mind while using unnecessary energy to discredit my endorsement by failing to provide a balanced view of Dr. Tangara’s qualifications and achievements. This makes you lose the traction of credibility and objectivity in your assessment with a perceived malicious and ill-fated critique that is only befitting to be placed in the wallowing mud of glorified ignorance.
Furthermore, did you read Julien Brenda’s “Treason of Intellectuals”? I doubt it because you would not have misunderstood the theory of the argument she advanced, as it does not correlate with my letters (i.e., letter of endorsement and rebuttal). Drawing from this premise, you made an unfair assessment and critique without reason by questioning my integrity and intellectual scholarship. I am not surprised at all, as your opening rhetoric and barrage of insults tell a lot about the person you are! In your world of prostituted intellection, my perspectives would have been given the coveted prize of “Simone’s Cowell’s golden buzzer of AGT and the carte blanche of 1000 million “YES, YES,” if I had changed my line of thoughts to your established living-a-lie compromised and questionable moral framework. This further validates a sickening imposition of a binary of ideals and the shallowness in you, as you deliberately overlooked the text and content of my letter based on the convenience of a flawed imagination and illogical assumptions. However, arrogance, ego, ignorance, idealistic views, a sickening mentality of youthful exuberance, and the flight by haste seeking validation overshadowed your line of thinking and failing woefully. To put this into context of phonetics and sounding with a British accent, “Sorry, my Lady” will suits the narratives by refering the former to you, as you affectedly add no value to the discourse. Because you are a psycho with no moral conviction and in your desire to feel so good, you decided to go on the rampage of a self-glorified “griot” beating about the bush with compromised values and prostituted convictions, as if I am in the same league with you when you know full well that our worlds are apart in all sphere of human development. Stop pretending that you are a mascot when you are living a lie and permanently caged in the cave of desperate deplorables. Grow a pair of balls and reason with objectivity’s rigor and logic, not subjective norms.
Here are a few tips to consider in writing a future critique:
- Critique the work, not the person or the writer. The latter shifts the discussion from purpose to confusion, leading to subjectivity and bias as personalization, not conversation, becomes the currency of the discourse.
- Be objective and rational – i.e., avoid any subjective or anecdotal evidence when presenting counterarguments or propositions. Rationality is critical as it helps a writer to stay focused, logical, and unbiased. Supported by this idea, Singh and Lukkarila (2017) recommend using “neutral, impartial, and reasonable” language in academic writing. This implies that, when writing or arguing, it should be impersonal and inviting, not grounded with abstract whining, as it is a craft that pictures words into meaning and transmits them to the waves, streams, and interactions of human-generated through the power of reading to understand and react in an objectively tiered sequence of the issue in question in a more nuanced and balanced way.
- Identify gaps and build counters, not blinders, in your counterarguments to demonstrate your logical, coherent, and unbiased line of thought and provide suggestions for improvement to advance the discourse to a new, more nuanced line of scholarship.
- Avoid riding on a free-floating intelligence, implying that you must be allergic to oversimplification and overgeneralization because they limit your inquisitive mind from exploring beyond your state of mind and imagination to question underlying assumptions. Notwithstanding, the logic of reason, objectivity, and rationality should be applied, as they are critical in your thought and decision-making processes.
Given the above, here are some recommended books on academic writing to enrich scholarship and enhance writing and critical thinking skills:
- Cho, J. (2020). On Well-Being: Nixing Negativity Bias. ABA Journal, 106(5), 10–11. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27196535
- Graff, G., Birkenstein, C., Maxwell, C., & Craine, T. (2014). They Say. I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (3rd ed). Gildan Media
- Griffith, R. R. (2010). Students Learn to Read Like Writers: A Framework for Teachers of Writing. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, 50 (1). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol50/iss1/5
- Hacker, D., & Sommers, N. I. (2021). A writer’s reference. Bedford/St. Martin’s.
- Lahman, M., De Oliveira, B., Engle-Newman, E., Gorman, M., Johnson, T., Kershaw, S., Phan, T., Schweihs, K., Shimokawa, D., Switzer, A., Sylvester, J., & Yoast, S. (2021). Refining Research Representations through Fiction, Journalism, and Creative Non-Fiction Writing Ideas. Journal of Educational Research and Innovation (9), 1, 2. https://digscholarship.unco.edu/jeri/vol9/iss1/2
- Roberts, C., & Hyatt, T. (2019). The Dissertation Journey: A practical and comprehensive guide to planning, writing, and defending your dissertation. Corwin, a SAGE Company.
- Roe, S. C., Den, Ouden, P. H. (2018). Academic writing: The Complete Guide. CSP Books Inc.
- Rosenwasser, D., & Stephen, J. (2024a). Writing analytically. Cengage.
- Seale, T. (2017). Finding Moments of Opportunity. The English Journal, 106(5), 10–11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26359481
- Singh, A.A., & Lukkarila, L. (2017). Successful academic writing: A complete guide for social and behavioral scientists. Guildford Press
- Zinsser, W. (2016). On writing well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-fiction. New York: HarperPerennial.
In summary, this response serves as a reminder to focus on the diversity and democratization of critique with an objective, logical, rational, and unbiased pysche of approach and reactions to the work presented instead of going off the rails and attacking the writer for expressing a thought or perspective that differs from yours. I advise you to make your writing inviting, as suggested by Zinsser (2016), and not write looking for a response. Further, never read a textbook or any journal article and take the theories or arguments advanced by authors at face value, implying that you should critique their assumptions and the theories that influenced their lines of thought. That is what intellectuals do, not following the flow of the writer’s and author’s views, as a sheep on ropes, directed, dictated, and forced to think and accept assumptions of others as their lived realities. Intellectual debates are critical in our national discourse as “democracy is a marketplace of ideas where no one has the monopoly of knowledge.”
In conclusion, we can enrich intellectual conversations through the power of civility and maturity, not by overlooking, generalizing, oversimplifying, and drawing inferences with a binary approach, as the latter places the critique and argument in the gallows of pigs’ mud.
The viewpoints expressed in this paper are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial position of Lamtoro Newspaper.
