*Updated* 13th Edition (with ONLINE content!)

Viola! I've got it! "What is it?", you ask? Well, I'll tell you! I've discovered how to talk like a textbook.

I guess after years of absent-mindedly flipping through pages careful study, I've finally figured out just what it is that makes a textbook sound like a textbook. There's a few general things that really get the ball rolling. First, come up with your own names for everything. Be not content to call it "Kool-Aid", when you could call it sugar-laden beverage. Then abbreviate it to be SLB. Make sure that stays in bold, too, lest we forget it's a made-up word. AKA an MUW. And of course, if there's a figure which has this so-called SLB in it, don't hesitate to label it as something else entirely, and explain the new abbreviation you've used in the picture in a footnote or caption (preferably on the next page--or better yet, "refer to page x). Like carbohydrate-infused water, CIW for short. It's like I always say, "The more acronyms, the better!"

Innovative verbiage notwithstanding, you need to amaze and engage your reader with full-color diagrams and on-line content, respectively. Only when your humble pupils have mastered the cryptographic art of deciphering the "respectively clause" will you know that they are worthy of the secret knowledge that you alone possess. Sort of like a modern-day Illuminati or DaVinci Code. Speaking of which, if you devote a whole page spread to some sort of pop-culture reference with a vague relation to whatever you're talking about, you'll really add to the street-cred of you textbook. Like the physics and/or sociological implications of that one guy's hair in House Party. And we all know that street-cred (SC, if you will) is the only way to keep those darned college kids from pirating PDFs of your manuscript on bit torrents, or proxies, or Napster or whatever.

Next is the content. There have been hundreds of other textbooks written about this same thing. They are all terrible. Why? Because they aren't the latest edition--complete with updated Table of Contents! That, and, now we have this thing called the internet, and if you want the kids to like your book, you better have a cool silver scratch-off window on the inside cover that gives them a cool code like "DR07RR6G8HJ" (that's NOT an O, its a 0, get it right!) that they can punch into the website you've designed on Frontpage Express to make all your pupils feel like spies (with secret codes!). You might even want to make an online James Bond Case Study to really hammer home some of your key points, if you can get the copyright people to sign off on it--if not, you could make it a James Blunt Case Study about the evils of falsetto.

Of course, you're not really all that arrogant. We all know to fear the man who doesn't know what he doesn't know. But that's not you. You know what you don't know. But with that said, you might rather your pupils thought you knew everything. That's where my favorite textbook phrase comes in. If you have to say you don't understand, or have absolutely no clue, in order to sound superior, all you need to say is, "poorly understood".

For example--Question: why did the chicken cross the road? Answer: To date, these reasons are poorly understood. What if God was one of us? The implications of this are poorly understood. How do you fit an elephant in a Safeway? By a poorly understood mechanism. That's it. Just say "poorly understood", and you get to hide the fact that you have no idea what you're talking about! Just in case there's a lot you don't know, there are plenty of variations on this theme. You might say "under investigation", "remains elusive", "paradoxic", or "appears promising for further research". If all that fails to convince your readers that your mental prowess is superior to their own, say something in Latin. Like ad hoc. Or make up something that you think sounds Latin-ish, and put it in italic type. Like ex unstu, or in dyna, or really whatever combination of letters come up when you get on TextTwist.

So, I guess that's about it.

PS. For the next edition of your book, maybe you should start thinking about some Greek letters to include. Because nothing says "Higher Learning" quite like Greek letters.

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