I’d listened to enough ex-cons babble nonsense on the bus and train. Their narrative bridge always crumbled because there wasn’t anything to sustain it. They didn’t have the good fortune of studying with the professors I’d studied with, reading the books and articles from academic journals that they assigned. Learning how to understand and use these big words and phrases—hegemony, structural, institutional, furthermore, all things considered, elucidate—to ensure that your arguments stood tall and sturdy like rich people’s houses, instead of slums built on mud.
